"Wantonness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hercules was never carried out. Future guests were therefore admitted to the reception rooms by a dark, narrow entrance, or they made a long roundabout tour by way of the Queen's staircase across the Marble Court. The demolition of the stairway of honor was an irreparable loss. No other piece of wantonness equaled it in the ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... the whip, 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 was killed, they said, ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... images of a playful mind, and are at least as frequently misrepresented as they are misunderstood. But thus the cunning Philistines are enabled to triumph over the strong and gifted man, because in the hour of confidence, and in the abandonment of the mind, he had laid his head in the lap of wantonness, and taught them how he might be shorn of his strength. Dr. JOHNSON appears often to have indulged this amusement, both in good and ill humour. Even such a calm philosopher as ADAM SMITH, as well as such a child of imagination as BURNS, were remarked for ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... necessary. There were in it many individuals whom neither lenity could touch, nor rigour terrify; who, with all sense of social duty, appeared to have lost all value for life itself, and with the same wantonness exposed themselves to the darts of the savages, and to the severe punishments which, however reluctantly, every society must inflict when milder methods have been tried without success. Towards the latter end of February a criminal court was convened, ...
— The Voyage Of Governor Phillip To Botany Bay • Arthur Phillip
... of Songs Venetian, cheerful, With southern wantonness and color-wonders,— Rather "Two Shots" (although they make us fearful) Against our shallow breeding and ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... this power as well as the custom-house officers. The words are: "it shall be lawful for any person or persons authorized," etc. What a scene does this open! Every man prompted by revenge, ill-humor, or wantonness to inspect the inside of his neighbor's house, may get a writ of assistance. Others will ask it from self-defence; one arbitrary exertion will provoke another, until society be involved in tumult and ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... square with descending steps, and 'tis not amiss, for I would not have any one so nice as that Grecian Calis, sister to Nicephorus, emperor of Constantinople, and [2906]married to Dominitus Silvius, duke of Venice, that out of incredible wantonness, communi aqua uti nolebat, would use no vulgar water; but she died tanta (saith mine author) foetidissimi puris copia, of so fulsome a disease, that no water could wash her clean. [2907]Plato would not have a traveller lodge in a city that is not governed by laws, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... After we went west even the death penalty for wantonness was enforced, though at the time we ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... monk, his voice growing lower and more gentle, as he continued: "Folly and wantonness without end! When will you learn discretion, Count Philipp? But as you did it unintentionally, I will let it ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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
... the strictures upon individuals, their wives, and their daughters, or the deeds of licentiousness and violence are too numerous to be computed. Indeed, there is one more kind of loose literature, the wantonness and pollution in which work ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the life of the 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, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... result has been found in constant slurs upon the sacred pages, lessening the beauty and often perverting the sense,—a source of sorrow to the keen scholar and reverent Christian, and reiterated indignity done in wantonness or heedlessness to the pure and easy flow of ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... thanksgiving. Children ceased to play, Feeling an awe they comprehended not, And stood, unconscious of their beauty's pose, As those Murillo's pencil glorifies. Upon the airy esplanade the steed No longer pawed the air in wantonness, But, like his compeer of the fabled song, Stood statued with his rider, while below The beggar ceased his cry importunate, And to a Higher Almoner than man Sent up a dumb appeal. In folly's court The laugh was hushed, and the half-uttered jest Fell witless into air, and burning thought ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... have heard of your paintings[30] too, well enough; Heaven hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another:[31] you jig, you amble, and you lisp,[32] and nickname Heaven's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.[33] Go to, I'll no more of't; it hath made ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... made, very easy, and very safe.[1224] It was cut smooth, and enclosed between parallel walls; the outer of which secures the passenger from the precipice, which is deep and dreadful. This wall is here and there broken, by mischievous wantonness.[1225] The inner wall preserves the road from the loose stones, which the shattered steep above it would pour down. That side of the mountain seems to have a surface of loose stones, which every accident may crumble. The old road was higher, and must have been very ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... marriage? The journey 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
... themselves with the prince, night and day, and to sing and dance before him, so as to draw his heart towards worldly enjoyments. But 'twas all of no avail, for none of those maidens could ever tempt the king's son to any wantonness, and he only abode the firmer in his chastity, leading a most holy life, after their manner thereof. And I assure you he was so staid a youth that he had never gone out of the palace, and thus he had never seen a dead man, nor any one who was not hale and sound; for the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... 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, whilst the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... we bound to any anxious care to make this pain as little as may be. Brutes are as things in our regard: so far as they are useful to us, they exist for us, not for themselves; and we do right in using them unsparingly for our need and convenience, though not for our wantonness. If then any special case of pain to a brute creature be a fact of considerable value for observation in biological science or the medical art, no reasoned considerations of morality can stand in the way of man making the experiment, yet ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... staid manner, on being released, runs, whisks his tail, kicks up his heels, lays back his ears, opens his mouth, and rushes with mock vicious-looking eyes at whomsoever he meets, and all this from mere wantonness, to enjoy his freedom; so the devil in the man, not perchance the theological one, but still the devil no less actually, as seen every day in the activity of the baser passions, on being released, by the abdication of reason and the substitution of feeling, begins to exercise his ingenuity ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Al-Kyris!" and as the Prophet enunciated these words with majestic emphasis a visible thrill ran through the hushed assemblage.. "God saith: Get thee up, O thou City of Pleasure, from thy couch of sweet wantonness,—get thee up, gird thee with fire, and flee into the desert of forgotten things! For thou art become a blot on the fairness of My world, and a shame to the brightness of My Heaven!—thy rulers are corrupt,—thy teachers are proud of heart and narrow in judgment,—thy young men ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... above twenty sorts of other 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 ancestors ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... report, which chiefly wrote Thomas Becket's life—whose names are Herbert Boseham, John Salisbury, William of Canterbury, Alen of Tewkesbury, Benet of Peterborough, Stephen Langton, and Richard Croyland—he bestoyed his youth in all kinds of lascivious lightness, and lecherous wantonness. After certain robberies, rapes, and murders, committed in the king's wars at the siege of Toulouse in Languedoc, and in other places else, as he was come home again into England, he gave himself to great study, not of the holy scriptures, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... rifle. '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, he held a pinch to the deer's nose—'Prends, ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... their hands, the men seemed only to delight in plunder and slaughter, and yet they were utter cowards. Their mouths were full of cursing and bitterness. The execrations they poured on each other were incredible. In very wantonness, when they met they would pelt each other with curses, and then perhaps burst into a fit of laughter. The women, like the men, went about in almost total nudity, and seemed to know no shame. So reckless were the chiefs of human life, that a man might be put to death for a single ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... took almost as long as the laying of a new line. For the marauder had done his work thoroughly and well. Hardly a trap was left unmolested. In some places the snow showed where he had eaten a marten, but in most instances the traps were simply destroyed apparently from sheer wantonness. Three or four martens and one lynx were recovered where they had been taken from the traps, carried off the line for some distance, and ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... world; dig wells then for their use and build road for them, so that thou mayest be judged worthy to share in the future world." But as Amalek had not been sufficiently instructed by his father, in his wantonness he undertook to destroy the whole world. God, who tries the reins and the heart, said to him: "O thou fool, I created thee after all the seventy nations, but for thy sins thou shalt be the first ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... good behaviour. Yet, curiously enough, good behaviour was just what he never obtained, for every kind of secret prank became the rule; and while, by day, there reigned restraint and conspiracy, by night there began to take place chambering and wantonness. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... 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 this pleasantry ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... the apparent abandonment of all definite aim or end, and in the removal of all bounds in the exercise of the mind,—attaining its real end, as an entire contrast, most perfectly, the greater the display is of intellectual wealth squandered in the wantonness of sport without an object, and the more abundant the life and vivacity in the creations ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... shows you the head only of one of the larger figures in the center. Yet just observe how much design, how much wonderful composition, there is in this mere fragment of a building of the great times; a fragment, literally no larger than a school-boy could strike off in wantonness with a stick: and yet I cannot tell you how much care has been spent—not so much on the execution, for it does not take much trouble to execute well on so small a scale—but on the design, of this minute fragment. You see it is composed of a branch of wild roses, which ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... in the very wantonness of their skillful horsemanship, threw themselves from side to side upon the backs of their steeds, firing under the neck or belly with as much accuracy as if from the saddle. None of them were furnished with the regulation ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... he suffers his house to be scattered with profane and wicked Books, such as stir up to lust, to wantonness, such as teach idle, wanton, lascivious discourse, and such as has a tendency to provoke to profane drollery and Jesting; and lastly, such as tend to corrupt, and pervert the Doctrine of Faith and Holiness. All these things will eat as doth a canker, and will quickly spoil, in Youth, &c. those ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... 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 of granite some seventy-five feet below. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... poem of Catullus to excuse the wantonness of his own verses, which he is sending to his friend Paternus; and Apuleius cites the passage in his Apology for the same purpose. "Whoever," says Lambe, "would see the subject fully discussed, should turn ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... He studied 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; ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... for it was not quite safe for anybody of mark to stay away from 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 ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... tastefully distributed garden was broken 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... "I think so all the more because these men fare with laughter and wantonness; but such kinsmen of Njal as Thorgeir is would not smile before some vengeance is taken for the Burning, and I will make another guess, and maybe ye will think that unlikely. My meaning is, that it must be Flosi and the Burners with him, and ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... twenty-four hours had been made against him alone; at least, so Lablache understood it. Retief's efforts were only in his direction; the raider had robbed him of twenty thousand head of cattle; he had burnt his beautiful ranch out, in sheer wantonness it seemed to the despairing man; what then would be his next move if he were not stopped? What else was there of his—Lablache's—that the Breed could attack? His store—yes—yes; his store! That was all that was left of his property in Foss River. And then—what then? There was nothing after that, ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... last, and were conducted between the rows of name-boards, where we saw, in cells, many persons of each sex amusing themselves in such a manner) that it seemed to me that every one of them must have been drinking satyrion. (On catching sight of us, they attempted to seduce us with paederastic wantonness, and one wretch, with his clothes girded up, assaulted Ascyltos, and, having thrown him down upon a couch, attempted to gore him from above. I succored the sufferer immediately, however,) and having joined forces, we defied the troublesome wretch. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... 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 ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... the mere wantonness of insult," said one of the oldest and most important of Prince John's followers, Waldemar Fitzurse, "and if your Grace attempt it, cannot but prove ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... were disturbances everywhere. Men out of employment, excited by club orators, were ready for any violence. At Lyons they destroyed the hospitals and orphan asylums, out of mere wantonness. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... his name and fame 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 ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... attractive. The injured husband, for example, is invariably ridiculed, the adulterer glorified. The Hindu books, on the other hand, were written by professedly religious men whose aim was "not to encourage chambering and wantonness, but simply and in all sincerity to prevent the separation of husband and wife"—not to make them a married couple look afield, but "to lead them to love each other more by understanding each other better." Vatsyayan and Kullianmull, [394] indeed, though they poetized the pleasures ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... name first began to be inscribed upon glasses, I was honoured with the amorous professions of the gay Venustulus, a gentleman, who, being the only son of a wealthy family, had been educated in all the wantonness of expense, and softness of effeminacy. He was beautiful in his person, and easy in his address, and, therefore, soon gained upon my eye at an age when the sight is very little over-ruled by the understanding. He had not any power in himself of gladdening or amusing; but supplied his ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... daughter of Uranus, who has no mother and is the elder and wiser goddess, and the other, the daughter of Zeus and Dione, who is popular and common. The first of the two loves has a noble purpose, and delights only in the intelligent nature of man, and is faithful to the end, and has no shadow of wantonness or lust. The second is the coarser kind of love, which is a love of the body rather than of the soul, and is of women and boys as well as of men. Now the actions of lovers vary, like every other sort of action, according to the manner of their performance. And ...
— Symposium • Plato
... salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... king and his good wife, Sweetbine, were very much grieved at the foolish trifling of their daughter, Dewbell—for they were well assured that Dewbell loved the noble knight, Sir Timothy, and that it was only a spirit of mere wantonness that led her to vex and torment him. Long into the night did the royal couple converse, striving to devise some means of bringing their wayward daughter to her senses. They at last hit upon a plan, which they fondly hoped might be the means of securing the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... this movement of passion, since undoubtedly it broke and disturbed the else uniform stream of public indignation by investing the original aggressor with something like the character of an injured person; and therefore with some set-off to plead against his own wantonness of malice: his malice might now assume ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... speak to you both, and teach you to be good friends together." Then, having shut the door quite close, and 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 for 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 ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... about present conditions, and he neither came nor promised that he would appear. And yet what did I do that was unfair or unfitting or arrogant in summoning him as a friend and ally? What insolence and wantonness rather, has he omitted in refusing to come? Is it not inevitable that he did this from one of two reasons, either that he suspected he should suffer some harm or that he felt contempt for me? Well, if he had any suspicions he convicted himself most clearly of conspiring against us. For no one ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... disparaged, for that "he had run away from his masters the day before in consequence of a whipping, and that from an event which had happened by mere chance, he had fabricated this charge, from resentment and wantonness." But when they were charged by their accusers face to face, and the ministers of their villanies begin to be examined in the middle of the forum, they all confessed, and punishment was inflicted upon the masters ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... Government, and the Liberty of professing Opinions and Factions, which perhaps our Neighbours may have about them, but are forc'd to disguise, and thereby they may come in Time to be extinguish'd. Plenty begets Wantonness and Pride, Wantonness is apt to invent, and Pride scorns to imitate; Liberty begets Stomach or Heart, and Stomach will not be constrain'd. Thus we come to have more Originals, and more that appear what they are; we have more Humour, because every Man follows his own, and takes a Pleasure, ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... 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 ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... 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 caution, too ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... endless pranks, at once grotesque and lamentable, played by the mania for restoration, surely the "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 understand or ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... 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 his young companions. At length he would make a sudden turn, seize one of them, and tumble him in the dust; then giving a glance at us, as much as to say, "You see, gentlemen, I can't help giving way to this nonsense," ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... suffered at thought of the harpooner's tongue, as last I had seen it lying on the sand and covered with sand. O Kanaka Oolea, what animals young men are with the drink! Not until they have grown old, like you and me, do they control their wantonness of thirst and drink sparingly, ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... 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 for you, and would not. But you were my misery. If you ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... she finds him, fitting well her will, As he enjoys the pure and morning air Beside a brook, which trickled from a hill, Streaming towards a limpid lake and fair. His fine, soft garments, wove with cunning skill, All over, ease and wantonness declare; These with her hand, such subtle toil well taught, For him in silk and ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Probable want of early and deliberate purposes. Youth where the highest malice does not appear. Sex where the highest malice does not appear. Intoxication and levity, or mere wantonness of any kind. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... sister Judah saw, yes she saw,(177) that, all because 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 herself more than ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... in 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 ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... feelings, unique in the experience of both. In Jacobi's company Goethe became another man from what he had been in the company of Lavater and Basedow. "I was weary," he says, "of my previous follies and wantonness, which, in truth, only concealed my dissatisfaction that this journey had brought so little profit to my mind and heart. Now, therefore, my deepest feelings broke forth with irrepressible force." After a few days spent at Pempelfort, during which Georg Jacobi joined them, the two brothers ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... case the stronger; I don't believe that the maddest man that ever lived would throw away a diamond worth more than a thousand pounds with such utter wantonness as seems to have characterized the action of the original owner of the stone which I found ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... whereupon the latter went to the court of Henry I of England, where he 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 array in Mainland, and the ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... 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;" though I had explained my words by ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... countenance that the occurrence of the night before had become 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. When the poor ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... 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 ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... mother's question out of her mind for all time; so that until the end no word concerning that other woman passed again between them. Twenty years later, nearly, I myself happened to meet her, and then long physical suffering had chased the wantonness away for ever from the pain-worn mouth; but in that hour of waning voices, as some trouble of the fretful day when evening falls, so she faded from their life; and if even the remembrance of her returned at times to either of them, I think it must ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... 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
... Or do you think AEsopus was ever angry when he acted, or Accius was so when he wrote? Those men, indeed, act very well, but the orator acts better than the player, provided he be really an orator; but, then, they carry it on without passion, and with a composed mind. But what wantonness is it to commend lust! You produce Themistocles and Demosthenes; to these you add Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato. What! do you then call studies lust? But these studies of the most excellent and admirable things, such as those were which you bring ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... said that Booth frequently cut his adversaries upon the stage in sheer wantonness or bloodthirstiness. This is a mistake, and is attributable to his father, the elder Booth, who had the madness of confounding himself with the character. Wilkes was too good a fencer to make ugly gashes; his pride was his skill, not ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... satisfaction with sword and pistol, or dismiss him from the garrison, and renounce all friendship with him at once. But he had been so long accustomed to Jack's company, that he could not live without him; and upon more cool reflection, perceiving that what he had done was rather the effect of wantonness than malice, which he himself would have laughed to see take place upon any other person, he determined to devour his chagrin, and extended his forgiveness even to Pipes, whom, in the first sally of his passion, he had looked upon in a more criminal light than that of a simple ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... 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 pace and with the utmost impetuosity. ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... wood, or to artificial hedges: and extensive ravages by fire, such as now happen not unfrequently in the American woods (but generally from carelessness in scattering the glowing embers of a fire, or even the ashes of a pipe), were then occasionally the result of mere wantonness of mischief. Ovid accordingly notices, as one amongst the familiar images of daybreak, the half-burnt torch of the traveller; and, apparently, from the position which it holds in his description, where it is ranked with the most familiar ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... Such wantonness seems to his maturer reflection a sacrilege, and even the boy was not insensible to the silent reproach of ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... a place of want, woe, wantonness, an' wickedness, same as you claim, Maria, I don't see how a minister's wife can be too jolly!" was her husband's cheerful reply. "Look how she's melted up the ice in both congregations, so't the other church is most willin' we should prosper, so long ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... elders hear that I have been at the theatre of Drury Lane, in London, you must not think that I was there to see a carnal stage play, whether tragical or comical, or that I would so far demean myself and my cloth, as to be a witness to the chambering and wantonness of ne'er-du-weel play-actors. No, Mr. Micklewham, what I went to see was an Oratorio, a most edifying exercise of psalmody and prayer, under the management of a pious gentleman, of the name of Sir George Smart, ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... beauty in the other; he looks only at her earthly namesake, and instead of being awed at the sight of her, he is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he rushes on to enjoy and beget; he consorts with wantonness, and is not afraid or ashamed of pursuing pleasure in violation of nature. But he whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator of many glories in the other world, is amazed when he sees any one having a godlike ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... a wheel inside my head Of wantonness and wine, An old, cracked fiddle is begging without, But the wind with scents of the sea is fed, And the sun ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... while the sun blazes and the flowers are beautiful. So thinks everybody who has survived Puritanism unscathed, so thought the majority of Brineweald's visitors that year, so thought Mrs. Delarayne and her party of eager young swains and still more eager virgins. Wantonness was in the air,—wantonness and beauty; and when these two imps of passion come together August is ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... unless it were the religious bigot. And to 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? ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... conclusion was that moral suasion was of little purpose—that there must be more of example than precept. In this particular case how speedy and effective has been the result will be seen later on. Man destroys birds for sport, or in mere wantonness, and the increasing myriads of insect hosts lay such toll upon his crops and the fruit of the earth which by the exercise of high intelligence and noble perseverance he has improved and made plentiful, that the national loss is to be counted by hundreds of thousands. In ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... astonished and disgusted me: and my mother not only permitted the revered scoundrel to do this, but actually seemed to encourage him. Soon they placed themselves upon a sofa, in full view of my gaze; and I was both mortified and enraged to observe the wantonness of my mother, and the lasciviousness of her pious friend. After indulging in the most obscene and lecherous preliminaries, the full measure of their iniquity was consummated, I being a witness to the whole disgraceful scene. Horrified, and sick ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... 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 the children lament ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... must not meet; but his fear is, lest 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 the philosopher's stone; a disease uncurable, ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... as he lay on the sled. No one spoke to him. The men were too busy with songs and rough jests over the business of the evening. The engineer would not confess to himself that he was frightened, but the wantonness and alacrity with which the irresponsible men had destroyed valuable property impressed him with ominous apprehension of what they might do to him. He wondered what revenge Connick ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... dust, if your looks had not raised me to 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 ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... not this occasion our carelessness in watching against sin; for that would be, to turn his grace into wantonness; but rather let it sharpen our diligence in watching against all occasions of sin, lest we ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... his desk and engaged in transferring certain imposing red-sealed documents to a green baize satchel which he held between his knees. He had regained his equanimity; his features wore their usual expression of judicial severity; nothing denoted his recent discomposure, except perhaps an additional wantonness in the stringy black hair falling over the high forehead,—that pallid high forehead which always wore the look of being ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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 nurseries of the arts, In which they flourish most; where, in the beams Of ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... the time of the Romans. There is also to be seen in this town, a Mosaic pavement discovered only a few years since, wonderfully beautiful indeed, and near ten feet square, though not quite perfect, being broken in the night by some malicious people, out of mere wantonness, ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... from the exercise of this sort of ministerial privilege: on one occasion particularly, I myself narrowly escaped unhurt, when a decent, elderly woman was thrown down, close by my feet, and had both her thighs broken through the unfeeling wantonness of the coachman of the Baron de Breteuil, at that time minister ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... 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 of morality, which are ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... that custom, curiosity, or wantonness, supplies every art with patrons, and finds purchasers for every manufacture; the world is so adjusted, that not only bread, but riches may be obtained without great abilities or arduous performances: the most unskilful hand and unenlightened mind have sufficient ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... character, had they been obscure, would have been made clear by Adelaide Neilson's embodiment. The personality that she presented was typical and unusual. It embodied virtue, neither hardened by austerity nor vapid with excess of goodness, and it embodied seductive womanhood, without one touch of wantonness or guile. It presented a woman innately good and radiantly lovely, who amid severest trials spontaneously and unconsciously acted with the ingenuous grace of childhood, the grandest generosity, the most constant ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... kept his sheep upon a common, and in sport and wantonness would often cry out, "The wolf! the wolf!" By this means he several times drew the husbandmen in an adjoining field from their work; who, finding themselves deluded, resolved for the future to take no notice of his alarm. Soon after, the wolf came indeed. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... are made attractive by displays of gaudy luxuries, set out to tempt the purses of the self-made autocrats of wealth. Gambling houses here are outvying in richness, and utter wantonness of wasted expense, anything yet seen in America. They are open always. Haunts abound where, in the pretended seclusion of a few yards' distance, rich adventurers riot with the beautiful battalions of the fallen angels. It were gross profanation ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... albeit averse from engaging their proper persons into a matrimonial duty, like the pontifical flamens of Cybele in Phrygia, as if they were capons, and not cocks full of lasciviousness, salacity, and wantonness, who yet have, nevertheless, in the matter of conjugal affairs, taken upon them to prescribe laws and ordinances to married folks. I cannot goodly determine what I should most abhor, detest, loathe, and abominate,—whether the tyrannical presumption ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... especially the inclination to equality and frugality. While republics are destroyed by extravagance, lust, and self-seeking, a monarchy can dispense with civil virtue, patriotism, and moral disinterestedness, since in it false honor, luxury, and wantonness subserve the public good. Great states tend toward despotism; smaller ones toward aristocracy, or a democratic republicanism; for those of medium size monarchy, which is intermediate between the two former, is the best form of constitution. Although Montesquieu, in his Lettres Persanes, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau—and for what? It was the wantonness of ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... mountains, but sometimes when pursued hotly they will separate into small bands and scatter through the hills; these fellows are dangerous. They would have murdered any white men they might meet for their arms alone, without considering the spirit of wantonness or revenge that ...
— A Desperate Chance - The Wizard Tramp's Revelation, A Thrilling Narrative • Old Sleuth (Harlan P. Halsey)
... drenched hair, And laughing from my lip the audacious brine, Which kissed it like a wine-cup, rising o'er The waves as they arose, and prouder still 110 The loftier they uplifted me; and oft, In wantonness of spirit, plunging down Into their green and glassy gulfs, and making My way to shells and sea-weed, all unseen By those above, till they waxed fearful; then Returning with my grasp full of such tokens As showed that I had searched the deep: exulting, With a far-dashing stroke, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... when so many others whom he knew and knew of had thrown off the shackles of sensuality and dedicated themselves to chastity and the higher life, he heard a voice in the garden say, "Sume, lege" (take and read), and opening the Bible at random, saw the text, "not in chambering and wantonness," etc., which seemed directly sent to his address, and laid the inner storm to rest forever. Augustine's psychological genius has given an account of the trouble of having a divided self which has never ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... sate down together to sup. Tall he was and comely of form and feature, debonair and gracious of mien and manner, and in his lusty prime. The lady had eyed him again and again to her no small satisfaction, and, her wantonness being already kindled for the Marquis, who was to have come to lie with her, she had let Rinaldo take the vacant place in her mind. So when supper was done, and they were risen from the table, she conferred with her maid, whether, after the ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... tents, not enough for 2000. A large proportion of the men lived in holes in the 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 written to them from here—is in the U. S. light-house employ ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 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
... anguish, whose swoln 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 ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... are severely observed there; for in the whole of their manners is aught more praiseworthy than this: for they are almost the only Barbarians contented with one wife, excepting a very few amongst them; men of dignity who marry divers wives, from no wantonness or lubricity, but courted for the lustre of ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... is always an age of frivolity, of heartless levity, of dwarfish objects and pursuits, of dreadful contrasts—laughter amid mourning, rioting and wantonness amid judgments and executions; dancing and music at the hour of death. Such was the frivolity of the days of Nero; such was the mirth of the "death-dance" in the days of Robespierre. Nothing like this sickly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... street, to speculate on the wasted harlotry of the other. "Look you, Madam!" says Mr. Toddleworth, leaning on his stick and pointing towards Chatham street. "A desert, truly," replies the august old lady, nervously twitching her head. She sees to the right ("it is wantonness warring upon misery," says Mr. Toddleworth) a long line of irregular, wooden buildings, black and besmeared with mud. Little houses with decrepid door-steps; little houses with decayed platforms in front; little dens that seem crammed with rubbish; ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... for argument's sake, that mere wantonness and lust of domination would be sufficient to beget that disposition; still it may be safely affirmed, that the sense of the constituent body of the national representatives, or, in other words, the people of the several States, would control the indulgence ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... gave me another, gentler picture of myself—a fight here, a failure there, a hunger somewhere else, and Lord knows how many old shreds of cynicism and belief, of selfishness and ambition and wantonness and pride, and just a little bit of love and desire for beauty. I told him that madness of mine, about the Mater's letters that I told you to take to King George. He was interested in that—said it was symbolical of my love for the Mater. I think ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... had loved her once! She recalled his fiery love-making, and thrilled again to the eager insistence of his voice, the mastery of his touch. And then she remembered what they said of him, that women were his slaves, his playthings, the toys he broke in wantonness and carelessly tossed aside. She remembered how once in his actual presence she had overheard words that had made her shrink, a wonder as to who was his latest conquest, the cynical remark: "Anyone for a change and no one for long is his motto." What ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... last moment, when the victory was no longer doubtful, and all were in full retreat or in full pursuit, a Zouave, in wantonness, firing his weapon before he throw it away, sent a random-shot which struck Theodora, and she fell. Lothair, who had never left her during the battle, was at her side in a moment, and a soldier, who had also marked the fatal ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... as slowly it breaks, Hills, cupolas, fountains, called forth every one Out of darkness as if but just born of the Sun. When the Spirit of Fragrance is up with the day From his Haram of night-flowers stealing away; And the wind full of wantonness wooes like a lover The young aspen-trees,[280] till they tremble all over. When the East is as warm as the light of first hopes, And day with his banner of radiance unfurled Shines in thro' the mountainous portal[281] that opes, Sublime, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... on to the sacred laurel with one hand. Well now! Consider! that is a thing of which Euripides has never spoken. And when we bestow our favours on slaves and muleteers for want of better, does he mention this? And when we eat garlic early in the morning after a night of wantonness, so that our husband, who has been keeping guard upon the city wall, may be reassured by the smell and suspect nothing,[590] has Euripides ever breathed a word of this? Tell me. Neither has he spoken of the woman who spreads open a large cloak before her husband's eyes ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... 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)
... thee out? Was't I that lured thee from thy father's house? Was't I that forced, ay, forced my love on thee? Was't I that wrenched thee from thy fatherland, Made thee the butt of strangers' haughty scorn, Or dragged thee into wantonness and crime? Thou nam'st me Wanton?—Woe is me! I am! Yet—how have I been wanton, and for whom? Let these pursue me with their venomous hate, Ay, drive me forth and slay me! 'Tis their right, Because I am in truth a dreadful thing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... traitor to myself. If my life has been vile my temptations have been sore, and the rest is in God's hands. But in my course I have sinned against many men; many a tall fellow's life have I wantonly wrecked; some, indeed, I have even taken in wantonness or anger. They are not by, nor, were they, could I now make amends. But you at least are here, and what little reparation may lie in asking pardon I can make. When I first saw you at Perth it was my wish to make you my friend—a feeling I have not had these twenty years ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... Worship of 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
... tears were sure to run in torrents down their silly, honest, burning cheeks. But this was not all; they had got a large tank in a flagged room, nominally for cleanliness and cure, but really for bane and torture. For the least offence, or out of mere wantonness, they would drag a patient stark naked across the yard, and thrust her bodily under water again and again, keeping her down till almost gone with suffocation, and dismissing her more dead than alive with obscene and insulting comments ringing in her ears, to get warm again in the ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... language as we do, we have not a more certain Measure of it, as they have in France: where they have an "Academy" erected for that purpose, and endowed with large privileges by the present King [LOUIS XIV.]. I wish, we might, at length, leave to borrow words from other nations; which is now a wantonness in us, not a necessity: but so long as some affect to speak them, there will not want others who will have the boldness to ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... of wantonness this arrogance of royalty may lead me, I do not know: I will watch, and see. It is written: 'It is not good for man to be alone!' But good or no, the arrangement of One planet, One inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely a natural and proper, but the only natural and ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... every condition of humanity, it might be considered as flowing at once from the dungeons of despairing convicts, the cellars and garrets of squalid poverty, the busy haunts of avarice, the waste of luxury, and the wantonness ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... is the opposite of all this; it is the dread of the unknown, the ghastly doubt as to whether there is any goal before us or not; when we fear, we are like the butterfly that flutters anxiously away from the boy who pursues it, who means out of mere wantonness to strike it down tattered and bruised ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of animals, and is attributable in part to the peculiarities of the volunteer service—such as the lack of care and knowledge on the part of the officers, and the disposition of the men to break down their horses by improper riding, and sometimes out of mere wantonness, for the purpose of getting rid of animals they do not like, for the chance of obtaining better. A measure has recently been adopted to remedy these evils, by putting into the infantry cavalry officers and men who show ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... one hundred and ten men in all. Many of them were without rifles, having given up their arms at Bloemfontein. Others were provided with serviceable achterlaaiers, but had little or no ammunition, because they had already fired off their cartridges in mere wantonness in the belief that they might have to give up their rifles any day. My handful of burghers were thus ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... stars came forth glowing over the blue sky. Between six and seven the moon rose; and I could not get my two prentices in from the door, where they were bickering one another with snow-balls, or maybe carhailling the folk on the street in their idle wantonness; so I was obliged for that night to disappoint Edie Macfarlane of the pair of black spatterdashes he was so anxious to get finished, for dancing in next day, at Souple Jack the ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... was thus tempered by Lycurgus, yet soon after it degenerated into an oligarchy, whose power was exercised with such wantonness and violence, that it wanted indeed a bridle, as Plato expresses it. This curb they found in the authority of the Ephori, about a hundred and thirty years after Lycurgus. Elatus was the first invested with this dignity, in the reign of Theopompus; ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... soaring really is. The hawk does not always ascend in a spiral, but every now and then revolves in a circle—a flat circle—and suddenly shoots up with renewed rapidity. Whether this be merely sportive wantonness or whether it is a necessity, is impossible to determine; but to me it does not appear as if the hawk did it from necessity. It has more the appearance of variation: just as you or I might walk fast ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... hands—perforce idle—buried in their torn and empty pockets, going from factory to factory asking for work, while the overseers would wave them off from afar to avoid a useless interchange of words. If, in the years of the French milliards, the workingman had turned socialist out of sheer envy and wantonness, he became so now under the sting of adversity, and in all the length and breadth of Berlin there was hardly one of the proletariat who was not a fanatical disciple of the new doctrine, with its slashing denunciations against all ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... Amid the general wantonness there was only one who remained morose and anxious, and this was Heideck, the newly-made captain ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann |
