"Sensualist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism;[223] and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfill your round of ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... can get round that. Why couldn't he have chucked it—gone away—anything—when he felt it coming on? A strong, fine, keen person like that, to be bowled over by his sloppy emotions and dragged through the mud, like any beastly sensualist, or like one of my own cheery relations.... I'd rather he'd done Hobart in. There'd have been some sense about that, if he had. After all, it would have been striking a blow against Potterism. Only, if he did do it, it would be more like him to face the music and own to it. What I can't fit into ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... understand. But all sincere men are comrades in a deep and fine sense. What the honest unbeliever has to keep in mind is that the darker side is but one side. If he stands studying a crowd of the orthodox and finds therein the drunkard, the gambler, the sensualist; and if he says bitter things of the value of religion and gets in return the clerical fiat of one who is more a politician than a priest; and if he rejoins contemptuously, "This is fit for women and children," ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... "You damned cynical sensualist," cried my master. "I have wasted the breath of my sentiment upon you." And he called out for ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... respect leading to repose or lofty contemplation, or to submission to the evils of life, which it catalogues with amazing detail; a book not even conducive to innocent entertainment. It is the revelation of the inner life of a sensualist, an egotist, and a hypocrite, with a maudlin although genuine admiration for Nature and virtue and friendship and love. And the book reveals one of the most miserable and dissatisfied men that ever walked the earth, seeking peace in solitude and virtue, while ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... words remind me of a conversation I overheard once between a great writer of books and a certain Prince of the blood Royal. 'Life is a difficult problem!' said the Prince, smoking a fat cigar. 'To the student, it is, Sir,' replied the author; 'But to the sensualist, it is no more than the mud-stye of the swine,—he noses the refuse and is happy! He has no need of the Higher life, and plainly the Higher life has no need of him. Of course,' he added with covert satire, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the eyes of posterity, all the crowned wiseacres that have crushed him by their overwhelming confederacy. If anything could place the Prince Regent in a more ridiculous light, it is Bonaparte suing for his magnanimous protection. Every compliment paid to this bloated sensualist, this inflation of sack and sugar, turns to ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... The young sensualist was in an ecstasy of gratitude to his late refection, and the slightest word recalled him to it. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... been idealized as an angel, a saint, and a demigod; he has been caricatured as a self-indulgent sensualist, a vulgar Lothario, a buffoon, a joker of ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... myself, but I believe that even then, as a boy of sixteen, I fully conceived of Falstaff's character, and entered into the author's wonderfully humorous conception of him. There is no such perfect conception of the selfish sensualist in literature, and the conception is all the more perfect because of the wit that lights up the vice of Falstaff, a cold light without tenderness, for he was not a good fellow, though a merry companion. I am not sure but I should put him beside Hamlet, and on the name level, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... misleading are our highly prized distinctions, how dangerous sometimes that secondary mental power which multiplies them. It sobers and clarifies human thinking a little, perhaps, to reflect on how thin a line separates the sublime and the ridiculous, the saint and the sensualist, the martyr and the fool, the genius ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... labor and get nothing for it; but boring hard wood into hard, the man of skill forthwith gets fire for his use. In seeking wisdom then it is not by these austerities a man may reach the law of life. But to indulge in pleasure is opposed to right: this is the fool's barrier against wisdom's light. The sensualist cannot comprehend the Sutras or the Sastras, how much less the way of overcoming all desire! As some man grievously afflicted eats food not fit to eat, and so in ignorance aggravates his sickness, so can he get rid of lust who pampers lust? Scatter the fire amid the desert grass, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... her in his arms; his face was so comically compunctious that she calmed down at once. She thought over her words afterwards and regretted them. All the same, Rosek was a sneak and a cold sensualist, she was sure. And the thought that he had been spying at their little house ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... habits, continued till it produces a change of tastes and desires, is necessary to prepare the sensualist to judge correctly with regard to things moral and religious. We must not therefore expect a good lecture, or an able book, to cure a skeptic of his doubts at once. It may produce an effect which, in time, if the party ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... knowledge in its turn be knowledge if it were merely intuition of essence, such as the sensualist, the poet, or the dialectician may rest in. If the imagery of logic or passion ever comes to convey knowledge, it does so by virtue of a concomitant physical adjustment to external things; for ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... seriously as the unmarried debauchee who acts on the same principle in his indulgences—perhaps more certainly from his very ignorance, and from his not taking those precautions and following those rules which a career of vice is apt to teach the sensualist. Many a man has, until his marriage, lived a most continent life; so has his wife. As soon as they are wedded, intercourse is indulged in night after night, neither party having any idea that these repeated sexual acts ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... beyond the low levels of earth, and making our anticipations of the future the reflection of the brightness of God thrown on that else blank curtain, we may turn into the worthy utterance of sober and saintly faith, the folly of the riotous sensualist when he said, 'To-morrow shall be as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... worn it so short on account of the heat of the season, that a curl was rendered impossible; a heavy dark brown moustache, worn without other beard; a sunny hazel eye that seemed made for laughter, and a full, red, voluptuous lip that might have belonged to a sensualist; while the eye could really do other things than laughing, and the lip was quite as often compressed or curled in the bitterness of disdain or the earnestness of close thought, as employed to express any ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... than his wisdom, and his powers were far superior to his character. The small bright eyes, buried deeply in his fleshy face, twinkled with intelligence and an unabated curiosity of life, but they were the eyes of a sensualist and an egotist. Enough of the man, for he is dead now, poor devil, dead at the very time that he had made sure that he had at last discovered the elixir of life. It is not with his complex character that I have to deal, but with the very strange and inexplicable incident ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shocked at this confirmation of my worst fears; and I meditated with intense bitterness on the fate of a being of such meek tenderness exposed to the heartless brutalities of a sated sensualist like Harlowe. But what could be done? She had chosen, deliberately, and after warning, chosen her lot, and must accept the consequences of her choice. In all the strong statutes, and sharp biting laws of England, there can be found no clause wherewith to ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... comes—and come it assuredly will—and the mind, like a polluted stream, can no longer flow back to its own bright source, and renovate its poisoned waters; who shall then say that the madness of the sensualist can satisfy ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... years of siege, not because her courage had failed, but because she had waited in vain for the reinforcement of his loyalty. This was what he had done with his life and hers. For him there was an empty future: for her marriage with a coldly selfish sensualist who called his greed piety. Stuart Farquaharson sat in a chilled inertia of despair while the ship's bells recorded the passing of hours. From the decks above drifted little fragments of human talk and human laughter, but to him they were ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... King ever forgave those fetes at Vaux, which were designed to dazzle Mademoiselle la Valliere, whom this man had the presumption to love. One may pity so terrible a fall, yet it is but the ruin of a bold sensualist, who played with millions as other men play with tennis balls, and who would have drained the exchequer by his briberies and extravagances if he had not been brought to a dead stop. The world has been growing wickeder, dearest, while ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... explained the motive for his visit. He was a lawyer of enlightened views; his client was a young man who had consulted him in confidence. This young man was no other than the son of P—, though he bears another name. In his youth P—, the sensualist, had seduced a young girl, poor but respectable. She was a serf, but had received a European education. Finding that a child was expected, he hastened her marriage with a man of noble character who had loved her for a long time. He helped the young couple for a time, but he was soon ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... one, perhaps the most innocent of all. Little girl, you have been studying the history of France; do you remember its Louises?—Louis the Fourteenth was a profligate, unprincipled, selfish king. Louis the Fifteenth, another God-defying, self-adoring sensualist. Louis the Sixteenth one of the most amiable, just, Christian monarchs the world ever saw. Yet the accumulated wrongs under which the nation had been groaning during the reign of his predecessors, were to be avenged in his person,—innocent, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... two stand out in tremendous contrast as contemporaries—the realist of the Soul, and the realist of the Flesh, the Saint and the Sinner, the Ascetic and the Sensualist. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... as she had done fifty times since she had seen him that moonlit night. Ah, she had thought him the dreamer, the enthusiast—maybe, in kind, credulous moments, the great man he claimed to be; and he had only been the sensualist after all! That he did not love Elise, she knew well enough: he had been coldblooded; in this, at least, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that he arranged love-trysts in the churches. "I was not afraid to think of my lust, and plan a scheme for securing the deadly fruit of sin, even within the walls of Thy church during the celebration of Thy mysteries." We might be reading the confession of a sensualist of to-day. One grows astonished at these morals, at once so old and so modern. What, already! These young Christian basilicas, but newly sprung out of the earth, where the men were strictly separated from the women—were they already become places of assignation, where ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... answered thoughtfully. "He hinted that he was interested in their superstitions, and I think there was some truth in it. Meddling with these things seems to have a fascination for neurotic people, and as the fellow's a sensualist he may find some form of indulgence that wouldn't be tolerated near the settlements. All this, however, doesn't quite seem ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... detect, and did instantly resent pretense, fraud, trickery, the poor condition of one combatant or the unwillingness of one man to have at another in deadly earnest, had to be not only in the pink of bodily condition but a fighter such as no drunken sensualist could ever hope to be. So it was easy to suppress the scandal that the gladiator Paulus was the emperor himself, although half Rome half-believed it; and the substitute who occupied the seat of honor at the games—ageing a little, growing a little pouchy ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy |
