"Voluptuary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sympathy. It is the effect of a great and active literature of belles-lettres, which is practically current throughout the civilized world, to multiply these sects of sentimental philosophy, with the fads and poses which correspond, and to provide them with appropriate cant. The cant of the voluptuary, the cynical egoist, the friend of humanity, and all the rest is just as distinct as that of the religious sectarian. Each of the little groups operates its own selection, but each is small. They interfere with and neutralize each other, but a general drift may be imparted by them to ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... corrupted and blase ways; to please him he affected malicious raillery and atheism, in his company criticised persons before whom in other places he would slavishly grovel. When at supper they talked of love and women, he pretended to be a subtle and perverse voluptuary. As a rule, one may say, Petersburg rakes are fond of talking of their abnormal tastes. Some young actual civil councillor is perfectly satisfied with the embraces of his cook or of some unhappy street-walker on the Nevsky Prospect, ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... consider biche de mer a very great luxury, believing that it wonderfully strengthens and nourishes the system, and renews the exhausted system of the immoderate voluptuary. The first quality commands a high price in Canton, being worth ninety dollars a picul; the second quality, seventy-five dollars; the third, fifty dollars; the fourth, thirty dollars; the fifth, twenty dollars; the sixth, twelve dollars; ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Crs, in which there is a modernised 16th-century house claiming to be the birthplace of Jean Baptiste Colbert, son of a Reims wool-merchant, and the famous minister who did so much to consolidate the finances which the royal voluptuary, masquerading at Reims in Roman garb, afterwards made such dreadful ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... of this period that we shall notice was Anacreon, a native of Teos, in Ionia, who flourished about 530 B.C. He was a voluptuary, who sang beautifully of love, and wine, and nature, and who has been called the courtier and laureate of tyrants, in whose society, and especially in that of Polyc'rates and Hippar'chus, his days were spent. The poet AKENSIDE thus ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... fool! that hast not half read thy villain lesson! Thou shouldst have known that the very cat, thou thoughtest me, will turn and rend the huntsman if he dare rob her of her portion! I tell you, Lucius Catiline, you thought me a mere wanton! a mere sensual thing! a soulless animal voluptuary! Fool! I say, double fool! Look into thine own heart; remember what blood runs in these female veins! Man! Father! Vitiator! My spirit is not female! my blood, my passions, my contempt of peril, my will indomitable and immutable, are, like my mortal body, your begetting! My crimes, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Man in Prosperity contented with his state and persisting in evil, a fit subject for reproof. A voluptuary and a miser, magnificently attired, is clasping to his heart a purse full of money and a bunch of ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... inscription; but if this lady be indeed a Valois, one wonders however the portrait of Henry III., the sybarite king, the great voluptuary, could support the sight of so much poverty in a person not only of his ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... voluptuary, is painted against a background of church members and professing Christians scarcely less hypocritical than he. In this book Sinclair Lewis adds a violent stroke to his growing picture of ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... Here, here, The testimony comes, that will convince, And put to utter dumbness their bold tongues: See here, grave fathers, here's the ravisher, The rider on men's wives, the great impostor, The grand voluptuary! Do you not think These limbs should affect venery? or these eyes Covet a concubine? pray you mark these hands; Are they not fit to stroke a lady's breasts?— Perhaps he ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... voluptuary, Sardanaphalus, man of pleasure, carpet knight; epicure, epicurean, gourmet, gourmand; pig, hog; votary of Epicurus, swine of Epicurus; sensualist; Heliogabalus; free liver, hard liver; libertine ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... himself. Every side of his personality appears: the artist, and the man; the formalist, and the skeptic; the spectator, and the critic; the gentleman in society, and the son of the collector; the landlord of five hearths, and the poet at court; the stern moralist, and the occasional voluptuary; the vagabond, and the conventionalist. He is independent and unhampered in his expression. He has no exalted social position to maintain, and blushes neither for parentage nor companions. His philosophy is not School-made, and the fear of inconsistency ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... on the point raised above: "I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest. Nay, I am in great doubt whether any man could be found, who would earn a life of the most perfect satisfaction at the price of ending it in the torments which justice inflicted in a few hours ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... that passed through the mind of the disgusting old voluptuary, while his lying tongue gave utterance ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... had no eyes for this scene which would have gladdened a voluptuary's heart—and which, for that reason was dear to Waldron—but walked toward the huge, four-posted bed where Wally himself, now rather paler than usual, with bloodshot eyes, was lying. This bed, despite the fact that it had ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... are of short duration; and sensuality is but a distemper of the mind, which ought to be cured by remembrance, if it were not perpetually inflamed by hope. The chase is not more surely terminated by the death of the game, than the joys of the voluptuary by the means of completing his debauch. As a band of society, as a matter of distant pursuit, the objects of sense make an important part in the system of human life. They lead us to fulfil the purposes of nature, in preserving the individual, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... within the limits of the law, the man might have been Tiberius in Rome, Richelieu under Louis XIII., or Fouche, had the ambition seized him to go to the Convention; but, instead of all that, Rigou had the common sense to remain a Lucullus without ostentation, in other words, a parsimonious voluptuary. To occupy his mind he indulged a hatred manufactured out of the whole cloth. He harassed the Comte de Montcornet. He worked the peasants like puppets by hidden wires, the handling of which amused him as though it were a game of chess where the pawns were alive, the knights caracoled, the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... mean, and requires it, and my Reputation in danger; should Your Lordship hence suspect that one could never write so much of dressing Sallets, who minded anything serious, besides the gratifying a Sensual Appetite with a Voluptuary ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn
... its paltry ending. His youth and manhood were characterized by a kind of savage lawlessness, like that of a Calabrian chieftain brigand or the brave of a Sioux band. He was cruel, he was cunning; he was, in his wild Highland way, a voluptuary and a debauchee; he was treacherous and hideously selfish. In his earlier days he had cast his eyes upon a lady, whom, for motives of worldly advantage as well as for her beauty, he had regarded as suitable to make his wife. Neither ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... man being admittedly a creature of his environment, can we still pretend to horror at this Roderigo and at the fact that being the man he was—prelate though he might be—handsome, brilliant, courted, in the full vigour of youth, and a voluptuary by nature, he should have succumbed to the temptations by which ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... as their own. To every soul that loves for the first time, the vision of that Lost Paradise is granted; to every man and woman who know and feel the truth of the divine passion is vouchsafed a flashing gleam of glory from that Heaven which gives them to each other. For the voluptuary—for the animal man,—who like his four-footed kindred is only conscious of instinctive desire, this pure expansion of the heart and ennobling of the thought is as a sealed book,—a never-to-be- divulged mystery ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... and the next day's meal would never be a penny the better - and the next cook (when she came) would be worse, if anything, but just as pious. It was often wondered that Lord Hermiston bore it as he did; indeed, he was a stoical old voluptuary, contented with sound wine and plenty of it. But there were moments when he overflowed. Perhaps half a dozen times in the history of his married life - "Here! tak' it awa', and bring me a piece bread and kebbuck!" he had exclaimed, with an appalling explosion ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was conversant with the world, and accustomed to the splendour of courts. Quite a contrast to the plain rigidity of Benedict, he was courteous and munificent, but withal a voluptuary; and his luxury and profusion gave rise to extortions, to rapine, and to boundless simony. His artful and arrogant mistress, the Countess of Turenne, ruled him so absolutely, that all places in his gift, which had escaped the grasp of his relations, were disposed ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... pass away. He erected a palace at Opslo, and lived there with his mistress until recalled to Copenhagen, when he took her with him. The most singular feature in this whole intrigue is that the royal voluptuary was from the outset under the absolute sway, not of the fair Dyveke, but of her mother, Sigbrit, a low, cunning, intriguing woman of Dutch origin, who followed the couple to the royal palace at Opslo, and afterwards accompanied them to Stockholm, the complete ruler of her daughter's royal slave. ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... have limited objects: the objects of psychical desires may be unlimited. A thirsty man thirsts not for an ocean, but for drink quantum sufficit: give him that and the appetite is gone. But the miser covets all the money that he can get: the voluptuary ranges land and sea in search of a new pleasure: the philosopher ever longs for a higher knowledge: the saint is indefatigable in doing good. Whatever a man takes to be an end in itself, not simply a means, that ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... lucrative or noble purpose impels me. I aim at nothing but selfish gratification. I have no relish, indeed, for sensual indulgences. It is the intellectual taste that calls for such banquets as imagination and science can furnish; but, though less sordid than the epicure, the voluptuary, or the sportsman, the principle that governs them and me is the same; equally limited to self; equally void of any basis in morals ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... will consume more food; consequently his frame will acquire a proportionate degree of strength, and, all other things being equal, it will be able to resist the influence of extraneous causes, to a much greater extent than that of the voluptuary. ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... countryman, Robert Nugent, afterward Baron Nugent and Viscount Clare, who appreciated his merits even more heartily than the Earl of Northumberland, and occasionally made him his guest both in town and country. Nugent is described as a jovial voluptuary, who left the Roman Catholic for the Protestant religion, with a view to bettering his fortunes; he had an Irishman's inclination for rich widows, and an Irishman's luck with the sex; having been thrice married and gained a fortune with each wife. He ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... of Ahasuerus for his fair bride seems to have soon declined. The fickle voluptuary sought new pleasures, and the bride so lately exalted to a throne was no longer an object of envy. Many bitter tears have been shed by the victims of family pride or state policy, when thus allied to greatness and splendour. ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... The temper of Xantippe herself, if she be but the decent mother of one's children, might work less havoc with a life than this embroidered cestus. But "the German Apelles" was no Greek voluptuary, ambitious in heathen vices, such as that other Apelles whose painting of Venus was said to be his masterpiece. And when Holbein inscribed his second portrait of Dorothea with the words LAIS CORINTHIACA, the midsummer madness must have been already ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... periwig." St. Evremond was a kind of Epicurean philosopher, and drew his own character in the following terms, in a letter to Count de Grammont. He was a philosopher equally removed from superstition and impiety; a voluptuary who had no less aversion from debauchery than inclination for pleasure: a man who had never felt the pressure of indigence, and who had never been in possession of affluence: he lived in a condition despised by those who have everything, envied by those who have ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... more befitting an oriental voluptuary than a Gothic king, Don Roderick was accustomed to while away much of that time which should have been devoted to the toilsome cares of government. The very security and peace which he had produced throughout his dominions, by his precautions to abolish the means and habitudes of war, had effected ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... a fine notice of Theodosius, thinks that the praises of Gibbon are extravagant, and that the emperor was probably a voluptuary and a persecutor. But Gibbon is not apt to praise the favorites of the Church. Tillemont presents him in the same light as Gibbon. [Footnote: Tillemont, Hist, des Emp. vol. v.] A man who could have submitted to such a penance ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... gratifications." Starting with this theme, I wove a whole story for the unknown personage whom, in my wandering fancy, I began by creating a grandee of Portugal, invested with rank honors, and riches; but who, effeminated by the habits and usages of his country, had become the mere idle voluptuary, living a life of easy and inglorious indolence. My further musings were interrupted at this moment for the individual to whom I had been so complimentary in my revery, slowly arose from his recumbent position, flung his loose mantle carelessly across ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... destructive of themselves; thus we are admonished by nature, that our constitutions were not formed to bear the continual pleasures of sense; for the too free use of any of them, is not only destructive of itself, but induces those painful and languid sensations so often complained of by the voluptuary, and which not unfrequently produce a state of ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... the exclusive adornment of those secluded arbors which the spade and the plough have never profaned. Here flowers grow which are too holy for culture, and birds sing whose voices were never heard in the cage of the voluptuary, and whose tones inspire us with a sense of freedom known only to those who often retire from the world, to live in religious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... of the waters of strife. Thence they turned toward the central portion of Palestine, the country of dates, where they encountered the five godless kings, Bera, the villain, king of Sodom; Birsha, the sinner, king of Gomorrah; Shinab, the father-hater, king of Admah; Shemeber, the voluptuary, king of Zeboiim; and the king of Bela, the city that devours its inhabitants. The five were routed in the fruitful Vale of Siddim, the canals of which later formed the Dead Sea. They that remained of the rank and file fled to the mountains, ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... kind of Roman "beau Brummell" in the court of Nero. He was a great voluptuary and profligate, whom Nero appointed Arbiter Elegantiae, and considered nothing comme il faut till it had received the sanction of this dictator-in-chief of the imperial pleasures. Tigellinus accused him of treason, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... pensive seems the foregoing strain of sentiment. Who could suppose it a prelude to detailed reminiscence on the author's part of sensual pleasures—the basest—enjoyed in the past? The venerable voluptuary keeps himself in countenance for his lascivious ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... new state-plot, that occurred oftener than a new epic, might engage the monarch and his privy council. These were not the men to be touched by the compressed reflections and the ideal virtues personified in this poem. In the court of the laughing voluptuary the manners as well as the morals of these satellites of pleasure were so little heroic, that those of the highest rank, both in birth and wit, never mentioned each other but with the vulgar familiarity ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... different in their stylish coats, square hats and canes, from the blue-chinned kindly slovens that one meets in the Latin countries. (In the train near Nymwegen, however, where the priests wear beavers, I travelled with a humorous old voluptuary who took snuff at every station and was as threadbare as one likes a priest to be.) Looking into the new Roman Catholic church at Groningen I found a little company of restless boys, all eyes, from whom at regular intervals were detached a reluctant and perfunctory ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... before we parted, but he retained all his other faculties in perfection; and as he gave vent to every whimsical idea as it rose, I was really astonished at the brilliancy of his thoughts, and the force of his expression. Quin is a real voluptuary in the articles of eating and drinking; and so confirmed an epicure, in the common acceptation of the term, that he cannot put up with ordinary fare. This is a point of such importance with him, that he always takes ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... from this expression, it might still help to express the fact that the moral degeneracy of Spain in her new career of wantonness was at least shared by the women. At the court, the king, who was in many ways what might be termed a mystic voluptuary, spent his time in alternate fits of dissipation and devotion, wasted his time in gallantry, and neglected his royal duties; and the all-powerful Lerma was the centre of a world of graft, where the highest offices in the land were bartered for gold, and every noble had an itching ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... uncle. The death of Ibrahim in November 1848 made Abbas regent of Egypt, and in August following, on the death of Mehemet Alh—who had been deposed in July 1848 on account of mental weakness,—Abbas succeeded to the pashalik. He has been generally described as a mere voluptuary, but Nubar Pasha spoke of him as a true Turkish gentleman of the old school. He was without question a reactionary, morose and taciturn, and spent nearly all his time shut up in his palace. He undid, as far as lay in his power, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
