"Prurient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and wealth of detail—for all that I curbed it lest I should seem to know too much—delighted her prurient soul. Had she been more motherly, this same knowledge that I exhibited should have made her ponder what manner of life I had led, and should have inspired her to account me no fit companion for her daughter. But a selfish woman, ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... powers to obviously unworthy aims and ends is the saddest thing in humanity. It is like elephants being set to pick up pins; it is like the lightning being harnessed to carry all the gossip and filth of one capital of the world to the prurient readers in another. Men take these great powers which God has given them, and use them to make money, to cultivate their intellects, to secure the gratification of earthly desires, to make a home for themselves here amidst the illusions of time; and all the while the great aim ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... who sang and played lots, For Washington, Wesley and good Dr. Watts; His prurient plots pained Wesley and Watts, But Washington said he "enjoyed ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... accordance with natural law, children would have no sexual notions or feelings before the occurrence of puberty. No prurient speculation about sexual matters would enter their heads. Until that period, the reproductive system should lie dormant in its undeveloped state. No other feeling should be exhibited between the sexes than that ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... been fanaticised by the secret societies as well as by Garibaldi himself, that infuriated enthusiast, who could not write four lines nor utter four words without enshrining therein the treasons of the black race, that prurient sore of Italy; or the venom of the Vatican, that nest of vipers; or the lies of Pius IX., that pest, that monster, twice accursed, as priest and as king. So when these people were made prisoners, they expected nothing better ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... fair-haired little figure was the woman that people who knew her only from her books, called bold, prurient even! Simply because she was great-hearted—intellectual. He was overcome by the unspeakable ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... Despite prurient opposition it is making rapid headway. It is entering very largely into the instructive and the entertaining departments of the world's curriculum. Millions of dollars are annually expended in the production of films. Companies of trained and practiced actors are brought together ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... of the brigadier if he did not think an establishment had the beneficial effect of sustaining truth, by suppressing heresies, limiting and curtailing prurient theological fancies, and otherwise setting limits to innovations. My friend did not absolutely agree with me in all these particulars; though he very frankly allowed that it had the effect of keeping TWO truths from falling out, by separating them. Thus, Leapup maintained ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... no means the wanton freak of a prurient imagination; it had a serious purpose and was believed by its author to present the essentials of a new and beautiful theory of life, art and religion. The great Schleiermacher, one of the profoundest of German theologians and an eloquent friend of religion, called ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... perform for them most tragically the sinful service of Gallehault. Then it struck him that the great Gallehault of modern life—El Gran Galeoto—was the impalpable power of gossip, the suggestive force of whispered opinion, the prurient allurement of evil tongues. Set all society to glancing slyly at a man and a woman whose relation to each other is really innocent, start the wicked tongues a-babbling, and you will stir up a whirlwind which will blow them giddily into ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... her brow and cheek, the noble contour of her lifted chin and full, modelled throat, all pink as the most delicate rose leaf is pink, against the cool lights of the altar-like wall. The sight convicted him in the court of his own soul as a prurient and mean-minded rustic. In the presence of such a face, of such music, there ceased to be any such thing as nudity, and statues no more needed clothes than did those slow, deep, magnificent chords which came now, gravely accumulating their spell ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... subject. If any remnant of inspiration or value clings to such a performance, it comes from a surviving taste for something in the real world. Thus the literature that calls itself purely aesthetic is in truth prurient; without this half-avowed weakness to play upon, the coloured images evoked would have had nothing to marshall or ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... post for which he was well suited. The other new novice was Brother Nicholas whom, had Mark not been the fellow-member of a community, he would have disliked immensely. Brother Nicholas was one of those people who are in a perpetual state of prurient concern about the sexual morality of the human race. He was impervious to snubs, of which he received many from Brother George, and he had somehow managed to become a favourite of the Reverend Father, so that he had been appointed guest-master, a post that was always ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... and holy. It appears that where marriage is solemnized by the church and blessed by the priest, it may at the same time be surrounded with customs and ideas of a frivolous, superficial, and even prurient character. We believed that two who love should be united in secret, before the public acknowledgment of their union, and should taste their apotheosis alone with nature. The betrothal might or might not ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman |
