"Ascetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... those tables a man was seated. Jimmie took a glance at him, and started so that he almost spilled his coffee. Impossible; and yet— surely—who could mistake that face? The face of a medieval churchman, lean, ascetic, but with a modern touch of kindliness, and a bald dome on top like a moon rising over the prairie. Jimmie started, then stared at the picture of the Candidate which crowned the shelf of pies. He turned to the man again; and the man glanced up, and his eyes met Jimmie's, with their ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... sounded as high a note as a young man's. He loved the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle. He loved courage, enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue; everything that lifts us above the table where we eat or the bed we sleep upon. This with no touch of the motive-monger or the ascetic. He loved his virtues to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he loved the jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense of life and of man's unequal character ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his countenance, was cleare, and fresh colour'd, his eyes quick and piercing, an ample forehead, manly aspect; low of stature, but very strong. He was for his life so exact and temperate, that I have heard he had never been surprised by excesse, being ascetic and sparing. His wisdom was greate, and judgment most acute; of solid discourse, affable, humble and in nothing affected; of a thriving, neat, silent and methodical genius; discretely severe, yet liberal on all just occasions to his ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... if we are coherent, that any "return to God" which ascetic philosophy may bring about cannot be a social reform, a transition to some better form of natural existence in a promised land, a renovated earth, or a material or temporal heaven. Nor can the error of creation be corrected violently by a second arbitrary act, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Palestrina, for he suffered many domestic sorrows. His three promising sons died one after another. They were talented young men, who might have followed in the footsteps of their distinguished father. In 1580 his wife died also. Yet neither poignant sorrow, worldly glory nor ascetic piety blighted his homely affections. At the Jubilee of Pope Gregory XIII, in 1575, when 1500 pilgrims from the town of Palestrina descended the hills on the way to Rome, it was their old townsman, Giovanni Pierluigi, who led their songs, as they entered the Eternal City, their maidens ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... than before. She was threatened with the most serious displeasure of her father and mother, if she encouraged Herbert in the morbid ascetic notions ascribed ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... royal authority and state. Charles was a gay, dissipated, reckless young man. The men whom he had to deal with were stern, sedate, and rigid religionists. They were scandalized at the looseness and irregularity of his character and manners. He was vexed and tormented by what he considered their ascetic bigotry, by the restraints which they were disposed to put upon his conduct, and the limits with which they insisted on bounding his authority. Long negotiations and debates ensued, each party becoming more and more irritated against the other. At last, on one occasion, Charles lost his ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... by the temptation to enter at once into Nirvana, without proclaiming his doctrine to the world. But putting the temptation from him, he began his ministry by announcing the tidings of release to the companions of his ascetic life, who, after scoffing for awhile, were at length convinced. In the course of this, his first sermon, Buddha proceeded to enunciate the eight steps on the path which leads to Nirvana—(i) Right faith, (ii) right resolution, (iii) right speech, (iv) right action, (v) right ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... of things. If Lorenzo writes at one moment carnival songs of ribald dirtiness, at the next hymns full of holy solemnity; it is, I think, merely because this versatile artist takes pleasure in trying whether his face may not be painted into grinning drunkenness, and then elongated and whitened into ascetic gentleness. Instead of seeking, like most of his contemporaries, to be Greek, Roman, or mediaeval by turns, he preferred trying on all the various tricks of thought and feeling which he remarked among his unlettered townsfolk. His realism naturally drew him towards the classes where ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... ends—all those higher and wider interests in life which are comprised under the one comprehensive name of "the kingdom of God." And the teaching of Christ is: Neither hate nor fear this part of your nature with the ascetic, nor pamper and stimulate it with the Hedonist, but let it alone to act on its own plane; trust it, trust God who made it, while you throw all your conscious energies into the higher concerns of life; ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... time is not a song of youthful romance, but "The Progress of the Soul," a study of transmigration. Years of wandering and poverty followed, until Sir George More forgave the young lovers and made an allowance to his daughter. Instead of enjoying his new comforts, Donne grew more ascetic and intellectual in his tastes. He refused also the nattering offer of entering the Church of England and of receiving a comfortable "living." By his "Pseudo Martyr" he attracted the favor of James I, who persuaded him to be ordained, yet left him without any ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... opened. A middle-aged man in black, with clean shaven ascetic face, and hair the colour of rust, and of remarkably wiry bodily appearance ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... Sunday evening concerts at a club of Polterham workmen. His discourse on this subject, systematically developed, lasted until the ladies withdrew. It allowed him scarcely any attention to his plate, but Mr. Vialls had the repute of an ascetic. In his buttonhole was a piece of blue ribbon, symbol of a ferocious total-abstinence; his face would have afforded sufficient proof that among the reverend man's failings were few distinctly of ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... carry to them all that was good and beautiful in the classics, was the desire of Benedict. His wish was to reconcile the learning of the past with Christianity, which up to that time had been simply ascetic. It had consisted largely of repression, suppression and a killing-out of all spontaneous, happy, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... toward that which he thought was right. His mistakes were all in the line of infirmities of the will. Voltaire calls him, "The father of all those who wear shovel hats," and in another place refers to him as an "amateur ascetic," but in this the author of the Philosophical Dictionary pays Seneca the indirect compliment of regarding him as a Christian. Renan says, "Seneca shines out like a great white star through a rift of clouds on a night of darkness." The wonder is not that Seneca ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... in the practice of the law, and had held a position of some honour under the Crown. But as the years wore on the ties which bound him to the world of sense were severed one by one, and he was now released. By the study of the Vedanta, by ascetic discipline, and by the daily practice of meditation undertaken at regular hours, he had attained the Great Peace; and those who knew the signs of such attainment reverenced him as a holy man. His influence was great, his fidelity was unquestioned, ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... were opposed to the ascetic mode of life he adopted, and the extreme of hardship which he so often and so willingly encountered in his work. But he himself often said, and there are many references in his diary to the same effect, that the kind of life ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... Like most laymen of the Catholic persuasion, he thought himself no longer bound to maintain a grave and mortified exterior, when worship and penitence were duly observed, and he joined his friend with a cheerfulness of air and voice that an ascetic, or a puritan, might have attributed to levity, after the scenes through which he had ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... Hail, arch-ascetic, pious, good, and kind! Hail, Saint Valmiki, lord of every lore! Hail, holy Hermit, calm and pure of mind! Hail, First of Bards, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... southern sun, was thronged with coaches and chariots brought over from London at heavy cost in tobacco, though soon to be bedimmed by Virginia roads and negro care; racing and hard-drinking planters; clergymen of the Establishment, not much more ascetic than their boon companions of the laity; ladies, with manners a little rusted by long seclusion; black coachmen and footmen, proud of their masters and their liveries; young cavaliers, booted and spurred, sitting their thoroughbreds with ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... spirit. His pious sister Jacqueline warned her brother that he was going too far. But he was still more effectively warned by an accident, in which he almost miraculously escaped from death. Withdrawing from the world, he adopted a course of ascetic practices, in which he continued till he died—in his thirty-ninth year. He wore about his waist an iron girdle armed with sharp points; and this he would press smartly with his elbow when he detected himself at fault in ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... must not be supposed that this earnest searcher after truth became ascetic or morose. Despite his mistakes, and the somewhat severe discipline which he was thereby led to impose on himself and the community, the effect on him and his large family of the Scriptures— pure, unadulterated, and without note or comment—was to create love to God, ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... originally instituted on priestly ideas of national sin and collective atonement, could be transformed into the purely spiritual festival which we celebrate to-day' (Montefiore, op. cit., p. 160). But the day is none the less associated with a strict rite, the fast. It is one of the few ascetic ceremonies in the Jewish Calendar as known to most Jews. There is a strain of asceticism in some forms of Judaism, and on this a few words will be said later. But, on the whole, there is in modern Judaism a tendency to underrate somewhat the value of asceticism in religion. Hence ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... infuriated mob. More powerful, and far more numerous than his followers, the Peterbrusians, were the Cathari and the Waldenses (founded by Peter Valdez A.D. 1177) who soon spread to Northern Italy and amalgamated with the sect of the Lombards. The Cathari advocated a simple and ascetic life, in accordance with the teaching of primitive Christianity, refrained from all ecclesiastical ceremonies and despised the sacraments, particularly baptism. More radical than later reformers, they rejected the doctrine ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Salaman's Heart Back to the Shah, and looking to the Throne Of Pomp and Glory? What but the Return Of the Lost Soul to its true Parentage, And back from Carnal Error looking up Repentant to its Intellectual Throne. What is The Fire?—Ascetic Discipline, That burns away the Animal Alloy, Till all the Dross of Matter be consumed, And the Essential Soul, its Raiment clean Of Mortal Taint, be left. But forasmuch As any Life-long Habit so consumed, May well recur a Pang for what is lost, Therefore The Sage set in Salaman's Eyes A Soothing ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that time by the spiritual power—that of a divine morality and superior culture coming into conflict with, and strong enough to withstand, a vigorous barbarism. These epistles are full of commonsense and clear, practical advice, and often give us a glimpse of the human, as distinct from the ascetic, element in monastic life. They show how men could pass pleasant and thoughtful days amid the barbarism of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... great public in general know of what the singer often suffers in the way of nervousness or stage fright before appearing in front of the footlights, nor that his life, outwardly so feted and brilliant, is in private more or less of a retired, ascetic one and that his social pleasures ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... had obtained only the barest idea of what was necessary to the deciphering a secret passage. Judging by what he could pick out, he would have thought the whole essay was upon the moral conduct; all parts of that he could make out seeming to refer to a certain ascetic rule of life; to denial of pleasures; these topics being repeated and insisted on everywhere, although without any discoverable reference to religious or moral motives; and always when the author seemed ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the pre-Buddhistic conception of salvation, and of the way to be followed by those who would attain thereto. No more thorough mortification of the flesh has ever been attempted than-that achieved by the Indian ascetic anchorite; no later monachism has so nearly succeeded in reducing the human mind to that condition of impassive quasi-somnambulism, which, but for its acknowledged holiness, might run the risk of being confounded ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... and Jesus shall have it." But he clearly indicated that the Christ he sought was an Indian Christ; one who was "a Hindu in faith," and who would help the Hindus to "realize their national idea of a yogi" (ascetic). ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... ascetic—a scholar by nature. He was tall, slender, and in countenance sad. For the intellect Nature had given him, she had taken toll by cheating him in form and feature. He was deliberate and of few words—he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... genius; talent which converts itself to money; talent which glitters to-day that it may dine and sleep well to-morrow; and society is officered by men of parts, as they are properly called, and not by divine men. These use their gifts to refine luxury, not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic, and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of Julian with a passion for abstract beauty and an enthusiasm for a restored system of pagan Hellenic worship. There was an individuality about Julian, an absence of the common purple convention, of the imperial rhetoric, which strongly commended him to Ibsen, and in his perverse ascetic revolt against Christianity he offered a fascinating originality to one who thought the modern world all out of joint. As a revolutionary, Julian presented ideas of character which could not but passionately attract the Norwegian poet. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... vainly struggled with himself to do so. The high cheek bones with the hollows beneath were the same, yet the texture of the hollows seemed different. The thin-lipped mouths were from the same mould, but George's lips were firm and muscular, while Al's were soft and loose—the lips of an ascetic turned voluptuary. There was also a sag at the corners. His flesh hinted of grossness, especially so in the eagle-like aquiline nose that must once have been like the other's, but that had lost the austerity ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... of her domain, and is manifest in life that continues and is increased in fuller measures of joy, heightened to fairer beauty, instinct with love in the heart of man. Wiser were the ascetics whom I used to scorn; they made themselves ascetics of the body, but I have been an ascetic of ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... no social amenities on the rangeside or in the bush, where women are scarce. Vane had lived in Spartan simplicity, practising the ascetic virtues, as a matter of course. He had had no time for sentiment, his passions had remained unstirred; and now he was seven and twenty, sound and vigorous of body, and, as a rule, level of head. At length, ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... Crotona, he formed a school, consisting at first of three hundred of the richest of the citizens, who bound themselves by a sort of vow to himself and to each other, for the purpose of cultivating the ascetic observances which he enjoined, and of studying his religious and philosophical theories. All that took place in this school was kept a profound secret; and there were gradations among the pupils themselves, who were not all admitted, or at all ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Adam's remark was justified. Alvarez lived with Indian frugality and looked ascetic; besides he had been long in power and had no doubt had opportunities for enriching himself at his country's expense. Kit liked Alvarez, but did not think him much honester than other Spanish-American rulers ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... earlier Florentine art, Titian might well have conceived, might well have painted thus. Strange to say, the influence is not that of Michelangelo, but, unless the writer is greatly deceived, that of Donatello, whose noble ascetic type of the Precursor is here modernised, and in the process deprived of some of its austerity. The glorious mountain landscape, with its brawling stream, fresher and truer than any torrent of Ruysdael's, is all Titian. It makes the striking figure of St. John, for all its majesty, appear ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... on the brazen horse. Plump down into castles as full of little milk-white princesses as a nest is of young sparrows. All love me dearly at once.—Charming idea of life, but too high-colored for the reality. I have outgrown all this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive,—almost, perhaps, ascetic. We carry happiness into our condition, but must not hope to find it there. I think you will be willing to hear some lines which embody the subdued and limited desires of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... smiled; his poise was indicative of the utmost self-control, his form lank, his hair heavy and graying at the temples, his general appearance giving evidence of a clean, active ascetic life and a strong moral and physical make-up. He was inclined to keep the light of his conversational powers under a bushel, and at times spoke only when aroused from apparent self-centered thought. His voice was deep and pleasant, his diction ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... shone upon him had been so short, so chequered, so tragically wiped out, it might as well never have dawned. Yet the one dear woman friend to whom in these latter years he had spoken freely, who knew him through and through—Helena Pitstone's mother—had taken for granted, in her quiet ascetic way, that he had indeed had his chance, and must accept for good and all what had come of it. It was because she thought of him as set apart, as debarred by what had happened to him, from honest love-making, and ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to their power), the St. Barbara and St. Elizabeth.[27] I do not know among the pictures of the great sacred schools any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically expressive of the need of the heart that conceived them. Not ascetic, nor quaint, nor feverishly or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities of thought. Only entirely true—entirely pure. No depth of glowing heaven beyond them—but the clear sharp sweetness of the northern air: no splendor of rich color, striving to adorn them with better brightness ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... had the darker malady. She fasted regularly on Fridays and Tuesdays. We always recognized her jours maigres by the quantity of cakes and pastry we saw carried to her room just before dinner, to which dinner she came in nun-like gray silk, saintly coiffure, with ascetic pallor on cheeks wont to bloom with roses de Ninon, to dine, a la Sainte Catherine or Sainte Something else, on a few lentils ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... truly vanquished. In the moral philosophy of Kant the idea of duty is proposed with a harshness enough to ruffle the Graces, and one which could easily tempt a feeble mind to seek for moral perfection in the sombre paths of an ascetic and monastic life. Whatever precautions the great philosopher has been able to take in order to shelter himself against this false interpretation, which must be repugnant more than all else to the serenity of the free mind, he has lent it a strong impulse, it seems to me, in opposing to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... well be written on the great novelist's journey to Africa, upon her departure from Charing Cross, shrouded in a black gauze veil, her silent thought as the good ship Empress rode cork-like upon the Channel waves, her ascetic lunch—a captain's biscuit and a glass of water—at the buffet at Calais, her arrival in Paris when the shades of night had fallen. An epic might well be written. Perhaps some day it will ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... serpents, Gandharvas, birds, and of all creatures; and lastly, of the life and adventures of king Bharata—the progenitor of the line that goes by his name—the son born of Sakuntala in the hermitage of the ascetic Kanwa. This parva also describes the greatness of Bhagirathi, and the births of the Vasus in the house of Santanu and their ascension to heaven. In this parva is also narrated the birth of Bhishma uniting in himself portions of the energies of the other Vasus, his renunciation of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... hoofs and routs up with a swine's nose the matter its clients best love to purchase. Mary, supported by her father and her cousin, preserved a brave composure. Indeed, she was less visibly moved than they. It seemed that the ascetic parent of the dead had power to lift the widow to his own stern self-control. The chaplain of Tom May's ship assisted at the service, but Septimus May conducted it. Not a few old messmates attended, for the sailor had been popular, and his unexpected death brought ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe, unless I scorn every previous generation from whom they have inherited their diseases ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... hell everlasting, heaven hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and submission, abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of life—these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediaeval Church. The Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing the light of reality upon the darkened places of his own nature. For ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... were spoken in the vernacular—and not in the voice of Roy. Startled, she drew back and faced a man of less than middle height, bare-headed, wearing the orange-pink draperies of an ascetic. In the half dark she could just discern the colour and the necklace of carved beads that hung ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... with bristling hair. He was marked in the town because he called himself a "Socialist," but Samuel did not know that. His wife was a little mite of a woman, completely swamped by child-bearing. Most interesting to Samuel was Friedrich, who played the violin; a pale ascetic-looking boy of fifteen, with wavy ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... was with Zenobia and with the hero in the Marble Faun. "We all go wrong," said Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous resolution to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson. This is the position of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man who sees only ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... years, and reviewing my impressions of his personality, I must put first the physical aspect of the man. He seemed older than he was, and even more ascetic, for he looked as if, like the cardinal in Lothair, he lived on biscuits and soda-water; whereas he had a hearty appetite for his midday meal, and, in his own words, "enjoyed his tea." Still, he carried the irreducible minimum of flesh on ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... but as he had mastered its intricacies the jury were welcome to his laboriously acquired knowledge in order to help them in arriving at a right decision. Mr. Middleheath's junior was Mr. Garden Greyson, a thin ascetic looking lawyer whose knowledge of medical jurisprudence had brought him his brief in the case. Mr. Oakham sat beside Mr. Greyson with various big ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... more valorous and famous." We have here a new conception of love which has profoundly influenced life and thought ever since—love no longer a weakness as in the ancient world, or a sin as it seemed to the ascetic spirit of the Church, but a conscious source of strength, an avowed motive of heroism. And it was round Arthur and his court that the French poets of the next generation wove their romances inspired by this conception—the offspring of ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... summons, wrenched himself from a murmuring home, and, starting by an early train, arrived half through the St. Michael's Day Service, it was to see Mr. Underwood looking indeed like some ethereal ascetic saint, with his bright eyes and wasted features, and to hear him preach in extempore—as was his custom—a sermon on the blessedness of angel helps, which in its intense fervour, almost rapture, was to many as ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... than he was to the grave, thin, stooping ascetic in a long coat, that she had expected. He was a tall, well-made man, of the same youthful cast of figure as his nephew, and a far lighter and more springy step, with features and colouring recalling those of his niece, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Buddhas, and Pratyeka Jinas, and explained by "individually intelligent," "completely intelligent," "intelligent as regards the nidanas." This, says Eitel (pp. 96, 97), is "a degree of saintship unknown to primitive Buddhism, denoting automats in ascetic life who attain to Buddhaship 'individually,' that is, without a teacher, and without being able to save others. As the ideal hermit, the Pratyeka Buddha is compared with the rhinoceros khadga that lives lonely in the wilderness. He is also called Nidana ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... attenuated. He had the look of a self-righteous ascetic, and dressed with puritanical austerity. No smile ever irradiated his gaunt face and remorseless eyes. His forehead was unusually high and white; his manners high, too; and if his morals were not white, his cravat, that was like ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... the mild Augustinian rule differed from the Benedictines, and it was not in their genius to seize great rocks and convert them into fortresses. Their attitude was humane, their rule not excessively ascetic; they allowed men and women to exercise the religious life side by side in neighbouring houses; they lived in the country but they were in familiar touch with the world. The White Canons ruled Maldon, but they lived at Beeleigh. They appear ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... but they are more visionary than any ascetic, and their invisible life is but the life about them made more perfect and more lasting, and the invisible people are their own images in the water. Their gods may have been much besides this, for we know them from fragments of mythology picked out with trouble from ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... riddle might be, Aziel bent towards her to reply, when suddenly round a bend in the path but a few paces from them came a body of soldiers and attendants, headed by a man clad in a white robe and walking with a staff. This man was grey-headed and keen-eyed, thin in face and ascetic in appearance, with a brow of power and a bearing of dignity. At the sight of the pair he halted, looking at them in ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... unpardonable trangressions into which young people generally, and this young person in particular, were likely to run, to hold up examples of those who had fallen into evil ways and come to an evil end, to present the most exalted standard of ascetic virtue to the lively girl's apprehension, leading her naturally to the conclusion that a bright example of excellence stood before her in the irreproachable relative who addressed her. Especially with regard to the allurements ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... mutilations and the eagerly sought sufferings manifested an ardent longing for {51} deliverance from subjection to carnal instincts, and a fervent desire to free the soul from the bonds of matter. The ascetic tendencies went so far as to create a kind of begging monachism—the metragyrtes. They also harmonized with some of the ideas of renunciation taught by Greek philosophy, and at an early period Hellenic theologians took ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... was, we know, a little Jewish, and rested upon temporal rewards and comforts. He thought, I am sure, that a competent staff of angels were placed specially in charge of the interests of Jos. Larkin, Esq., who attended so many services and sermons on Sundays, and led a life of such ascetic propriety. He felt quite grateful to them, in his priggish way—their management in this matter had been so eminently satisfactory. He regretted that he had not an opportunity of telling them so personally. I don't say that he would have expressed ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the lascivious memoirs of the last century form the pieces justificatives of the French Revolution, as the terrorism of a comite du salut public seems to be necessary physic when we read the confessions of the aristocratic world of France, so we recognize the wholesomeness of ascetic spiritualism when we read Petronius or Apuleius, which are to be regarded as the pieces justificatives of Christianity. The flesh had become so arrogant in this Roman world that it required Christian discipline to chasten it. After the banquet of a Trimalchion, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the chaplain was like a living oracle to him, as to many others. The ascetic face became beautiful with a beauty not of this earth—"his pallor," said they, "became of a fair shining red" when he spoke of Christ or holy things, while anon his thunder tones awoke an echo in the heart of many as he testified ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... been fed with the "bread of life" must remain "in the world." The Lord gives no countenance to the life of the ascetic. Our sanctification is not to be gained by withdrawal and retreat. At the best, that would be a holiness sickly and anaemic, a coddled virtue devoid of firm muscle and iron nerve. Our Lord purposes a holiness which shall wear white robes in the streets, ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... of study, prayer, and thought, Kenshin became a saintly priest—not wide In intellect nor broad in sympathies, For such things come not from the ascetic life; But narrow, strong, and deep, and like the stream That rushes fervid through the narrow path Between the rooks at Nikk[o]—so he grasped, Heart, soul, and strength, the holy Buddha's Law With no room left for doubt, or ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... we be, should submit to insult and indignity at the hands of a pack of godless Lutheran dogs." And, so saying, he seated himself and proceeded to remove his own head-covering, disclosing lean, ascetic features, cold, cruel, and domineering, crowned by the monk's tonsure. At the same time the others did the same, and with very similar result, the dominant expression of the faces thus disclosed being that of cold, stern ruthlessness, tempered, it must ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... we compare the military type of self-severity with that of the ascetic saint, we find a world-wide difference ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... and I think words get a hold on you when they're associated with every turn of your life. So I felt a little less like a wild beast, by the time the clergyman began his sermon. He was a pathetic old fellow, thin and ascetic and sad, with a narrow forehead and a little white hair, and an underfed look about him. The whole place seemed poor and badly kept. As he walked across the chancel, he stumbled on a hole in the carpet. I stared at him, and suddenly it struck me that he must be about your age, and ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... Normans left the country, it was again plunged in barbarism. The monasteries were in every way similar to any other feudal residence, and the ascetic rule of St. Benedict was entirely forgotten. The abbots rather distinguished themselves from the other nobles by their greed and violence. They married and indulged in drinking bouts and predatory expeditions. A reform ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... of despair or of bright hope. It may be the bitter creed of a worn-out debauchee, who has wasted his life in hunting shadows, and is left with a cynical spirit and a barbed tongue. It may be the passionless belief of a retired student, or the fanatical faith of a religious ascetic. It may be an argument for sensuous excess, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'; or it may be the stimulus for noble and holy living, 'I must work the works of Him that sent me while it is day. The night cometh.' The ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... submitting 'implicitly to the rule of her tastes. So absolute was her empire, that, when she became a devotee, he became a mystic: he followed her, as the satellite accompanies the planet, from the worldly gayeties of her youth, even to the foot of the altar, and the ascetic self-denial of Port-Royal. He survived her, as though he had survived himself, and lived to the extraordinary age of one hundred and four years, animated to unusual life by his gentle and amiable feelings. Such was Madame de Sevigne's principal friend. ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... called Margaret Donne, as distinguished from Cordova, of the 'English-girl' side, of the potential old maid that is dormant in every young northern woman until the day she marries, and wakes to torment her like a biblical devil if she does not. There is no miser like a reformed spendthrift, and no ascetic will go to such extremes of self-mortification as a converted libertine; in the same way, there are no such portentously virginal old maids as those who might have been the most womanly wives; the opposite is certainly true also, for the variety 'Hemiparthenos,' studied after nature by Marcel ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... just ceased from badinage with Rooke, in which that honest soldier's somewhat homely army jokes have been worsted by the graceful play of Graham's wit, who was ever gay, but never coarse, who was no ascetic, and was ever willing to drink the king's health, but, as his worst enemies used grudgingly to admit, cared neither for wine nor women. Silence falls for a little on the company. Claverhouse looking into the fire and seeing things of long ago and far away, hums a Royalist ballad to the honor of ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... most illustrious. At the period when this extraordinary and romantic order came into existence, the contrasting spirits of warlike enterprise and monastic retirement were drawing men, some from the field to the cloister, others from the life of ascetic piety to the scenes of strife. There appeared a strange blending of these two tendencies, which indeed was the leading characteristic of the time. This union of the religious with the militant spirit had been promoted by the enthusiasm of the crusades ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... roots hanging down from your branches, O ancient banyan tree, You stand still day and night, like an ascetic at his penances, Do you ever remember the child whose fancy played ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... wreaked by his Turkish garrison on the citizens. Yusaf Adil Shah was not dead, as Timoja told Albuquerque, but was absent in the interior, and the time was really favourable for a sudden assault. A Jogi or Hindu ascetic had prophesied that a foreign people coming from a distant land would conquer Goa, and the inhabitants were therefore ready to surrender the city without much ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... Hall, and as her table and her accommodations were the best on the camp ground, she often invited and pressed good Father Gray to rest and refresh himself in her tent. And the old man, though a severe ascetic, yielded to her repeated solicitations, until at length he seemed to ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... preparing this work, his early companion and friend, De Verger, a man of family and rank, had become abbot of the monastery of St. Cyran in Paris, and had formed, in the centre of that gay city, a learned and ascetic hermitage. This was during the reign of Louis XIII. His reputation, as a scholar and a saint, attracted the attention of Richelieu, and his services were solicited by that able minister. But neither rewards, nor flatteries, nor applause had power over the mind of St. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... favorite doctrine of the Christian Fathers that concupiscence, or the sensual passion, was the "original sin" of human nature; and it must be owned that the progress of knowledge, which is usually extremely opposed to the ascetic theory of life, concurs with the theological view, in showing the natural force of this appetite to be far greater than the well-being of man requires. The writings of Malthus have proved, what the Greek moralists appear in a considerable degree to have seen, that its ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the persecutions and blasphemies—had imprinted the stamp of melancholy on his face. It was easy to see that he lamented the barbarities of the times, and that his life had been full of anguish. He embodied all the sufferings of the Church. With his ascetic air, his deep-set eye, his complexion as pallid as ivory, his white robes tinged with red, the Sovereign Pontiff had in his whole person something strange and imposing. He occupied the apartment on the first floor ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... charmingly naive is the remark she makes regarding her relations with Chopin as a "PRESERVATIVE against emotions which she no longer wished to know"! I am afraid the concluding sentence, which in its unction is worthy of Pecksniff, and where she exhibits herself as an ascetic and martyr in all the radiance of saintliness, will not have the desired effect, but will make the reader laugh as loud as Musset is said to have done when she upbraided him with his ungratefulness to her, who had been devoted ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... condition of music." I could almost hear Davies saying that, as if Pater had never so much as thought of it. They literally soothe with a rare poetry painted for the eye. They are illuminations for the manuscripts of the ascetic soul. They are windows for houses in which men and women may withdraw, and be reconciled to the doom ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... Yeristof, belongs also here. Of theological science there can hardly be a trace, in a country where all free investigation in exegetical matters is cut off. Theological literature is entirely confined to synodal orations and some ascetic writings. The spirit of the present age in Russia is strictly orthodox; and the monocracy of the Greek Church is the great object for which clergy and laity exert themselves; especially in the Baltic provinces. Among sermons, ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... tittered audibly as they tumbled into the sleigh; they had regained their former spirits. "Where shall I take you?" said the stranger quietly. There was a hurried whispering; and then Kate said boldly, "To the Institute." They drove silently up the hill, until the long, ascetic building loomed up before them. The stranger reined up suddenly. "You know the way better than I," he said. "Where do you go in?" "Through the back window," said Kate with sudden and appalling frankness. "I see!" responded their strange driver quietly and, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... days' pause he starts from London for Malbourne, stopping at Belminster, through which he had made his last free journey with Cyril, when he told him that "an ascetic is a rake turned monk." Passing the gaol in which he had suffered so much, he goes to the cathedral. He asks who ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... delineated in Mrs. D'Arblay's Camilla. Men, who are compelled to unrelenting labour, whether by avarice, or by literary ambition, are equally to be pitied. They are not models for imitation; they sacrifice their happiness to some strong passion or interest. Without this ascetic abstinence from the domestic and social pleasures of life, surely persons may cultivate their understandings, and acquire, even by mixing with their fellow-creatures, a variety ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... proved them that - This good but wearisome ascetic; He jumped and thumped upon his hat, He was so ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... was capable of knowing God through the emotions. But I understood that as a child he had had a religious up-bringing with a strong moral side to it. His private life was, in the usual limited sense, blameless. He was almost ascetic in his habits, except as to smoking. I lived with him five years without ever knowing him to tell a direct verbal falsehood, constantly as he used to practise deceit in other forms. Can you understand the soul of a man who never hesitated to take steps that would have the effect of hoodwinking ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... marking them as the subjects of the festivity by the precedence to be observed in going out to supper, she resolved to have tea served in the drawing-room, and to make it literally tea, with bread and butter, and some thin, ascetic cakes. ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... befitting his circumstances. And I, for one, love to see that austere demeanor so far as it is yet hereditary on the old soil—and some of it is left—thinking of its origin. It is the signature of a fighting far more than of an ascetic ancestry—memorial of a new Pass of Thermopylae held by the latest race of Spartans on the shores of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Buddhism, is that ethics have so small a place in its fundamental conceptions. Its deities are not identified with the moral law and the saint is above that law. But this dangerous doctrine is corrected by the dogma, which is also a popular conviction, that a saint must be a passionless ascetic. In India no religious teacher can expect a hearing unless he begins ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... that of a marble figure. Ah!... When he would accumulate the price of his return thither, he would certainly join his lot to that of a maiden with large eyes and a breath of roses, scarcely out of childhood. Meanwhile he lived like an ascetic fakir amongst the Westerners, unclean folks with whom he was willing to transact business but with whom he avoided all unnecessary contact. Ah, to return yonder! Not to die far from the sacred river!... ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... thoroughly tiring himself with bodily exercise that he could get sound and long oblivion. Hours of sleeplessness were his dread. However soon he awoke after daybreak, he rose at once and drove his mind to some sort of occupation. To escape from himself was all he lived for in these days. An ascetic of old times, subduing his flesh in cell or cave, battled no harder than this idealist of London City ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... patiently all the privations of that ascetic household, assisted in all those external formalities, centred all her intellect within that iron range of existence. But no grace descended on her soul,—no warm ray unlocked the ice of the well. Then, gradually becoming aware of the niggardly meanness, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... warlike chatelaine of Canossa. Unfortunately we know but little of Matilda's personal appearance. Her health was not strong; and it is said to have been weakened, especially in her last illness, by ascetic observances. Yet she headed her own troops, armed with sword and cuirass, avoiding neither peril nor fatigue in the quarrels of her master Gregory. Up to the year 1622 two strong suits of mail were preserved at Quattro ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... less like the popular politician of our very noisy days than this slight and gentle person whose refinement of mind reveals itself in a face almost ascetic, whose intelligence is of a wide, comprehensive, and reflecting order, and whose manner is certainly the last thing in the world that would recommend itself to the mind of an advertising agent. But there is no living politician ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... the Cardinal was no ascetic. His hermitage contained other appliances save those for study and devotion. His retired life was, in fact, that of a voluptuary. His brother, Chantonnay, reproached him with the sumptuousness and disorder of his establishment. He lived in "good and joyous cheer." He ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... course the ascetic principle of self-mastery. It is best brought before us by the familiar practice of fasting, which is very mildly recommended to us in its lowest terms in the table in the Book of Common Prayer. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... reproof. He might never have gone with Howard in search of abuses, but he would have drawn such pictures of those near home as would have made some laugh and some blush and all unite heartily in doing away with them. With nothing of the ascetic, he could impose self-denial and bear it. Like Erasmus, he may not have aspired to become a martyr,—but in those long voyages and journeys, which, in his infirm old age, he undertook in his country's service, there was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... bowing and kneeling of the servants looks much more natural and less servile when you see people seated on the floor, and the servants have to kneel to hand them anything. His personality is that of a scholarly type, rather ascetic, not over refined, but not in the least sleek like some of our Hindu swamis, and very charming. When we left he thanked us for coming and expressed his great satisfaction that he had made some friends. His talk was largely moral but with a high metaphysical flavor, ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... meaning, according to him, the substance of Kapila or of the Sankhya philosophy. This is not all. Mr. Spence Hardy (p. 132) quotes a legend in which it is said that Buddha was in a former existence the ascetic Kapila, that the Sakya princes came to his hermitage, and that he pointed out to them the proper place for founding a new city, which city was named after him Kapilavastu. But we have looked in vain for any definite ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... looking at me with a composed face, but with that humorous questioning twinkle in his eyes which a master chess-player might assume when he had left his opponent without a move. On the top of the box beside him sat a very ascetic-faced, yellow, hollow-eyed man of fifty, with prim lips and a shrunken skin, which hung loosely over the long jerking tendons under his prominent chin. He was dressed in snuff-coloured clothes, and his legs under his knee-breeches were of a ludicrous ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... imagined that she had lingered over her prayers and would soon return. The good nun had sat down to wait for her, and telling her beads had fallen asleep. The unaccustomed warmth and comfort of the guest's room had been too much for the weariness that constantly oppressed a constitution broken with ascetic practices. Accustomed by long habit to awake at midnight to attend the service, her eyes opened of themselves, indeed, but a full hour later than usual. She heard the clock strike one, and for a moment could not believe her ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... there playing wild havoc amongst his monks: but the worthy fathers themselves were making the fierce tumult which filled the prior with alarm. The saloon no longer resembled the ascetic, peaceful refectory of cloister brothers. It was changed into a battle-field, upon which the two hosts thirsting ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... contrast of his moderation with the reckless violence of Macedonius at Constantinople. His appointments were Arianizing, and he gave deep offence by the ordination of his old disciple, the detested Aetius. So great was the outcry that Leontius was forced to suspend him. The opposition was led by two ascetic laymen, Flavian and Diodorus, who both became distinguished bishops in later time. Orthodox feeling was nourished by a vigorous use of hymns and by all-night services at the tombs of the martyrs. As such practices often led to great abuses, ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... drawn of Gordon as a gloomy ascetic, wrapped up in mystic thoughts, retiring from all communion with the world, and inspiring fear rather than affection. I can only describe him as he appeared to me. Far from being a gloomy ascetic, he always seemed to me to retain a boyish frankness, and to ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... absolutely illiterate. When about thirty years old, he lost his wife and his only child; and finding no comfort in his ancestral demonolatry, he turned to Buddhism for relief and retired to a mountain retreat and became known and esteemed among his people as a devout ascetic and a holy man. With the offerings of his people he built two pagodas and a monastery. But his soul found no rest there. In 1890, he was baptized as a Christian, with one hundred and forty of his followers. He then obtained a grant of twenty thousand acres of waste ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... language, had made either himself or his presence there the topic of very earnest discussion. In fact it appeared to him that the priest, from whatever cause, appeared to be rather hard set to defend him and to justify his presence among them. A tall, stern-looking man, with a lofty forehead and pale ascetic features—from which all the genial impulses of humanity, that had once characterized them, seemed almost to have been banished by the spirit of relentless persecution—appeared to bear hard upon him, whatever the charge ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... cells opened off the latter, and in these the fathers lodged, while the lay brothers and the workmen found apartments in the garret and the cellar. The regimen of this crude establishment was severely ascetic. The day began with early Mass and closed with evening prayers. The intervening time was spent by the laymen in cultivating the little clearing, and by the fathers in hearing confessions at the fort a mile away, or ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... of the White Lodge.[FN8: Terms while and black as used here have no relation to race or colour.] Of the disciples of the black and white magicians, the disciple of the black magician is often the more ascetic. His object is not the purification of life for the sake of humanity, but the purification of the vehicle, that he may be better able to acquire power. The difference between the white and the black magician lies in the motive. You might have a white magician, ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... purity, of faith in virtue.—They were not enough, they were not enough to stay his hunger: they were only the food of a moment. His life consisted of a succession of violent reactions—leaps from one extreme to the other. Sometimes he would bend his passion to rules inhumanly ascetic: not eating, drinking water, wearing himself out with walking, heavy tasks, and so not sleeping, denying himself every sort of pleasure. Sometimes he would persuade himself that strength is the true morality for people like himself: and he ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... family, especially with his mother, who held rigid Presbyterian views. From this time dates his friendship with Robert Leighton (1611-1684), who greatly influenced his religious opinions. Leighton had, during a stay in the Spanish Netherlands, assimilated something of the ascetic and pietistic spirit of Jansenism, and was devoted to the interests of peace in the church. Burnet wisely refused to accept a benefice in the disturbed state of church affairs, but he wrote an audacious letter to Archbishop ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... with some who were at best sinners. Bernard was a total disbeliever in scholasticism; so was Voltaire. Bernard brought the society of his time to share his scepticism, but could give the society no other intellectual amusement to relieve its restlessness. His crusade failed; his ascetic enthusiasm faded; God came no nearer. If there was in all France, between 1140 and 1200, a more typical Englishman of the future Church of England type than John of Salisbury, he has left no trace; and John wrote a description of his time which makes a picturesque contrast with the picture painted ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... pace, like one pricked in conscience, and the paleness of his ascetic features took a deadly hue. His lips moved as if he would have spoken, but the sounds were smothered by an oppression that denied him utterance. The gentle Florinda saw his distress, and she endeavored to interpose between the ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a flagged room like a cellar—cold, ascetic and bare. There was a big open fire-place, with a chimney hooded by massive masonry and blackened by the fires of immemorial winters. This was where Joan's parents had lived. She had probably been born here. The picture that formed in my mind was not of Joan, but that other woman unknown ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... matter of opinion), is unknown in London. A man who reads the "London Times," regularly and conscientiously, is guaranteed forever against insomnia. London "Punch" is a paper which the severest ascetic may read, all through Lent, without danger to ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... of footsteps, and the old eternal click of the typewriter from which Percy hoped he had escaped. They were alone in the room, which was furnished with the same simplicity as the Cardinal's—giving the impression of a curious mingling of ascetic poverty and dignity by its red-tiled floor, its white walls, its altar and two vast bronze candlesticks of incalculable value that stood on the dais. The shutters here, too, were drawn; and there was nothing to distract ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... this, the contemplation of the saint suggested to them a suspicion: such an enormity of self-negation and anti-naturalness will not have been coveted for nothing—they have said, inquiringly. There is perhaps a reason for it, some very great danger, about which the ascetic might wish to be more accurately informed through his secret interlocutors and visitors? In a word, the mighty ones of the world learned to have a new fear before him, they divined a new power, a strange, still unconquered enemy:—it was the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... determined to petition the Ecumenical Council to issue a bull of excommunication against "pusley." Of all the forms which "error" has taken in this world, I think that is about the worst. In the Middle Ages the monks in St. Bernard's ascetic community at Clairvaux excommunicated a vineyard which a less rigid monk had planted near, so that it bore nothing. In 1120 a bishop of Laon excommunicated the caterpillars in his diocese; and, the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... tall man with the lean, ascetic face moved about his new abode, arranging, changing, altering, hardly yet into his working-stride again, he gave the impression of almost spinster-like precision and nicety. For twenty years past, in a score of lodgings, garrets, flats, and rooms furnished and unfurnished, ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... relief from the deadening monotony of "plain" food. Chicken or mutton, beef or venison, finnan haddie or brook trout, eggs or oysters thus "sauced," taste all alike—sauce! To use such ready-made sauces with dishes cooked a l'anglaise is logical, excusable, almost advisable. Even the most ascetic of men cannot resist the insidiousness of spicy delights, nor can he for any length of time endure the insipidity of plain food sans sauce. Hence the popularity of such sauces amongst people who do not observe the correct culinary principle of seasoning food judiciously, ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... sugar, a stealer of hearts, who unites the magic of talismans with loveliness transcending that of the peris! When she bent the soft arch of her eyebrows, she pierced the heart through and through with the arrows of her eyelashes; and when she smiled, the heart of the most rigid ascetic was intoxicated! She was gorgeously arrayed, and covered all over with jewels—and the tout-ensemble of her appearance was such as would have riveted the gaze of the inhabitants of the spheres—what, then, more ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... little to the general knowledge. He had first heard of Mr. Adams through a Philadelphia lawyer, since dead, who had assured him of his client's respectability and undoubted ability to pay his rent. When they came together and Mr. Adams was introduced to him, he had been struck, first, by the ascetic appearance of his prospective tenant, and, secondly, by his reserved manners and quiet intelligence. But admirable as he had found him, he had never succeeded in making his acquaintance. The rent had been uniformly paid with great exactitude on the very ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... which seeks the eternity of pleasure offered by all religions to whoever fulfils at stray moments certain fanciful and often unnatural conditions, is unworthy of man and of God? Is it not a mockery to give to man impetuous senses and forbid him to satisfy them? Besides, what mean these ascetic objections if Good and Evil are equally abolished? Does Evil exist? If substance in all its forms is God, then Evil is God. The faculty of reasoning as well as the faculty of feeling having been given to man to use, ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... little of him and saw him only in his serious moods might have thought him lacking in that peculiarly human quality, humour. But neither was he an ascetic nor devoid of that element of innocent appreciation of the ludicrous and that keen enjoyment of a good story which seem essential to a complete man. His habit was sobriety, but he relished a joke that was free of all taint of uncleanness ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... many exorcisms and spells were performed to effect a cure, but all in vain. At length he was told by a friend that in a certain temple on the northern mountain (Mount Kurama) there dwelt a famous ascetic, and that when the epidemic had prevailed during the previous summer, many people had recovered through his exorcisms. "If," added the friend, "the disease is neglected it becomes serious; try therefore, this method of ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... gentleman with a remarkably foolish, ascetic face and a feebly-wandering sandy beard, was just about to hasten religiously towards the Moorish nook when the great Towle happened, by accident, to groan. Mrs. ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... the objects of admiration, as what ought to be the standard of Christians; but people did not yet like to talk much about attempts to copy them. Such a book as the Church of the Fathers brought out with great force and great sympathy the ascetic temper and the value put on celibacy in the early days, and it made a deep impression; but nothing was yet formulated as characteristic and ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... his individual responsibility, with peculiar temptations to combat, and peculiar circumstances to influence him. The son of a saint becomes mysteriously a drunkard or a fraud, and the son of a sensualist becomes an ascetic. This does not uniformly occur: in fact, the sons of good men are more likely to be an honor to their families than the sons of the wicked; but why are exceptions so common as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... portrait is admirably drawn: all we dwellers in the East have known her well: she is so and so. Her dress and manners are the same amongst the Hindus (see the hypocritical-female ascetic in the Katha, p. 287) as amongst the Moslems; men of the world at once recognise her and the prudent keep out of her way. She is found in the cities of Southern Europe, ever pious, ever prayerful; and she seems to do her work ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... if he could find a suitable place to set up a small community house, on the lines of Nicholas Ferrar's Little Gidding. This idea was thenceforth much in his mind. At this time his day-dream was that it should be not an ascetic order, but rather devotional and mystical. It was, I expect, mainly an aesthetic idea at present. The setting, the ceremonial, the order of the whole was prominent, with the contemplation of spiritual beauty as ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... I don't think he's so ascetic that he wouldn't marry." His grin broadened. "Now, if we were still at ol' Chilblains, you'd really have competition. After all, you can't expect that a gal who's stacked ... pardon me ... who has the magnificent physical ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... effect upon his work of any depression of his bodily well-being. He was, besides, too thrifty in all respects to think of lapsing into bodily neglect or abuse. He was severely temperate, but not ascetic, save in those times when devotion to work caused him to sleep with his clothes on, that he might not lose time in seizing the chisel when he awoke. He ate to live and to labor, and was pleased with a present of "fifteen marzolino cheeses and fourteen ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... it?" said Mrs. Boyce, bluntly. "Well, I don't know. Most young women like pretty gowns, and great functions, and prominent positions. I don't call you an ascetic, Marcella." ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... without a good government, and the colonies, despite bluster and threats, flourished in purity and peace. The English ministry dared not interfere with Massachusetts; it was right that the stern virtues of the ascetic republicans should intimidate the members of the profligate cabinet. The affairs of New England were often discussed; but the privy council was overawed by the moral dignity, which ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... justice we must admit that he led an ascetic and saint-like life, renouncing all worldly pleasures. An Englishman who saw much of him about 1851 declared that his goodness of soul surpassed even his brilliancy ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... certain than that the grave boy whose gravity impressed all Cambridge, and had taken immortal shape in the Nativity Ode and the sonnet of the "great Taskmaster's eye" before he was much past twenty, did not mean to hold up a drunken sensualist like Comus as a model for youth. He was not an ascetic, then or later; and he was writing a dramatic poem; and, of course, had no difficulty in giving Comus a fine speech about the follies of total abstinence which, indeed, he loved no better than other monkeries. The Lady, in reply, as she is dramatically bound, over-exalts ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... limbs, and then seated himself and gave his mind over to bitter reflection. Ryder's face exerted a strong influence upon him. In death it had assumed a delicacy almost effeminate. It was the face of a saint and an ascetic. What was most evil in him had been grown in the forcing-house of vice and crime society had set up, and for being the thing it had made him society had butchered him like a mad dog. Jim recognised Monkey ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... described on a previous occasion as Sufeyistic: she loved the beauty of this world, but not entirely for itself; she loved it on account of its symbols of another world beyond. And yet she was no slave to the ascetic side of Christianity. No doubt there was mixed with her spiritualism, or perhaps underlying it, a rich sensuousness that under other circumstances of life would have made itself manifest, and also a rare potentiality of deep passion. It is this, indeed, which makes the study of her ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... however, was a strengthfulness of purpose, a certain pleasant masterfulness, that made me feel that I could trust him, and it was to this aspect of his nature that I yielded. There was something frankly appealing in his long, thin, ascetic looking face, and I ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... money, giving it away to those in need as readily as if it had no value, often enduring privation himself in consequence; with a mode of life so simple that the entire menage was frequently transported elsewhere on slight provocation, this ascetic was now to encounter housekeeping problems, make money, save it (most difficult of all), employ servants, in short undertake in middle-age and in impaired health, duties the nature of which he could not even ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... Couto,[30] who fixes the date as 1220, states that while Madhava was living his ascetic life amongst the mountains he was supported by meals brought to him by a poor shepherd called Bukka, "and one day the Brahman said to him, 'Thou shalt be king and emperor of all Industan.' The other shepherds learned this, and began to treat this ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... that his death was through old age; and, although he had been a free liver, and, as Mr. Cross facetely observes, "was not a member of a Temperance Society," his internal organization did not seem to have suffered in the way usually consequent upon hard drinking. Perhaps a few ascetic advocates of cant and care-wearing abstinence will think that we ought to conceal this exceptionable fact, lest Jerry's example should be more frequently followed. Justice demands otherwise; and as the biographers of old tell us that Alexander the Great died of hard-drinking, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... this immortal carelessness and delight. Whether his figures are tranquil or rapturous, there is in his colour an expression of something far from their felicity. Indeed, however voluptuous the forms may be, the colour is always ascetic. It is not that he seems to disapprove of those glorified pleasures of the senses, but that he cannot satisfy himself with his own conception of them, as Titian could. Titian represents a world in which all the mind consents to delight. His figures are not foolish, but they are like ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... issues involved, because a coal shortage threatened many Eastern cities, and because of the direct intervention of President Roosevelt. The central figure of this gigantic struggle was the miners' young leader, barely thirty years old, with the features of a scholar and the demeanor of an ascetic, marshaling his forces with the strategic skill ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... while the Mahommedan religion in general is sinking to corruption along the coast, there are ascetic sects rising up in the interior which unite its last zealous followers by a religious bond. From some of these sects travellers receive much ill-treatment and annoyance. On the 15th of July the doctor determined to visit a remarkable mountain which appeared in the distance. ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston |
