"Ecstasy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so long as they are substituted for the pernicious ones. It may be in the common experiences of every-day life, through the pleading of a friend, during sleep or trance, in some abnormal state of a hypnotic character, or during religious ecstasy, and we cannot well say in any given case that one form will be more efficacious than another. Mental healing creates nothing new, but simply makes use of the normal mechanism of the mind and body. The ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... for the admission of those oracular gusts, as entering and passing up through a receptacle of greater capacity, and causing also a pruriency by the way, such as with due management has been refined from carnal into a spiritual ecstasy. And to strengthen this profound conjecture, it is further insisted that this custom of female priests is kept up still in certain refined colleges of our modern AEolists {122}, who are agreed to receive their inspiration, ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... that mere dry sense should here Explain the holy signs to thee. I feel you, spirits, hovering near; Oh, if you hear me, answer me! [He opens the book and beholds the sign of the Macrocosm.[6]] Ha! as I gaze, what ecstasy is this, In one full tide through all my senses flowing! I feel a new-born life, a holy bliss Through nerves and veins mysteriously glowing. Was it a God who wrote each sign? Which, all my inner tumult stilling, And this poor heart ...
— Faust • Goethe
... profited by this moment of stupefaction to let herself fall into the ecstasy of that infinite adoration which seizes the heart of a woman, when she truly loves and finds herself in the presence of an idol for whom she has vainly longed. Her eyes were all joy, all happiness, and sparks flew from them. She was under the ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... many of the guests were strolling about here. Priscilla's eyes sparkled at the sight of the lovely flowers. She forgot herself and made eager exclamations of ecstasy. Helen, who up to now had thought her a dull sort of girl, began to ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... and dilated—his voice deepened—a fanatic ecstasy shone in his expression as he uttered these words. Shocked and grieved as I was, I made no attempt to remonstrate or to reason with him. It would have been useless to have referred to any of the usual commonplaces ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... drugs that relieve mild depression, increase energy and activity, and include cocaine (coke, snow, crack), amphetamines (Desoxyn, Dexedrine), ephedrine, ecstasy (clarity, essence, doctor, Adam), phenmetrazine (Preludin), methylphenidate (Ritalin), and ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... free me from her obstacle of dust. Keep your watch from afar, O stars, drunk though you be with moonlight, And let the horizon hold its wings still around me. Let there be no song, no word, no sound, no touch; nor sleep, nor awakening,— But only the moonlight like a swoon of ecstasy over the sky and my being. The world seems to me like a ship with its countless pilgrims, Vanishing in the far-away blue of the sky, Its sailors' song becoming fainter and fainter in the air, While I sink in the bosom of ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... wood for bonfires at the cross-ways. The citizens were spreading tables in the streets, which their wives were loading with fattest capons and choicest wines; there was free feasting for all comers; and social jealousies, religious hatreds, were forgotten for the moment in the ecstasy of the common delight. Even the retainers of the Dudleys, in fear or joy, tore their badges out of their caps, and ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... taught him that there was a side of life he did not realize. Though beauty meant little to his practical nature, he sought, in his great love for Margaret, to appreciate the works which excited her to such charming ecstasy. He walked by her side with docility and listened, not without deference, to her outbursts. He admired the correctness of Greek anatomy, and there was one statue of an athlete which attracted his ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... treasure! Oh Sylvia! What demon, malicious at my glory, seized my vigour? What god, envious of my mighty joy, rendered me a shameful object of his raillery? Snatched my (till then) never failing power, and left me dying on thy charming bosom. Heavens, how I lay! Silent with wonder, rage and ecstasy of love, unable to complain, or rail, or storm, or seek for ease, but with my sighs alone, which made up all my breath; my mad desires remained, but all inactive, as age or death itself, as cold and feeble, as unfit for joy, as ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... Esquire, suddenly apprehending in the midst of his absorption the nature of the invitation, gave two elastic bounces straight up and down expressive of supreme ecstasy; then, his arms outstretched, he began to run wildly up and down the veranda, looking in at the doors and windows as he passed, seeking his mother ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... on hugging and kissing her like this—" Billy went into an ecstasy of portrayal. Suddenly, however, he reeled into sanity, for Jude had struck him across the cheek with the back of a hand trembling with ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... reverent hush of the landscape in the blended light of the setting sun and the "hunter's moon." Presently the musician came into view, advancing slowly through the aisles of the red autumn forest. A rapt figure it was, swaying in responsive ecstasy with the rhythmic cadence. The head, with its long, blowsy yellow hair, was bowed over the dark polished wood of the instrument; the eyes were half closed; the right arm, despite the eccentric patches on ...
— The Christmas Miracle - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... patient waiting, the proud man who had never loved any one but the fair young girl in his arms, abandoned himself to the ecstasy of possession. He kissed the eyebrows that were so lovely in his sight, the waving hair on her white temples, and again and again the soft sweet trembling lips that glowed ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... stocky, with a firm tread and an eye of decision. As Gwendolyn appeared, she was seated at the piano, her face raised (as if she were seeking out some spot on the ceiling), and her solid frame swaying from side to side in the ecstasy of performance. Up and down the key-board of the instrument her plump ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... have fallen upon her knees in blessing and thankfulness, forgetful of all her tribe of sorrows, conscious only that she was a woman crowned and throned. By degrees she forgot that she was starving, forgot everything in an ecstasy of pure passion and pride, an ecstasy that brought food, rest, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... near, blended in with the marvel of his freedom. He took no heed of it. He was afloat on the great sea-faring tide. Far away before him, but nearer, nearer, and yet nearer, the sea gleamed in trembling ecstasy. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... the shrieks of people in dire distress, and fire, and the crash of giant waves, and all that makes for horror, the shock of these brute irresponsible forces of nature is too tremendous for fear to obtrude. Thought is suspended—you are in an ecstasy of awful emotion, emotion made perfect by the very ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... their failures are alike identical. We have to form what broken impression we can of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as wandering in the woodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or waking out of it to note with ecstasy all the effects of light and colour around him, the flight of birds, the flutter of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomas were alike in their "extreme thirst after ancient things." They avoided, with a certain disdain, the affectation of vague and conventional ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... food but air, and that only every twelve days, and, master of his respiration he embraces God in his thought. At the fifth he stands as still as a pole; he no longer sees anything but Baghavat, and God touches his cheek to bring him out of his ecstasy." ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... is rushing up under an opening of the rock to the left, while the advanced guard of cavalry are trotting down the shelving top of a precipice, the horses excited and snuffing up the sea air with ecstasy." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... rhododendron. Wood doves cooed in the trees like invisible lovers unable to cease from gushing. Under the trees ferns grew in masses. Squirrels swarmed, and in the huge rhododendron flowers the bees lost themselves in an ecstasy of sipping sensuality. It was a fine summer, and this house was made to be a summer house. In winter it must have been ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... she had never known—nor ever could know now—the ecstasy of Love. Truly, it conquered; but it left its prisoners to perish of starvation in ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another boy in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother's arms, smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble, stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew him crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the loveliness ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... done something wrong; and where I, descending on my snow-shoes into some valley, would pause as though bewitched by a loveliness, by a longing, which I had not the power to explain, but which was so great that above the highest ecstasy of joy I would feel the deepest apprehension and distress—here in the parsonage of Naesset were ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... by, saw her stoop flushed and sparkling from above him; the sun caught her shining hair; a loose white smock revealed so much of her neck as to picture him the snowy rest. Snow and rosebuds—O ye little gods! As he stood in ecstasy she saw him at the end of the lane, and blushing drew back with a finger in her mouth, to thrill and giggle at ease. She saw a great gentleman stare; he saw a rosy goddess stoop and laugh, then blush and hide. Vitas hinnuleo ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... entitled 'Evening', which appeared in Haug's Suabian Magazine in the autumn of 1776. In irregular rimed verses—the rimes often very Suabian—we hear of sunset glories producing in the bard a divine ecstasy that carries him away through space. Then he returns to earth and hears in the voices of evening a general symphony of praise. It is still the Klopstockian strain of magniloquent religiosity, tempered ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... wonderful!" Estelle said ecstatically. Lionel said nothing. He looked slightly amazed. It seemed so funny that Winn, who hadn't much use for ecstasy, should have married a so ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... lay in the grass Sun-baked and tired, looking through a maze Of tiny stems into a new green world; Once more knew eves of perfume, days ablaze With clear, dry heat on the brown, rolling fields; Shuddered with fearful ecstasy in bed Over a book of knights and bloody shields... The ship slowed, jarred and stopped. There, straight ahead, Were dock and fellows. Stumbling, he was whirled Out and away to meet them — and his back ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... And in the ecstasy of that moment of mutual understanding Leibel forgot to wonder why he had never thought of Rose before. Afterward he remembered that she had always been his ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... allied sovereigns were met in Napoleon's capital after Waterloo, the Czar of Russia conceived a thought which seemed to him to be an inspiration. In the ecstasy of the hour of deliverance from the sword which had been the nightmare of the continent for a generation Alexander proposed to his fellow potentates a covenant binding them to be governed by the principles of Christian justice ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... tangled and rebellious, bore witness to the protest of her dauntless spirit. In her company I tasted for the first time the delight of souls that join and blend and unite in mutual trust. In an ecstasy of sincerity, for hours I imagined myself baptising her whole life with my faith. I said to her, ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... only be confessed by "the saints in light." To awake, and discover that the creaking, breaking cords are left behind, that all the leakages are over, that we are no longer exposed to the cutting wind, that pain is passed, and sickness, and death—this must be a wonder of inconceivable ecstasy! ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... from the brute?" groaned Abner, in an ecstasy of terror. "If I could only get my hands loose!" and he ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... Mary, while thy gentle cheek Is on my breast reclining, And while these arms around thy form Are fondly thus entwining; It seems as if no earthly power Our beating hearts could sever, And that in ecstasy of bliss We ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... got to eat their meals. But how should I describe the final scene, when in the dark evening two night-lights shone out of the giant's eyes, and flames came out of its monstrous mouth?... It was nothing less than wild ecstasy. Their father also taught them skating; there was very little danger except from falls, for they began in the meadows about the house, where they skated over shallow pools left in the hollows by rain-water or melted snow; but when they became proficient, we used to go to the great pond at Varolles. ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... and rose, once again, with the lyre in his hand, And smote out the cry that his white-lipped sorrow denied: And the grief's mad ecstasy swept o'er the summer-sweet land, And gathered the tears of all Time in the rush of ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... saw her—immediately. And, whether it was his own invention, or whether it was the divination of a man in the ecstasy of sudden love, it was vital because he felt it, and it was real because he believed it. Then why seek to explain the amazing sense of intimacy, the certainty that he had known her always? The thing was there; explanation could ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... endearment one hears at prayer-meetings, "Blessed Jesus," "Dear Jesus," "Loving Jesus," "Elder Brother," "Patient, gentle Jesus," etc., were first used by women in an ecstasy of religious transport. And the thought of Jesus as a loving, "personal Savior," would die from the face of the earth did not women keep it alive. The religious nature and the sex nature are ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... chapter on this subject, in the present day, would be the history of the Seeress of Prevorst, the best observed subject of magnetism in our present times, and who, like her ancestresses of Delphos, was roused to ecstasy or phrensy by ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... seclusion yet more tender. In the moonlight 'tis a path of enchantment—a way (as I know) of pain and high delight: of a wandering hope that tantalizes but must in faith, as we are men, be followed to its catastrophe. I have suffered much of ecstasy and despair upon that path. 'Tis the road ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... newspapers. Over us, the sky rose in an arch from horizon to horizon, blue and blinding; the heat was like a hand laid on one's mouth. I had with me my soldier-servant and a provision of food; there was something of both ecstasy and anguish in serving her needs, in establishing her comfort. She talked little and always so that I stood at a distance from her, fenced apart by little graceful formalities, groping hopelessly and vainly towards her through the clever mesh of her adroit speech and skilful ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... liked them then; he could endure even Ulick when he heard him give his little flat voice for the "sweet sea-city." That was what made him have a sneaking kindness for them—that they were so out of the workaday world and kept him so out of it. The summer had waned when, with cries of ecstasy, they all passed out on the balcony that overhung the Grand Canal. The sunsets then were splendid and the Dorringtons had arrived. The Dorringtons were the only reason they hadn't talked of at breakfast; but ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... matter of color, texture, modelling, and composition; for though it contains these and many {189} sensuous and perceptual values besides, it conveys through them with surpassing truth and delicacy ideas as evasive as they are subtle and profound. There is an ecstasy of mind in the discernment of these ideas, and a blend of emotion that follows in their train, both of which are conditioned by insight; that is, by a process that is neither sensuous, perceptual, nor emotional merely, but, ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... be a cipher all his life; such double-sided timidity makes him what we call "an imbecile." Often fine suppressed qualities are hidden within that imbecile. To this double infirmity we may, perhaps, owe the lives of certain monks who lived in ecstasy; for this unfortunate moral and physical disposition is produced quite as much by the perfection of the soul and of the organs, as by defects ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... west was keen as the blade of a knife, and over it all the colors swam and blended in an ecstasy of sunset. ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... and shutters are tall and slender like the trees, the colours vivid as if the paint had been laid on yesterday. It is all unspeakably beautiful and it comes to me with the natural, inevitable shock and ecstasy of beauty. I am going straight into the horror of war. For all I know it may be anywhere, here, behind this sentry; or there, beyond that line of willows. I don't know. I don't care. I cannot realize it. All that I can see ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... for a time reveled in the dreams which fleetingly haunt all mortals, that there I had found the lost Arcadia, where balmy zephyrs fan the brow into ecstasy forever; but, alas! After a brief respite I had, in that land which the real estate sharks called "Paradise," suffered more from alternating chilling winds and withering heat than ever before; one day sweltering in the thinnest of seersuckers, and perhaps the very next ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... write ecstasy or black despair. Through the long night she may ever beckon, whispering courage, and by her magic making victory of defeat. It is for her to say whether his face shall be world-scarred and weary, hiding tragedy behind its ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... such as that of Maud, so was it a modern composer who carried to completion, in 'Tristan und Isolde', the dramatic expression of passion at the highest point of lyrical utterance. It is no more unnatural for the raptures of Wagner's lovers, or the swan-song of ecstasy, to be sung, than for the young man whose character Tennyson assumes, to utter himself in measured verse, sometimes of highly complex structure. The two works differ not in kind, but in degree of intensity, and to those whose ears are open to the appeal of music, the power of expression ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... is less like tears than like glistening jewels to deck the earth in the joyous time of her bridehood in the spring; the flight of birds over it and their little bursts of melody are eloquent of an ecstasy which does not remember. How little time then must pass to wipe out the memory of the passing of a David Drennen from the busy thoroughfares into ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... Gary McFarlane went off into an ecstasy of laughter, delighted and amused beyond count. Preston interrupted the sponge-cake exercise, and Daisy felt her sofa shaking with his burden of amusement. What had she done? Glancing her eye towards Dr. Sandford, who sat near, she saw that a very decided smile was curling the corners ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... contemplating the beauties of the spot, advanced onwards step by step. She was plunged in a state of ecstasy, when suddenly, from the rear of the artificial rockery, egressed a person, who approached her and facing her said, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... content. Rita and Dic are children. I give them knowledge. They give me youth. I touch my piano. It fills my soul with peace. If it gives me a discordant note, the fault is mine. I go to the forest, and sweet Nature takes me in her arms and lulls me to ecstasy." ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... for a moment, for as the evening sun swept its veil of rainbow radiance over the scene, the bird began to sing. Its little throat swelled, it chirruped, it trilled, it called, it soared, it lost itself in a flood of ecstasy. In the applausive silence, the emotional recess of the sale, as it were, the man to whom the bird and the song meant most, pushed his way up to the stand where M. Manotel stood. When the people saw who it was, they fell back, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... drum-beat, responsive to a bugle. So she led for some months a very pleasant idyllic life, face to face with a strong, vivid memory, which gave everything and asked nothing. These were doubtless to be (and she half knew it) the happiest days of her life. Has life any bliss so great as this pensive ecstasy? To know that the golden sands are dropping one by one makes servitude ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... to behave as she might have behaved before would be to act, for Amerigo and Charlotte, with the highest hypocrisy. She saw in these days that a journey abroad with her father would, more than anything else, have amounted, on his part and her own, to a last expression of an ecstasy of confidence, and that the charm of the idea, in fact, had been in some such sublimity. Day after day she put off the moment of "speaking," as she inwardly and very comprehensively, called it—speaking, that is, to her father; and all the more that she was ridden by a strange suspense as ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... wing; the dust which gives it its color is left upon your fingers. Romanticism is the star that weeps, it is the wind that wails, it is the night that shudders, the bird that flies and the flower that breathes perfume: it is the sudden gush, the ecstasy grown faint, the cistern beneath the palms, rosy hope with her thousand loves, the angel and the pearl, the white robe of the willows. It is the infinite and the starry," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Aminah heard these words she dropped her sword, and beat upon the door with her little bare hands, weeping and screaming in a perfect ecstasy of rage, and showering curses and imprecations on her brother. The army joined in the torrent of abuse, and a very pretty set of phrases were sent spinning through the clean night air. At length, Tungku Aminah, finding that ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... caress the ear in moments of ecstasy; songs which the soul perceives, but which the lip cannot repeat; single notes of a distant melody, which sound at intervals, borne on the breeze; the rustle of leaves kissing each other on the trees with a murmur like rain; trills of larks which rise with quivering ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... to the chocolate, sniffed it and pulled herself up in bed. The woman, still smiling beside them, turned and hunted among the clothes upon the chair; then held a jersey towards her shoulders and guided her arms into its sleeves. Ecstasy stole over Fanny; other similar wakings strung themselves like beads upon her memory; nursery wakings when her spirit had been guided into daylight by the crackle of a fire new-lit, by the movements of just such an aproned ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... only half of life. He never had any conception of the passionate longing for vice per se; the thrill, the glow which comes to some men at the splendid caress of sin in her most horrible shape. Do you see what I mean? He couldn't imagine the ecstasy that may lie ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... thee and enjoin thee to keep watch and ward upon thy senses and passions and to observe and preserve the pledge by thee plighted to the King of the Jann." "O Mubarak," replied the Prince, "an thou knew the love-longing and ecstasy which have befallen me of my love to this young lady, thou wouldst feel ruth for me! indeed I never think of aught else save of taking her to Bassorah and of going in unto her." Mubarak rejoined. "O my lord, keep thy faith and be not false to thy pact, lest a sore harm betide ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... are moved in two ways; for when the mind is moved in a placid and calm motion, consistent with reason, that is called joy; but when it exults with a vain, wanton exultation, or immoderate joy, then that feeling may be called immoderate ecstasy or transport, which they define to be an elation of the mind without reason. And as we naturally desire good things, so in like manner we naturally seek to avoid what is evil; and this avoidance of which, if conducted ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... an ingrate. I bit the hand that fed me. Noble iniquity that yields such delicious crumbs of love as Henry and I stole in moments of ecstasy in park and parlor, in pavilion and veranda, on our drives and rides, be blessed a hundred times. Ah, the harvest of little tendernesses, the sweet words I caught on the wing—recompense for the weeks of abstinence ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... creep over the world. The sun peered over the mountains inquiringly, a timid young thing, as if she were asking what degree of light and warmth they would like for the day. A new brilliancy tinged every flower face in this light, a throbbing ecstasy mellowed every bird note; the orchards dropped farther apart, meadows filled with grazing cattle flashed past them, the earthy scent of freshly turned fields mingled with flower perfume, and on their right came drifting in a cool ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... me as the lover of your prayer, and you said that in ecstasy the nuns—and indeed it must be so—exchange a gibbeted saint for some ideal man? Give yourself; make this ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... want to be sure that the dream is over, Hobbs. Never mind. You needn't pinch me. I'm awake," and to prove it he stretched his fine young body in the ecstasy of realisation. ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... do they all become, to have a highly exhilarating effect on their nerves. Birds ordinarily mute are vociferous, and the rowdy ones—the varied honey-eater as an example—losing all control of their tongues, call and whistle in ecstasy. The best of the fig-tree's life is given for ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... that I felt the presence of the Deity smiling upon my sacrifice, and already offering me a reward in the consolatory hope of a celestial abode. Tears of delight flowed down my cheeks. I repeated my vows with holy ecstasy, and went to bed again to taste the slumber of ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... Cupids, and creatures of a now extinct species. The rainbow had been the painter's palette; genius his brush; fancy-gone-mad his attendant; the total temporary stagnation of redskin faculties his object, and ecstasy his general state of mind, when he executed this magnificent chef d'oeuvre in the centre of the ceiling of the reception hall at ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... the majority of its adherents and exponents, is of too narrow a scope to permit the boundless love and ecstasy contained in the deep emotion of the true woman, sweetheart, mother, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... the stone manorial outbuildings, and of the glittering pinnacles of the church, and felt his heart beating, and knew, without being told by any one, whither he had at length arrived—well, then the feeling which had been growing within his soul burst forth, and he cried in ecstasy: ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... wandering. From his brilliant life at court he had saved nothing, and he returned to Florence a poor man. Perhaps necessity kept his spirit excited: the next four years are one prolonged rapture or ecstasy of invention. He painted the pictures of the Louvre, his most authentic works, which came there straight from the cabinet of Francis the First, at Fontainebleau. One picture of his, the Saint Anne—not the ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... National Press, it indulged in an ecstasy of enthusiasm over the perpetration, combined with intense disgust "at the miscarriage of justice" of my having escaped without hurt or more than very temporary inconvenience. On my departure, one eloquent writer ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... assist and others retard. Into the elysian fields of thought enters no satisfaction but brings with it youth, and strength, and ardour; nor is there a thing in this world on which the mind thrives more readily than the ecstasy, nay, the debauch, of ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wrong; that the {184} right obliges me, that I ought to do it. . . . The law is over all, though it were never obeyed. . . . Ethics is nothing but the response which man and man make to the higher order of things. . . . Ecstasy is the grace heaven sets upon the moment in which the soul weds itself to the perfect good." [7] Let us see what is implied in these truly remarkable statements. The real sanctions of moral conduct are not the sanctions of expediency or force, but are derived from a higher ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... at Susan, as if waiting for her reply. Happy Susan! Eager, trembling, her face glowing with a tender enthusiasm, a tearful ecstasy, feeling that it would be sweet to die in the service of this man whom her thoughts had so wronged, she gave her answer: "I am so glad you have come to me! Anything on earth I can do to aid you I will do with all my heart—as for myself. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... incident. The Annunciation, as described by Matthew, is made to Joseph, and is simply a warning to him not to divorce his wife for misconduct. In Luke's gospel it is made to Mary herself, at much greater length, with a sense of the ecstasy of the bride of the Holy Ghost. Jesus is refined and softened almost out of recognition: the stern peremptory disciple of John the Baptist, who never addresses a Pharisee or a Scribe without an insulting epithet, becomes a considerate, ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... explorer of the Capitalist syndicate was still enthusiastic. "Ten million dollars' worth of copper practically in sight, Monsieur l'Administrateur. Ten millions in sight! And a railway coming—a railway! They will never believe my report. C'est trop beau." He fell a prey to a screaming ecstasy, in the midst of sagely nodding heads, before Charles Gould's ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... sun sinks And the canons deepening in color Add mystery to silence Then the lone traveller lying out-stretched Beneath the silent pines on some high range Watches and listens in ecstasy ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... sometimes played kissing games at parties, and there had been the more serious affair with Edwina May Pulver-nights when he had escorted her from church or sociables to the Pulver gate and lingered in a sort of nervously worded ecstasy until he could summon courage to kiss the girl. Twice this had actually happened, but the affair had come to nothing, because the Pulvers had moved away from Simsbury and he had practically forgotten Edwina May; forgotten even the scared haste of those embraces. He seemed to remember ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... finite save as an avenue to the infinite, and holds knowledge in light esteem unless as a path to the wonder, the ecstasy, and the wisdom which are beyond knowledge. The past is dead, the present is a dream, the future is not yet, but in the Eternal NOW the soul is one with that Reality of which the remotest pasts, the farthest presents, the most distant futures, are ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... tea in his house and garden. He had not dared to dream of such bliss. He had hesitated long before asking them to come, and in asking them he had blushed and stammered: the invitation had seemed to him to savour of audacity. But, bless you! they had accepted with apparent ecstasy. They gave him to think that they had genuinely wanted to come. And they came extra-specially dressed—visions, lilies of the field. And as the day was quite warm, tea was served in the garden, and everybody admired the view; and there was no restraint, no awkwardness. In particular Ella talked ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... arms, the taste of meat and wine, the cunning of horsemanship, of boat-sailing, of mountain-climbing, the breathless joy of the diver, the languid joy of the dancer, the feel of the canoe-paddle shaken in the rapid, the delicious lassitude of sleep in wayside-inns, and lastly the ecstasy of love and fatherhood—all these he relinquished for a tombstone that should be handsomer than Jenkins's. Jenkins, meanwhile, was articled to his father, and, having passed the necessary examinations with credit, became a solicitor and ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... song is rapture, for he sees God's loveliness, and we, When with his insight we are blest, Shall share his ecstasy; Oh, come the day when all shall sing As ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... wondered if she was recalling, as he would to the day of his death, the heavenly words she had spoken at parting. The touch of her velvet lips still lay on his hand, sending through his every vein streams of sheer ecstasy. Overhead the sky arched, star-sprinkled, calm, and as full of its untold story as ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... wines completed the work; Wenceslas was deep in what must be called the slough of dissipation. Excited by just a glass too much, he stretched himself on a settee after dinner, sunk in physical and mental ecstasy, which Madame Marneffe wrought to the highest pitch by coming to sit down by him—airy, scented, pretty enough to damn an angel. She bent over Wenceslas and almost touched his ear ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... in my words; his face represented an ecstasy of cunning thought. I could read there, plain as print, that he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... excitement with which, day by day, I drew nearer to the home that held her, trembling now with nervousness at my slow progress, now with timidity lest, grasping this vast happiness too swiftly, I should crush it from very ecstasy of possession. I made clear to him, moreover, that I had come without ever dreaming of the possibility of a rival—as innocently, serenely confident of right, as would be a little child approaching to ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... loving you is so eternal, why it doesn't fluctuate like a human emotion. You can't exhaust it and rest before a new tide sweeps back; the timeless ecstasy of a worship of ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... With that look she drew the man's soul away from him through his immobile pupils, and from Willems' features the spark of reason vanished under her gaze and was replaced by an appearance of physical well-being, an ecstasy of the senses which had taken possession of his rigid body; an ecstasy that drove out regrets, hesitation and doubt, and proclaimed its terrible work by an appalling aspect of idiotic beatitude. He never stirred a limb, hardly breathed, but stood in stiff immobility, absorbing the delight ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day; through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. The slowly revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me; the great woman-star jeweling the summit of a cliff, was only an ecstasy within me; the murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart; and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... the eye to the shining of the Scottish Sea, the great water with its islands, the coast of Fife with its dotted line of little fishing towns, the two green Lomonds standing softly distinct against the misty line of more distant hills. It was the same view that moved Fitz-Eustace to ecstasy, still but little changed in the eighteenth century from what it had been in the sixteenth. And picturesque as Edinburgh still continues to be in spite of many modern disadvantages, it was no doubt infinitely ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... group of us withdrew to consider the matter. Something like lese majeste must be committed either way, that was apparent. To give up the chance of a dance with Miss Cityswell was to forego a rare and exquisite moment of ecstasy; and yet, to qualify ourselves for it, we were required to put an insult upon, and to neglect, our beautiful Rakope and her sisters. Whatever was to ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... person electrified. She seemed to be the acting partner in this house to watch over her treasure of a daughter, to supply her with worldly wisdom, to look upon her as a phoenix, and—scold her. Miss Watts was all ecstasy and lifting up of hands and eyes, speaking always in that loud, shrill, theatrical tone with which a puppet-master supplies his puppets. I all the time sat like a mouse. My father asked, "Which of those ladies, madam, do you think is your sister authoress?"—"I am no physiognomist"—in ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... habit of stressing extremely, and lackadaisically dwelling on, some particular syllable. In Swinburne this trick was delightful—because it wasn't a trick, but a need of his heart. Well do I remember his ecstasy of emphasis and immensity of pause when he described how he had seen in a perambulator on the Heath to-day 'the most BEAUT—iful babbie ever beheld by mortal eyes.' For babies, as some of his later volumes testify, ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... utterance, the seemingly unfeeling words of his son, stung the father into an ecstasy of grief akin to anger. A man stood before him, as clearly recognized as his own image in a mirror. The captain was not out of his mind in any familiar sense of the word; he remembered distinctly what had happened for months past. He must recall, ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... Grimm!" he squealed in ecstasy. "There ain't any one else like you in the world. And—and—when the other fellows laugh at your funny hat, ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... height of his ecstasy, Mr Quilp had like to have met with a disagreeable check, for rolling very near a broken dog-kennel, there leapt forth a large fierce dog, who, but that his chain was of the shortest, would have given him a disagreeable salute. As ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... in the Paradox of Love, the Church holds both these passions, at full blast, both at once. As human love turns joy into pain and suffers in the midst of ecstasy, so Divine Love turns pain into joy and exults and reigns upon the Cross. For the Church is more than the Majesty of God reigning on earth, more than the passionless love of the Eternal; she is the Very Sacred Heart of Christ Himself, the Eternal united with Man, and ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... opiates and other illicit drugs from Southwest Asia, Latin America, and Western Europe to Western Europe and Scandinavia; limited production of methamphetamine and ecstasy; susceptible to money laundering ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... kinds of wonders and glories painted on it and gilded on it, and standing four feet high if it stood one inch! I could never tell you the feelings of Rosa if I wrote a thousand pages. Her heart thrilled so with ecstasy that she almost dropped all her petals, only her vanity came to her aid, and helped her to control in a measure her emotions. The gardeners broke off a good deal of mould about her roots, and they muttered one to another something about her dying ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... stirred by the round-ended paddle which was wielded with ease by a superb woman (with marvellous eyes and a complexion browned by the sun), who wore an air of stately indifference: all these things together seemed to plunge me into an ecstasy, and I forgot entirely the reason for my presence on the river. In that moment I had not even a desire to reach the end of my voyage—and yet, how many privations remained for me to undergo, and dangers to encounter! I felt myself here ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... expert Cabalist and had the temerity to utter the Ineffable Name Jehovah, was said to be possessed of marvellous powers, his skin exuded exquisite perfume, he indulged perpetually in sea-bathing and lived in a state of chronic ecstasy. The pretensions of Shabbethai, who took the title of "King of the Kings of the Earth," split Jewry in two; many Rabbis launched imprecations against him, and those who had believed in him were bitterly ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... ecstasy of the "personal belongings." From that time we used napkins and a table-cloth on Sundays—that is, when any one remembered ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... was torn from his beloved museum, Felix came down in suppressed ecstasy, declaring it the loveliest and most delicious of places, all bones and stones, where his father must come and see what Fergus thought was a megatherium's tooth. The long word was pronounced with a triumphant delicacy of utterance, ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fountain had spurted in their eyes. In a nest of orange velvet lay like three eggs, three white and vivid diamonds that seemed to set the very air on fire all round them. Fischer stood beaming benevolently and drinking deep of the astonishment and ecstasy of the girl, the grim admiration and gruff thanks of the colonel, the wonder of the ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... friendliness he came eagerly forward. His gray face, twitching with nervous excitement, beamed with joyous welcome. As he hurried across the bit of lawn between them, he waved his arms and rubbed his hands together in an apparent ecstasy of gladness at this opportunity to receive such an honored guest. His voice trembled with high-pitched assurance of his happiness in the occasion. He laughed as one ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... cloth was already spread for supper—(remember it was in Germany)—the newspapers of the day were placed before me—and, in a word, every attention showed that I had found the true avenue to Antoine's good graces, who now stood bowing before me, in apparent ecstasy at his own cleverness. ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... a prophetic vision of the one, his honest pride in his native town would have risen almost to ecstasy. Could he have known of the other, his patriotic soul would have sunk within him, and the pleasure of his day's journey would have ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... starve soon enough without our help; and yet—I feel we should all be together still. That last superfluous word is the refrain of Gibbes's song that is ringing in my ears, and that I am chanting in a kind of ecstasy of excitement:— ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... felt, as of yore, swept off on roaring seas. But the rush and the ecstasy had their alloy of terror. To be with him was to be no longer herself, but a hypnotized stranger. Perhaps she was unwise to have provoked this meeting. She should have remembered he was not to be coquetted with. As well put a match to a gunpowder barrel to warm your ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill |
