"Sensual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bed, and that's a good beginning for drones. Sleep is sure to play a great part in the New Year, and the glass likewise. Do you know what dwells in the glass?" asked Ole. "I will tell you. There dwell in the glass, first, health, and then pleasure, then the most complete sensual delight; and misfortune and the bitterest woe dwell in the glass also. Now, suppose we count the glasses—of course I count the different degrees in the glasses ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... within you something more. There is in your breast a heart beating—an organ so wonderful in its sensitiveness, so perfect in its consciousness of good, that the least throb and thrill of pleasure that it feels is worth years and ages of mere sensual life enjoyment. The body having tasted of all happiness whereof it is capable, and having found that it is good, is saturated with its own ease and enjoys less keenly. But the heart is the border-land ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... eyes and lips, and during the last few days remaining to him, his Madonna obtained Florette's joyous expression, while the sensual, alluring charm, that had been peculiar to the mouth of the musician's daughter, soon hovered ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a concentration, a quintessence of Protestant feeling," answered Vincent; "I consider myself a good Protestant; but the pleasure you have in hunting these men is quite sensual, Fusby." ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... panted in it. Was there ever night so silent? Following his lead, came the long column, a dark, even-moving mass, shirred with steel. Sometimes he could catch glimpses of some vivid point in the bulk: a hand, moving nervously to the sword's hilt; faces,—sensual, or vapid, or royal, side by side, but sharpened alike by a high purpose, with shut jaws, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... the final catastrophe, the instrumental band doing its share toward characterizing the opposing forces, emphasizing the solemn dignity of the Hebrew religion and contrasting it with the sensuous and sensual frivolity of the worshippers of Dagon. The choral prayer has for its instrumental substructure ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... child to perfect normal body growth, as well as normal growth of mind. Even in its intellectual activity the school is recognizing the importance of making the child mind an active machine for thought, rather than a passive storehouse for information. Though less emphasized, the training for sensual growth is becoming of ever increasing importance in the new education. Above all, the aesthetic side of child life is being expanded in an effort to round out ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... always lived with him in the same house, and who died leaving two boys. She is neither young nor handsome, but he considered it his duty to provide for her and the children, and not to let her marry a stranger. So you see that polygamy is not always sensual indulgence, and a man may practise greater self-sacrifice so than by talking sentiment about deceased wives' sisters. Hassan has 3 pounds a month, and two wives come expensive. I said, laughing, to Omar ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... countrymen, and (without detriment to one's faith) to refuse due honour to those of higher dignity, to cast off all regard to reason, human and divine, and, in contempt of heaven and earth, to be guided by one's own sensual inventions? I shall, therefore, omit those ancient errors common to all the nations of the earth, in which, before Christ came in the flesh, all mankind were bound; nor shall I enumerate those diabolical ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... at her. Then, taking the cigarette from his mouth, he sang Le Moulin at her, leaning back, swaying and moving his thick eyebrows. It was a sad song, full of autumnal atmosphere, a delicate and sensual caress of sorrow. The handsome composer and the lusty musical critic listened to it, watched the singer with a sort of bland contempt. But when he threw away his cigarette and sang Le Retour de Madame Blague, an outrageous trifle, full of biting esprit and insolent wit, with a refrain ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... and without doubt the charges were often true, because a robe and a rope girdle, or the reversal of haberdashery, do not change the nature of a man. Down under the robe, you'll sometimes find a man frail of soul—grasping, sensual, selfish. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... stimulates the passions; in course of time it also destroys the body; fasting and penance often produce the same results in an opposite way. The weaker the body, the more imperious its demands; the stronger it is, the better it obeys. All sensual passions find their home in effeminate bodies; the less satisfaction they can get the keener ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... was an extreme that illustrated a tendency. Sir Walter Scott's father, when his son incautiously expressed some relish for his porridge, dashed a handful of salt into it with an instinctive sense that it was his duty as a father to prevent his son enjoying himself. Ruskin's mother gratified the sensual side of her maternal passion, not by cuddling her son, but by whipping him when he fell downstairs or was slack in learning the Bible off by heart; and this grotesque safety-valve for voluptuousness, ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... excels the king among savages, so far does the society exalted and enriched by the struggles of labor excel the state in which Poverty feels no disparity, and Toil sighs for no ease. On the other hand, if the rich were perfectly contented with their wealth, their hearts would become hardened in the sensual enjoyments it procures. It is that feeling, by Divine Wisdom implanted in the soul, that there is vanity and vexation of spirit in the things of Mammon, which still leaves the rich man sensitive to the instincts ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... last night that had reminded him unpleasantly of the scarlet woman and the awful night of the fire. If he ever got well enough acquainted he would ask her never to wear red again; it made her appear sensual; and even she, delicate and sweet as she was, could not afford to cast a thought like that into the minds of her beholders. It was then he began to ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... romance in his disposition; he feels himself to be the member of a brotherhood, and longs to be a distinguished and worthy one; he is anxious for all that is grand and right, and yearns for a little sympathy to support his determination and enliven his hopes. Some there may be so dull and sensual, so swallowed up in selfishness and conceit, so chill to every generous sentiment, and callous to every stirring impulse, that they experience none of this; their sole aim is, on the one hand to succeed, or on the other, to amuse and gratify themselves, to cultivate all ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... pleasure, which two words will here be treated as synonymous; happiness, also, though not quite identical in meaning, being occasionally substituted for them. Enjoyment, it must be observed, is of very various kinds, measures, and degrees. It may be sensual, or emotional, or imaginative, or intellectual, or moral. It may be momentary or eternal; intoxicating delight or sober satisfaction. It may be unmixed and undisturbed, in which case, however short of duration ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... hope, we resolve, we aspire, we pray, And we think that we mount the air on wings Beyond the recall of sensual things, While our feet still cling to the heavy ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... his whole nature, and so collectedly because reason, in him, is not in conflict with passion, but passion's ally. His senses speak with unparalleled directness, as in those elegies which must remain the model in English of masculine sensual sobriety. He distinguishes the true end of such loving in ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... which mark with equal precision, the state of civilization existing in any community, as the rank assigned in it to females. In the rude and barbarous stages of society, they are invariably regarded as inferior beings, [31] instruments of sensual gratification, and unworthy the attention and respect of men. As mankind advance to refinement, females gradually attain an elevation of rank, and acquire an influence in society, which smoothes the asperities of life and produces the highest polish, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... that magazine of all curious varieties, that they could almost have dwelt there (going from shop to shop like bee from flower to flower), if they had but had a fountain of money that could not have been drawn dry. I doubt not but a Mohamedan (who never expects other than sensual delights) would gladly have availed himself of that place, and the treasures of it, for his heaven, and have thought there ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... enjoy the embraces and congratulations of their wives and children; and that all who dote upon their charms are doomed to perish. What Solomon says in the ninth chapter of Proverbs, of the miseries to which those are exposed who abandon themselves to sensual pleasures, well justifies the idea given us of the Sirens by the Greek poets, and by ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... top of the world, and all the pleasures of the world are set before him. Mostly there is only a very small part of political business which he cares to understand, and much of it (with the shrewd sensual sense belonging to the race) he knows that he will never understand. But a Parliament is composed of a great number of men by no means at the top of the world. When you establish a predominant Parliament, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... are fairly flat and large; the nostrils dilated; their lips full and sensual; their teeth perfectly shaped and very white and sound; their chins strong, though round; and their eyes black and large, not brilliant, but liquid. Their feet and hands are mighty—hands that lift burdens ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... again, Mark Twain has kept solid hold of the material world; his doctrine is not of the earth earthy, but it is never sublimated into sentimentality. He sympathizes with the spiritual side of humanity, while never ignoring the sensual. Like Moliere, Mark Twain takes his stand on common-sense and thinks scorn of affectation of every sort. He understands sinners and strugglers and weaklings; and he is not harsh with them, reserving his scorching hatred for hypocrites and ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... subservient demons he reared a castle on an inaccessible height, in the Pyrenean mountains, and to make it a pleasant abode to his pupil, contrived to entrap and convey thither knights and damsels many a one, whom chance had brought into the vicinity of his castle. Here, in a sort of sensual paradise, they were but too willing to forget glory and duty, and to pass their time ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... puzzles us most by peculiarities which it is difficult for us to reconcile. She seemed to have no sense of chastity whatever; yet, on the other hand, she was not grossly sensual. She possessed the maternal instinct to a high degree, and liked better to be a mother than a mistress to the men whose love she sought. For she did seek men's love, frankly and shamelessly, only to tire of it. In ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of the century, had attained the zenith of their numerical power. It was further illustrated in writings upon the character of enthusiasm elicited by the extravagances of the so-called French Prophets. In its aspect of a discussion upon the supra-sensual faculties of the soul, it received some additional light from the transcendental conceptions of Bishop Berkeley's philosophy. In its relation with mediaeval mysticism on the one hand and with some distinctive aspects of modern thought on the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... inscrutable, incredible portion of herself, some dark and fierce and sensual thing lay there at her feet. It was not incredible or inscrutable to itself. It was indeed splendidly unashamed. It gloried in itself and in its suffering. It lived on its own torture, violent and exalted; Jane could hardly bear its nearness ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... them off. Tho these will be no longer the Correctors of Chocolate, yet they will serve to season it, with which they will please their Taste, without troubling themselves with the Consequences. But those Persons who will give themselves the trouble of thinking, and are more tractable and less sensual, will wisely abstain from such Extreams, and their Moderation will not be unattended with Benefit. Health is so valuable a Blessing, that the Care to gain and preserve it, ought to supersede ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... innumerable and indescribable—some in shreds and patches, reeling, inarticulate, with bruised visage and lack-lustre eyes—some in whole although filthy garments, with a slightly unsteady swagger, thick sensual lips, and hearty-looking rubicund faces—others clothed in materials which had once been good, and which even now were scrupulously well brushed—men who walked with a more than naturally firm and springy step, but whose countenances were fearfully pale, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... like myself, seem to be gifted with a sensitiveness of perception, an appreciation of beauty in many forms. I cannot believe that such an organisation is given me fortuitously, and that I am merely meant to suppress it. Of course the same argument could be used sophistically by a man with strong sensual passions and appetites, who could similarly urge that he must be intended to gratify them. But such gratification leads both to personal disaster and to the increase of unhappiness in the race. Such instincts as I recognise in myself seem to me to do neither. ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... than a citizen of what men call the world. We are conscious of a certain remoteness in his writings, as in those of Donne, but with such a difference that we should call the one super- and the other subter-sensual. Hawthorne is psychological and metaphysical. Had he been born without the poetic imagination, he would have written treatises on the Origin of Evil. He does not draw characters, but rather conceives them and then shows them acted upon by crime, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... faith which is involved in the creation of the truth? M has its character indeterminate, susceptible of forming part of a thorough-going pessimism on the one hand, or of a meliorism, a moral (as distinguished from a sensual) optimism on the other. All depends on the character of the {103} personal contribution x. Wherever the facts to be formulated contain such a contribution, we may logically, legitimately, and inexpugnably believe what we desire. The belief creates its verification. The ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... as the model of imitation for His followers. Then, in the rewards and punishments of the future state of the Mahometans, how gross are all the ideas, how unlike the promises of a divine and spiritual being; their paradise is a mere earthly garden of sensual pleasure, and their Houris represent the ladies of their own harems rather than glorified angelic natures. How different is the Christian heaven, how sublime in its idea, indefinite, yet well suited to a being of intellectual and progressive faculties; "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... to Samson, shorn of his locks, as he shakes himself off a soft and sweetly-worked couch in The Sensual ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... in the youth any sensual passion, for there was nothing in her that resembled Pelageya, and altogether she was not at all like other women. He knew that shameful rumours about her were in the air, but he did not believe any of them. But ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... which I have lived in this kingdom ever since my arrival here from Manila, sustaining the soldiers and other men whom I brought in my ship at my own expense, keeping them in a state of discipline and honor, and never allowing them to abandon themselves to sensual pleasures; although I had no credentials for this, for Gallinato had those which the governor was to give me. I shall not discuss the why and wherefore of most of the Chinese matters, because Fray Alonso Ximenez and Fray Diego ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... used in description of the Satanic system, has a much larger meaning in the Scripture than its present popular use, where it refers only to that which is sensual. In these passages quoted, it refers to the whole Satan-inspired ambition of humanity, and includes their principle of self-help, and their struggle for all that, to them, is highest and best. It is unlawful, in that it disregards the truth of God; and it is related to that which is ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... his temper. His eye no longer possessed that buoyant, searching shrewdness which had characterised it in Adams Street. His step was not as sharp and firm. He was given to thinking, thinking, thinking. The new friends he made were not celebrities. They were of a cheaper, a slightly more sensual and cruder, grade. He could not possibly take the pleasure in this company that he had in that of those fine frequenters of the Chicago resort. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... statues, formed with the rest of her face a perfect oval. Her nose, delicately curved, was slightly aquiline; the enamel of her teeth glistened when the light fell upon them; and her vermeil mouth voluptuously sensual, seemed to call for sweet kisses, and the gay smiles and delectations of dainty and delicious pleasure. It is impossible to behold or to conceive a carriage of the head freer, more noble, or more elegant than hers; ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... him, "it would be pushing my devotion to eclectic philosophy too far to insert your ideas in my book; they would destroy it. Everything in it is based on love, platonic and sensual. God forbid that I should end my book by such social blasphemies! I would rather try to return by some pantagruelian subtlety to my herd of celibates and honest women, with many an attempt to discover some social utility ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... darkest brown; his face strongly marked and exceedingly expressive; his nose was fine, so was his forehead, and his eyes sparkled like diamonds beneath a pair of bushy brows slightly grizzled. He had one disagreeable feature—his mouth—which was wide and sensual-looking to a high degree. He was dressed with elegance—his brown surtout was faultless; shirt of the finest Holland, frill to correspond, and fine ruby pin. In a very delicate and white hand he held a delicate white handkerchief ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... applied universally, but only to those in whose eyes their souls, and the redemption thereof, is precious. My darling—most men do, by their actions, say of their soul, 'my drudge, my slave; nay, thou slave to the devil and sin; for what sin, what lust, what sensual and beastly lust is there in the world that some do not cause their souls to bow before and yield unto? But David, here, as you see, calls it his darling, or his choice and most excellent thing; for, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... brief reference to the personal allusions which the spirits and angels made during their visits or his wanderings. His distinguished rival, Christian Wolf, was encountered as a spirit by spirits from Mercury, who 'perceived that what he said did not rise above the sensual things of the natural man, because in speaking he thought of honour, and was desirous, as in the world (for in the other world every one is like his former self), to connect various things into series, and from these again continually to deduce others, and so form several ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... sports and diversions. These damsels were dressed in silk and gold, and were seen continually sporting in the garden and its palaces. He made this garden with all its palaces and pleasures, in imitation of that sensual paradise, which Mahomet had promised to his followers. No man could enter into this garden, as the mouth of the valley was closed up by a strong castle, from which there was a secret entrance into the garden, which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... and tendencies of the Hedda type are very common in modern life, and not only among women. Hyperaesthesia lies at the root of her tragedy. With a keenly critical, relentlessly solvent intelligence, she combines a morbid shrinking from all the gross and prosaic detail of the sensual life. She has nothing to take her out of herself—not a single intellectual interest or moral enthusiasm. She cherishes, in a languid way, a petty social ambition; and even that she finds obstructed and baffled. At the same time she learns that another woman has had the courage to love ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... power is a fact which properly belongs to the intellectual side of our question not yet reached, and may be here merely mentioned. But the effect on the physical condition of the youth, of such carelessly written sensational stories, mostly of the French type, and full of sensuous, if not sensual suggestions, is a point not often enough considered. The teacher cannot, perhaps, except indirectly, prevent the reading of such trash at home. But every influence which he can bring to bear towards the formation of a purer and more correct taste, he should never omit. Where there is a public ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... complex civilization; but their operations are now conducted with more regard to the decencies. This is worth remembering when we are occasionally offended by his frankness on subjects to which we are not accustomed to allude; he is not an unclean or a sensual writer, but the waters of decency have risen since his time and submerged some things which were ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... purpose to which some day it may be put. Before the boy goes to a boarding-school he should have imbibed from his father the desire for moral cleanliness, the knowledge of good and of evil, and a cordial dislike for everything that is sensual, self-indulgent, or nasty. Talks on such subjects should be very infrequent, but I believe that, if "depolarisation" is to be achieved, they must be repeated every now and then during later childhood and in adolescence. To attempt to impart all this interesting information in a single constrained ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... that made a man as will-less as a log, and left him in the end, spent, exhausted, incapable. He saw the danger that had frightened Gilbert, but he could not make up his mind to run away from it. There was something so exquisitely sensual in her look as she lay on the couch, looking at him and chattering in the Lensley style, that he felt inclined to yield himself to her, even if in yielding he should ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... into intoxication and lasciviousness typify the priests that war against vice, but suffer themselves to be overcome by wine and sensual appetites till they are slain by their enemy the devil, and ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... with horror at the huge Jovian and shrank back from his sensual gaze. Glavour gazed at her in astonishment and a deep scowl spread over ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... that though the story has been left unfinished by Marivaux after the fifth part, we are led to expect at least a complete emancipation from the sins of the flesh, if not a high ethical status. The hero of Maupassant, on the other hand, is basely sensual and cruelly self-interested from the first, and totally lacking in those heart-qualities which, in spite of his vices, gain ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... spoke seriously; her voice bore no connective suggestion. Kisses, it appeared, were no more to her than little flowers which she dealt out casually where she pleased. Yet the idea, with its intimate sensual implications, stayed in his thoughts. He considered kissing her, holding her mouth against his; and he was conscious of a sharp return of his stinging sense ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... had become transformed into the Prince Stratimojeff. Four short years had passed, but what desolation had they not caused in his inner life!—four years of dissolute pleasure, of mad, enervating enjoyment; four bacchanalian years of sensual dissipation and extravagance; four years passed at the court of two Russian empresses! In these four years Elizabeth had died; and for a few days the unfortunate Peter III. had worn the imperial crown. But it had proved too heavy for him; and his great consort, Catharine, full ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... to worse. The new emperor was still more selfish and tyrannical than his father, and under the control of his craving for sensual pleasures paid no heed to the popular cry for reform. The discontent was now coming to a head. In the south broke out a revolt, whose leaders proclaimed as emperor a youth said to be a descendant of the Ming dynasty, who took the royal name of Teen-tih, or "Heavenly ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... carnal and voluptuous men could not see their genii, because their mind was not sufficiently pure, nor enough disengaged from sensual things; but that men who were wise, moderate, and temperate, and who applied themselves to serious and sublime subjects, could see them; as Socrates, for instance, who had his familiar genius, whom he consulted, to whose advice he listened, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... of our senses; it is a complete satisfaction given to all our natural and sensual appetites; and, when our worn-out senses want repose, either to have breathing time, or to recover strength, pleasure comes from the imagination, which finds enjoyment in thinking of the happiness afforded ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... This sensual and sanguinary religion inspired other peoples with horror, but they imitated it. The Jews sacrificed to Baal on the mountains; the Greeks adored Astarte of Sidon under the name of Aphrodite, and Baal Melkhart of Tyre ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... exhorting them to purify themselves for the research of the mines by fasting, prayer, and chastity. It is scarcely necessary to add, that his advice was but little attended to by his rapacious and sensual followers. ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... longing for the infinite, existing in the soul itself, cannot be satisfied by any earthly longing, sensual gratification, or external possession. Made 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever,' man is ruined and eternally miserable if he refuse to fulfil the destiny for which he was created. His misery springs from ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... attention, while his sullen and self-centred disposition demanded no less watchfulness. His first preceptor was M. Vauquelin des Ivetaux, a man of great talent, and quite equal to the task of forming the mind and intellect of a Prince, but of dissolute principles and sensual habits.[188] He, however, did not long remain about the person of the boy-King, having been replaced a year after the death of Henri IV by Nicolas Le Fevre,[189] who was distinguished alike for his learning and his piety. Unfortunately for the young Louis, this ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... than ten millions of dollars. For her he erected the Little Trianon, with its gardens, parks, and fountains, a temple of pleasure dedicated to lawless passion. The king had totally neglected the interests of his majestic empire, consecrating every moment of time to his own sensual gratification. The revenues of the realm were squandered in the profligacy and carousings of his court. The people were regarded merely as servants who were to toil to minister to the voluptuous indulgence of their masters. ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... cause of the rapid degeneracy of mankind. High wages flowed in upon them before they had acquired the artificial wants in the gratification of which they could be innocently spent. Thence the general recourse to the grosser and sensual enjoyments, which are powerful alike on the savage and the sage. Men who, in the wilds of Ireland or the mountains of Scotland, were making three or four shillings a-week, or in Sussex ten, suddenly found themselves, as cotton-spinners, iron-moulders, colliers, or mechanics, in possession ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... makes it possible to proclaim an international law of war, approved by the legal conscience of all civilised peoples; and when a principle is thus generally accepted, it exerts an authority over minds and manners which curbs sensual appetites and triumphs over barbarism. We are well aware of the imperfect means of causing its decrees to be respected and carried out which are at the disposal of the law of nations. We know also that war, which ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... happiness; by this Fresh Fountain many a blushing Maid Hath crown'd the head of her long loved Shepherd With gaudy flowers, whilest he happy sung Layes of his love and dear Captivitie; There grows all Herbs fit to cool looser flames Our sensual parts provoke, chiding our bloods, And quenching by their power those hidden sparks That else would break out, and provoke our sense To open fires, so vertuous is that place: Then gentle Shepherdess, ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... limbs and sensual organs, in fact, our whole body and life, are but an accretion round and a fostering of the spermatozoa. They are the real "He." A man's eyes, ears, tongue, nose, legs and arms are but so many organs and tools that minister to the protection, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... "I mean your exposure on the moral side. I approve of luxury; I think we ought to be as elegant as possible. Look at the luxury of our western cities; I've seen nothing over here to compare with it. I hope you'll never become grossly sensual; but I'm not afraid of that. The peril for you is that you live too much in the world of your own dreams. You're not enough in contact with reality—with the toiling, striving, suffering, I may even say sinning, world that surrounds you. You're too fastidious; you've too many graceful ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... from God, to such neglecters Of the grace it offers, it must be "a favor of death unto death!" And is not their number great? Doth it not increase from year to year, from age to age? To these who are taken up with sensual pleasures, and with minding only earthly things, St. Paul would say "even weeping you are enemies to the cross of Christ, and ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... of family, fortune, and position, and equerry to the Duke of York, was, in truth, rather an amateur than an artist. Rowlandson was an able draughtsman, and something more; but his style and his tastes are essentially coarse and sensual, and his women are the overblown beauties of the Drury Lane and Covent Garden of his day. George Moutard Woodward, whose productions he sometimes honoured by etching, and whose distinguishing characteristics are carelessness and often ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... whose life is one continued round of licentious pleasures and sensual gratifications; or the gloomy enthusiast, who detests the cheerful amusements he can never enjoy, and envies the healthy feelings he can never know, and who would put down the one and suppress the other, until he made the ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... upon them, and the branches of the trees and the tops of the tall nettles, agitated by the gusts from the mountain hollows, were beating in their faces, for enthusiasm is never scoffed at by the noble, simple-minded, genuine Welsh, whatever treatment it may receive from the coarse-hearted, sensual, selfish Saxon." ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... not both legs at once like a sparrow, but by putting one leg forward first, and then the other. There was this advantage in the Christian taboo of sex that by discouraging the physical and sensual side of love it did for the time being allow the spiritual side to come forward. But, as I have just now indicated, there is a limit to that process. We cannot always keep one leg first in walking, and we do not want, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... goal by the road to the emotions—if they hope to win the big world. Patriotism, fidelity—love of country, like love of woman—are emotions, and it would puzzle logicians, I am afraid, to be sure that these emotions, at times sublime, might not be as sensual as some of ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... Ellen Forbes, whom I knew well when I was young, had the wee house in Hume Park Square. You'll have been there? Hev' ye not? Imphm. I thought so. Well, they'd had thought difficulty in paying the rent...." The story droned on perpetually, breaking off into croonings of sensual pity; and Yaverland sat listening to it with such rage, that, as he soon knew from the narrator's waggish look, the vein in his forehead ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... and coarse mockery, between violence and a pretence of moral austerity, he understands only the sorriest motives; thinks the whole thing feigned, and fancies the stranger, so effeminate, so attractive of women with whom he remains day and night, but a poor sensual creature, and the real motive of the Bacchic women the indulgence of their lust; his ridiculous old grandfather he is ready to renounce, and accuses Teiresias of having in view only some fresh source of professional profit to himself ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the past, of reflection upon those long-since vanished joys, the loss of which has caused the sorrow! For the children of the world, for the striving, for the seeker of inordinate enjoyments, for the ambitious, for the sensual, solitude is but ill-adapted—only for the happy, for the sorrow-laden, and also for the innocent, who yet know nothing of the world, of neither its pleasures nor torments, of neither its ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... expressed in life, the truth as that which alone either has or can give being and diuturnity, this is its food, for which it thirsts with holy ardor. Here is the genuine esoteric gnosis, the sacred secret, which the rude and selfish wishes of the savage, the sensual rites of Babylon, "mother of harlots," and the sublimely unselfish dreams of a "religion of humanity," have alike had in their hearts, but had no capacity to interpret, no ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... recognisable designs of the French ateliers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. These are so frequently brought before us as to seem almost like products of our own day. The earlier ones seem (as ever) the purer art, the less sensual, appealing to the more impersonal side of man, dealing in battles and in classic subjects. Later, the drawings, becoming more directly personal, in the time of Louis XIV portrayed events in the Life of the King; in the next reign, slipping into the pleasures ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... horror, he saw looking at him, from a distance of only a few feet, a white, luminous face, presumably that of a woman. But what a woman! What a devil!—what a match for the most lurid of any of Satan's male retainers. Yet she was not without beauty—beauty of the richest sensual order; beauty that, had it been flesh and blood, would have sent men mad. Her hair, jet black, wavy, and parted in the centre, was looped over her shell-like ears, which were set unusually low and far back on her head; her nose was of that rare and matchless ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... told the parable of a drunkard who forgets the precious gems put in his own pocket by one of his friends. The man is drunk with the poisonous liquor of selfishness, led astray by the alluring sight of the sensual objects, and goes mad with anger, lust, and folly. Thus he is in a state of moral poverty, entirely forgetting the precious gem of Buddha-nature within him. To be in an honourable position in society as the owner of that valuable property, ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... cloister, was quivering and boiling in the presence of this night scene of love and voluptuousness. This young and beautiful girl given over in disarray to the ardent young man, made melted lead flow in his-veins; his eyes darted with sensual jealousy beneath all those loosened pins. Any one who could, at that moment, have seen the face of the unhappy man glued to the wormeaten bars, would have thought that he beheld the face of a tiger glaring from the depths of a cage at some jackal devouring a gazelle. His eye shone like a candle ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... of a sixteenth-century monk, a dweller in the rarefied atmosphere of mysticism. It only remained for a friar in the opposition camp to discover nearly three hundred years later a tendency in Luis de Leon to treat sensual themes in a sensual fashion.[272] To deal seriously with a belated judgement based on malignant ignorance would be a waste of time. It is the very irony of fate that the poem which has been the subject of severe censure should prove ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... citizens." Yet they display considerable talent and enterprise, as in Quito; a proof that mental degeneracy does not necessarily result from the mixture of white with Indian blood. "There is, however," confesses Bates, after ten years' experience, "a considerable number of superlatively lazy, tricky, and sensual characters among the half-castes, both in rural places and in the towns." Our observations do not support the opinion that the result of amalgamation is "a vague compound, lacking character and expression." The moral part is perhaps deteriorated; but in tact and enterprise ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... when shall the elfin lamp of my glimmerous understanding, purged from sensual appetites and gross desires, shine like the constellation of thy intellectual powers. As for thee, thy thoughts are pure and thy lips are holy. Never did the unhallowed breath of the powers of darkness, and the pleasures of darkness, pollute the sacred flame of thy sky-descended and heaven-bound ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... defending this measure, he had maintained that the high rate of wages would subvert the design of transportation: the employer would indulge the workmen, and to obtain their full strength supply the means of sensual gratification. ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... to Japan, I'll meet a tall bearded stranger, sunburned, with the flame of the Orient in his eyes, and on his thin, cruel, sensual mouth——" ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... illustrate how minute are the plastic details which will revolutionise a countenance; how easily noble and handsome features can degenerate into what is sordid and vulgar. In this bust the chin, though receding, is far from weak; the lips are full but not sensual; the nose has the faint aquiline curve of distinction. There is benevolence in the eyes, meditation in the brow, dignity and reserve throughout the physiognomy: it is the portrait of a man who may be great, but who must be good. When a bronze ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... spiritually discerned." He who has not raised himself above "the world," that is, the interests and ideals of human society as it organises itself apart from God, and above "the flesh," that is, the things which seem desirable to the "average sensual man," does not possess in himself that element which can be assimilated by Divine grace. The "mystery" of the wisdom of God is necessarily hidden from him. St. Paul uses the word "mystery" in very much the same ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... comparing the two, and often quoted Leibnitz: "Music is an occult exercise of the mind unconsciously performing arithmetical calculations." For him, so he assured his friends, music was a species of sensual mathematics. Before he left St. Petersburg to settle in Balak as its Kapellmeister he had studied at the University under the famous Lobatchewsky, and absorbed from him not a few of the radical theories containing the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... depraving influence. He alleged, indeed, a special Divine sanction for the dissoluteness of his later life, but this has not deterred his followers from thinking they could not go far wrong in imitating him. In addition to these facilities for a life of sensual enjoyment, the teaching of the Prophet in reference to female slaves has had a most depraving effect on family life. The Hindustanee expression for libertine, profligate—luchcha—is, I think, more frequently applied to Muhammadans in Northern India ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... 'Tall, with immense embonpoint, and not proportionately strong legs; he holds himself in such a way that one is always afraid he will tumble over backwards; very bald, and not a very intelligent face: one can see that eating, drinking, and sensual pleasure are everything to him. Spoke a good deal of French, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... mind, softened by passion to the consistency of clay, was stamped with the picture of her as she stood and looked at him. Vaguely, with uneasiness and dislike, he understood her value; it was something remote as heaven and less desired, yet it strengthened his sensual scorn of Miriam, and rising, he went and made a hateful gesture over her. Some exclamation came from him, and he stooped to pick her up and slake his thirst for kisses. He wanted to beat her about the face before he cast ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... friends of his own sex that originated that spirit of favoritism, so unworthy of a monarch, which he so often evinced; and even his irregular and unhallowed attachments of another kind seem to have been not wholly selfish and sensual. The course of conduct which he pursued through the whole course of his life toward his female companions, evinced, in many instances, a sincere attachment to them, and an honest desire to promote their welfare; and in all the wild recklessness of his life of pleasure ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... expression used in various ways, sometimes meaning one thing, sometimes meaning another;-but we will endeavour to explain its general principles—and these we will divide into three heads; first, the tyranny of the present; secondly, the tyranny of the sensual; and lastly, the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... Von Rheineck was a very wild youth. Recklessly and without consideration did he plunge into every excess. Dissipation grew to be the habit of his life, and no sensual indulgence did he deny himself which could be procured by any means whatever. Amply provided for as he was, the revenues of his wide possessions, which comprehended Thal Rheineck, and the adjacent country, to the shore of the Rhine, and as far ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... Acropolis. The result was the coarse splendor of the Empire. How utterly the still Greek Ideal was forgotten in this noisy splendor, how entirely the chaste spirituality of the Greek line was lost in the round and lusty curves which are the inevitable footprints of Sensual Life, scarcely needs further amplification. I have referred to the Ionic capital of the Erechtheum as containing a microcosm of Attic Art, as presenting a fair epitome of the thought and love which Hellenic artists offered in the worship of their gods. Turn now ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... constantly held communion with the body, and having served and loved it, and been bewitched by it, through desires and pleasures, so as to think that there is nothing real except what is corporeal, which one can touch and see, and drink and eat, and employ for sensual purposes; but what is dark and invisible to the eyes, which is intellectual and apprehended by philosophy, having been accustomed to hate, fear, and shun this, do you think that a soul thus affected can depart from the body by ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... state of things, in which the discontent of the labouring classes was proportioned to the money disbursed in poor-rates, or in voluntary charities; in which the young were trained in idleness, ignorance, and vice—the able-bodied maintained in sluggish and sensual indolence—the aged and more respectable exposed to all the misery incident to dwelling in such society as that of a large workhouse without discipline or classification—the whole body of inmates subsisting on food far exceeding both in kind and amount, not ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... He is big-framed, but his flesh is shrunken, as though the wind of conceit were oozing out of him day by day. His cheeks and stomach hang flabbily. His blond mustache is getting thin and discloses his full, sensual lips. His hands are thick and soft, always stained with nicotine. He lives in constant terror of his wife, and all the pockets of his coats are burned full of holes from his hiding his cigarettes in them when he thinks he hears his wife coming. I have ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... whole tenor of your being by agitations and distractions and petty cares, or if you defile it by sensual and fleshly lusts, and animal propensities gratified, and poor, miserable, worldly ambitions and longings filling up your souls, then God can no more be visible before your face than the blessed sun can mirror himself ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... intemperance, prone to extremes; The wish of his heart (it has always been such) Is, give me by all means of all things too much! In pleasures and honours, in meats, and in drinks, He craves for the most that his coveting thinks; To wallow in sensual Lucullus's sty, Or stand like the starving Stylites on high, To be free from all churches and worship alone, Or chain'd to the feet of a priest on a throne, To be rich as a Rothschild, and dozens beside, Or poor as St. Francis ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... transgressions,"—then closing with, "Yes; 'when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Do not err,' do not stray, do not transgress ({me planasthe}),[30] 'my beloved brethren,' it is first 'earthly, then sensual, then devilish;'" he shut the book, and sent us all away terrified, shaken, and humbled, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—yet, ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... by libertines and prostitutes, as well as sensual women of the higher classes, is quite marked. Heschl reported a case of a man of forty-five in whom absence of the olfactory sense was associated with imperfect development of the genitals; it is also well known that ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... is a baser species of pride, born of the Earth and Eolus; that is to say, of sensual and vain conceits. His foster-father and the keeper of his castle is Ignorance. ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... part had every quality save that of sincerity. They were transcendantly adroit and they reeked of talent. They were luxurious, refined, sensual, titillating, exquisite, tender, compact, of striking poses and subtle new tones. And while the heads were well finished and instantly recognisable as likenesses, the impressionism of the hands and of the provocative draperies ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... the death of the unhappy lad, Athalaric, in his eighteenth year, the victim of unwise strictness, followed by unwise licence, and of the barbarian's passion for swinish and sensual pleasures. When her son was dead, Amalasuentha, who had an instinctive feeling that the Goths would never submit to undisguised female sovereignty, took a strange and desperate resolution. She sent for Theodahad, now the only surviving male ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... passed, to quote from an early Letter on this subject, either "in happy ignorance and full oblivion, or in a state of quiet slumber, a sleep full of rosy dreams ". But on the other hand, if their earth-lives have been low and brutal, selfish and sensual, they will, like the suicides, be conscious to the fullest extent in this undesirable region; and they are liable to develop into terribly evil entities. Inflamed with all kinds of horrible appetites which they can no longer satisfy directly now they are without a physical ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... after drying her tears. "Leave so sensual a being; the slave of his passions, the ravisher of others' good. The pomp and grandeur which surround you and intoxicate you would seem but a little thing did you but look at them as now I do, upon my ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of nature was cheerless and desolate. But there was another storm raging in those streets, more terrible than any elemental warfare. In locust legions, the deformed, the haggard, the brutalized in form, in features, in mind, in heart—demoniac men, satanic women, boys burly, sensual, blood-thirsty, like imps of darkness rioted along toward the Convention, an interminable multitude whom no one could count. Their hideous howlings thrilled upon the ear, and sent panic to the heart. There was no power to resist them. ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... tones of his voice the doctor's keen intelligence caught the ring of his savage metal and felt the shock of his powerful personality—a personality which had thrown to the winds every mask, whose sole aim of life was sensual, whose only fears were of physical pain and death, who could worship a snake and sacrifice ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... the philosopher was ill-calculated to engage her wanton levity, or to fix that unbounded passion for variety which often discovered personal merit in the meanest of mankind. The Cupid of the ancients was, in general, a very sensual deity; and the amours of an empress, as they exact on her side the plainest advances, are seldom susceptible of much sentimental delicacy. Marcus was the only man in the empire who seemed ignorant or insensible of the irregularities of Faustina, which, according to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... before a big cheval glass, he looked eminently British for his day. The style is a little changing now, but the thick-set sturdy figure, the full paunch, the blunt scowling features, the cold grey eyes, the double chin, the firm yet sensual mouth, were all expressive of his type. The suit of pilot cloth into which he had changed gave him something of a seafaring look; but the high white collar, the shining black satin stock, the heavy gold chain which trailed ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... and sleepy," said Dorothea, and again blinked at him out of one corner of her eye with that mocking, sensual look. As he showed no inclination to leave, she yawned, and continued in an angry tone: "Why do you wake a person up in the middle of the night, if all you want is to scold them? Get out of here, you ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... terrific pace.— When o'er retreating Autumn's golden grace Tempestuous Winter spreads in every wind Naked asperity, our musings find Grandeur increasing, as the Glooms efface Variety and glow.—Each solemn trace Exalts the thoughts, from sensual joys refin'd. Then blended in our rapt ideas rise The vanish'd charms, that summer-suns reveal, With all of desolation, that now lies Dreary before us;—teach the Soul to feel Awe in the Present, pleasure in the Past, And to see vernal Morns in ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... with Mrs. Westbrook; and this new turn of mind brought her naturally into contact with the principal saint of the neighbourhood, Mr. Richard Templeton. We have seen that that gentleman was not happy in his first marriage; death had not then annulled the bond. He was of an ardent and sensual temperament, and quietly, under the broad cloak of his doctrines, he indulged his constitutional tendencies. Perhaps in this respect he was not worse than nine men out of ten. But then he professed to be better than nine hundred thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book X • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 'Madmen are all sensual in the lower stages of the distemper. They are eager for gratifications to sooth their minds, and divert their attention from the misery which they suffer: but when they grow very ill, pleasure is too weak for them, and they seek for pain[496]. Employment, Sir, and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... elucidated, precluding all chance of further additions, would the study be dry and monotonous? On the contrary, the verification witnessed by ourselves would be so fascinating and instructive, that we cannot avoid pitying the condition of that man who finds gratification only in the gross and sensual. It has been remarked, that "he who cannot find in this and other branches of natural history a salutary exercise for his mental faculties, inducing a habit of observation and reflection, a pleasure so easily obtained, unalloyed by any debasing mixture—tending to expand and harmonize ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... for thee? Thou who hast vied with the great Preacher of thy faith in sanctity of motives, and in elevation above sensual and selfish! Thou whom thy fate has changed into parricide and savage! Can I wish for the continuance ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... had been profound, and as the sensation was new he enjoyed its sensual charm to the fullest. He discarded the jaunty cap for a slouch hat which he pulled down over his eyes; he selected the soberest of neckwear, turned up his collar, sank his fists in his pockets, and spent solitary afternoons among the ruins of ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... as an alien being distinguished from the real individual, which is the chimera, the dream, and the postulate of Christianity, is under democracy sensual reality, the present, and the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... They seem to be involved and buried in their own corporeal substance, and to look dimly forth at the outer world. They breathe not easily, and yet not with difficulty nor discomfort; for the very unreadiness and oppression with which their breath comes appears to make them sensible of the deep sensual satisfaction which they feel. Swill, the remnant of their last meal, remains in the trough, denoting that their food is more abundant than even a hog can demand. Anon, they fall asleep, drawing short and heavy breaths, which heave their huge sides up and down; but at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... from politics into archaeology—it is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait. Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be in stronger contrast with his son's, and ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... I advise you earnestly and sincerely not to yield to the solicitations of thoughtless or unscrupulous men, who think of nothing but their coarse sensual pleasures. It is advice dictated by common sense, by your own deeper interest, aside from any religious ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... seems to have rendered him fond of drinking, and fiery in disposition. As a youth he showed great power of self-control, by abstaining from all sensual pleasures in spite of his vehement and passionate nature; while his intense desire for fame rendered him serious ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... the Kent Ditch. Here lived Sir Harry Trevor, the second holder of a title won in banking enterprises, and lately fallen to low estate. The reason could perhaps be seen on his good-looking face, with its sensual, humorous mouth, roving eyes, and lurking air of unfulfilled, undefeated youth. The taverns of the Three Marshes had combined to give him a sensational past, and further said that his two sons had forced him to settle at Brodnyx with a view to preserving what ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... has much influence for evil; an island which has helped the Portuguese to lock up the east coast of Africa for centuries; an island which would not be missed—save as a removed curse—if it were sunk this night to the bottom of the sea, and all its selfish, sensual, slave-dealing population swept entirely off ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... to her warm imagination a favourite Casino in the Piazza St. Marco. That her learned and highly-accomplished son imbibed her taste and talents for sensual delights, has been long known in England; it is not so perhaps that there is a showy monument erected to his memory at Padua, setting forth his variety and compass of knowledge in a long Latin inscription. The good old monk who ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... then? You say that marriage is based upon love, and when I give voice to a doubt as to the existence of any other love than sensual love, you prove to me the existence of love by marriage. But in our day marriage is ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... art to the mind. It is the perfection of the type, the intensity of the emotion, the inevitability of the plot,—it is the pure and intelligible form disclosed in the phases and movement of life, disengaged and set apart for the contemplation of the mind,—it is the purging of the sensual eye, enabling it to see through the mind as the mind first saw through it, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, the revelation accomplished by the mind for the senses. If the world of art were only ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... the pages, handling the book as a lover handles the thing he loves. The very touch of the vellum thrilled him with an almost sensual rapture. Here and there a line flashed from a chorus and lured him deeper into the text. His impulse was still to exclaim, but a finer instinct taught him to suppress his scholarly emotion. Looking up as she spoke he saw her eyes fixed on him with a ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... of forty-five or fifty, with a heavy black beard, thick sensual lips, and dog-like face. He is clad roughly; and the few words which he utters prove that ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... made his exit, in order to bring back with him Sensual Suggestion: here he returns, but his re-entrance is not noted. Sensual Suggestion follows him, but not immediately, and what he first says was perhaps off the stage, and out of sight of the audience; ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... save to say that they, more than any writing of his, reveal his inherent dramatic power. By dramatic power I mean not his power of situation and evolution of dramatic technique, but his power to change his point of view with the character he is creating A sensual exquisite himself whose predominant thought is of woman, and of woman from a standpoint closely akin to an epicure's toward an ideal meal, Mr. Moore can identify himself with people in whom there is none of himself but the essential humanity common to mankind. Most wonderful ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... reception of any seed that may fall upon it. Until age brings individuality, the mind seems to have little choice as to what it will receive. Then, indeed, it does reject much seed that falls upon it, and much fails to take root because of the pre-occupation of the surface. A sensual seed is planted in the soul of a young man, and it springs up readily, and produces after its kind; but the same seed tossed upon an older soil fails to sink and germinate, because the surface is ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... a skin that, strangely enough, did not covet its sensual touch. She craved back to the starchy blue-gingham morning dresses. It was as if she sat among the ruins of those crispy potential yesterdays, all her to-morrows ruthlessly and ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... 63: From this name or title comes the Gita Govinda, a mystic erotic poem (in praise of the cow-boy god) exaltedly religious as it is sensual (twelfth century).] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... that old glutton illustrated the fools who, in their effort to gulp down the sensual pleasures of this world, choke the soul, and nothing but the clap-board of hard experience, well laid on, can dislodge the ham, and ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... was a little woman, still very pretty, although of a certain age—the age of embonpoint—a brunette, with very delicate features, a little sensual mouth, and pretty rosy ears peeping forth from skilfully arranged masses of black hair. With a plump, dimpled hand, she held before her myopic eyes a pair of gold-mounted glasses; and she was speaking to a man of rather stern aspect, ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... in books, in the rivalry of writers, especially novelists, success, (so-call'd,) is for him or her who strikes the mean flat average, the sensational appetite for stimulus, incident, persiflage, &c., and depicts, to the common calibre, sensual, exterior life. To such, or the luckiest of them, as we see, the audiences are limitless and profitable; but they cease presently. While this day, or any day, to workmen portraying interior or spiritual ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... people is exquisitely subtile, without being at all acute: hence there is so much humor and so little wit in their literature. The genius of the Italians, on the contrary, is acute, profound, and sensual, but not subtile; hence what they think to be ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... I did not find them, as a rule, very sensual or fond of indecent talk. As a rule, they objected to stripping naked; they did not touch my organs; they did not suggest masturbation, sodomy, or fellatio. They seldom exhibited transports, but the better among them seemed sentimental ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... definitely material character; it has to do with physical things in relation to the body. In contrast, reason, or science, lays hold of the immaterial, the ideal, the spiritual. There is something morally dangerous about experience, as such words as sensual, carnal, material, worldly, interests suggest; while pure reason and spirit connote something morally praiseworthy. Moreover, ineradicable connection with the changing, the inexplicably shifting, and with the manifold, the diverse, clings to ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... with pleasure, with intoxication, caressed by the wave, throbbing with a sensual delight, raising herself at each stroke as if she were going to spring from the water. He followed her with difficulty, breathless, and vexed to feel himself ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... and fails of its due object; if it does not meet with the supreme term of its repose, its indefinite aspirations attach themselves to objects which cannot satisfy them, and thence arise stupendous aberrations. With some, it is the pursuit of sensual gratifications; they rush with a kind of fury into the passions of their lower nature. With others it is the ardent pursuit of riches, power, fame,—feelings which are always crying more: More! and never: Enough. And the after-taste from the fruitless search after ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... quarter; whence I have been led to conclude, that every one perceives in himself that he lives a man after death. Who that has loved his married partner and his children when they are dying or are dead, will not say within himself (if his thought be elevated above the sensual principles of the body) that they are in the hand of God, and that he shall see them again after his own death, and again be joined with them in a ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... threw down a soft red glow. Heavy imitation Eastern curtains deadened the hum of voices and rattle of cups. The air was warm and scented, the light dim, and Foster, who had often camped in the snow, felt amused by the affectation of sensual luxury as he ate iced cakes and languidly watched the people. He could only see two or three men, one of whom he had noticed at the hotel and afterwards passed in the street. This was probably a ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... she could do no more to beautify her person Sally turned again to the clothes-press, by now so far gone in self-indulgence, her moral sense so insidiously sapped by the sheer sensual delight she had of all this pilfered luxury, that she could contemplate without a qualm less venial experiments with the law ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... New Orleans reading of conditions in Europe and foolishly searching for Zoe. Moreover, I was beginning to be tired of everything in America, and particularly worn with New Orleans. I longed to be back in Chicago in the fresh air by the lake, away from the steam, the heat, the sensual atmosphere of this southern city. Yet Dorothy could not just now venture into the changeable climate of Lake Michigan. I was forced to stay on for her sake. I continued my wanderings and my thoughts about the city, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... Interest is that by which reason becomes practical, i. e., a cause determining the will. Hence we say of rational beings only that they take an interest in a thing; irrational beings only feel sensual appetites. Reason takes a direct interest in action then only when the universal validity of its maxims is alone sufficient to determine the will. Such an interest alone is pure. But if it can determine the will only by means of another object of ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... profligacy. He compelled the widow of his murdered brother to marry him—then a beautiful Greek nun who had been captured from Byzantium—then a Bulgarian and a Bohemian wife, until finally his household was numbered by hundreds. But this sensual barbarian began to be conscious of a soul. He was troubled, and revived the worship of the Slav gods; erected on the cliffs near Kief a new idol of Perun, with head of silver and beard of gold. Two Scandinavian Christians were by his orders stabbed ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... subsidings of the storm Within; the sweet resignedness of hope Drawn heavenward, and strength of filial love, In which I bow'd me to my Father's will? My God and my Redeemer, keep not thou My heart in brute and sensual thanklessness Seal'd up, oblivious ever of that dear grace, And health restor'd to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... Londres. Vast schemes of finance and of conquest wove through his busy, plotting brain. Visions of the girl arose, too, tempting him still more, though his chill heart was powerless to feel the urge of any real, self-sacrificing or devoted love. Sensual passion he knew, and ambition, and the lust of power; nothing else. But these all opened his eyes to the vast blunder he had committed, and nerved him to reconquest of the ground ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England |
