"Sensual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heap of half-clothed blacks. Going on the underground railroad to Canada. Stolid, sensual wretches, with here and there a broad, melancholy brow and desperate jaws. One little pickaninny rubbed its sleepy eyes and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... of young men under age; with our neighbours it is a weighty subject of inquiry for minds of almost the highest order. With us, the stage is considered as a harmless pastime, wholesome because it occupies the man by occupying his mental, not his sensual faculties; one of the many departments of fictitious representation; perhaps the most exciting, but also the most transitory; sometimes hurtful, generally beneficial, just as the rest are; entitled to no peculiar ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... state of bodily intoxication. My animal impulses had put on the mask of spirit; and the deliciousness of those tears soon seduced me into endeavouring to stir up such emotions artificially, into abusing this mysterious close relation to infinite love as a stimulus of the most refined sensual excitement, which I then extinguisht in a rapture of tears. I was appalled by this lie in my soul, when I detected and could no more deny it; and the fearfullest desolation of despair, the dismallest solitude of death closed round me again, when the deception ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... feature, or mannerism, as it might be called, specially marks Hawaiian music of the bombastic bravura sort in modern times, imparting to it in its strife for emphasis a sensual barbaric quality. It can be described further only as a gurgling throatiness, suggestive at times of ventriloquism, as if the singer were gloating over some wild physical sensation, glutting his appetite of savagery, the meaning of which is almost as foreign to us and ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... beauty, infinite order, and suggests and confirms within us eternal aspiration. Those intimations of the ideal and endless perfectness which are dimmed within us by the meaner aspects of human life, or by the sordid difficulties of thought which a sensual and wealth-seeking society present to us, are restored to us by her quiet, order and beauty. When he wrote Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and The Inn Album, Nature had ceased to ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... founded largely on her superiority to the world he had known; and here it was necessary for him to convince himself that his wedding had not been merely the result of romantic accident. He knew that the sensual had had almost no part in it, it had been mental; an act of pity crystallizing his revolt against what he felt to be the impotence of "Christian" ethics. Yet this was not sufficient; for he, like Rhoda, had found under his wife's immobility the ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... great, hot bustle, reviewing that house, once ours, to which he had but now succeeded; a corpulent, sanguine man of middle age, sensual, vulgar, humorous, and, if I judged rightly, not ill- disposed by nature. But the sparkle that came into his eye as he observed me enter, warned me ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... giants, in a strain sublime, "And vengeful thunders, o'er Phlegraea's plain "Scatter'd; a tender theme now claims my lyre: "I sing of youths by deities belov'd; "And nymphs who with forbidden wishes burn'd, "And met the doom their sensual lusts deserv'd. "The king of gods made Phrygian Ganymede "His favorite, but some other form possess'd. "Jove must in shape be something else than Jove. "He deems no form becomes him, save the bird "That bears his thunder. Instant all is done; "The Phrygian borne ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... Somewhat surprised, Claude looked in vain for the traits of childish softness that he had just portrayed; the upper part of her face, her clear forehead, her gentle eyes had become less conspicuous; and now the lower part stood out, with its somewhat sensual jaw, ruddy mouth, and superb teeth. And still she smiled with that enigmatical, girlish smile, which was, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... personification of the apparently destructive forces of nature. Fire was his element. The Indians had their Rakshas and Uragas, the Egyptians their Typhon, and the Persians their Devas. The Israelites may claim the honour of having brought the theory of evil into a coarse and sensual form, and the Christians took up this conception, and developed it with the help of the Gnostics, Plato, and the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... might read the following sign over the threshold of a youthful life: "For sale, grand opportunities, for a song;" "golden chances for beer;" "magnificent opportunities exchanged for a little sensual enjoyment;" "for exchange, a beautiful home, devoted wife, lovely children, for drink;" "for sale, cheap, all the magnificent possibilities of a brilliant life, a competence, for one chance in a thousand at the gambling table;" "for exchange, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... delicacy in the mode of dress, more respect for women, not even mentioning the names or existence of their wives. My late Marabout camel-driver, when speaking of his wife and family, merely said saghar ("little children"). And, notwithstanding all this, no people are more sensual and impure, and esteem women less, than the Moors of towns. In swearing and oaths, the epithets "With God!" "By God!" "God!" "The Lord!" or "My Lord (Rubbee)!" "God, the Most High!" and, "The Most Sacred ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... sensual and the dark rebel in vain, Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game They burst their manacles, and wear the name Of Freedom ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... in society, or else reduce her to a level with the beasts of burden. In old savage and pagan tribes the severest burdens of physical toil were laid upon her. She was valued for the same reason that men prize their most useful animals, or as a means of gratifying sensual and selfish desires. Even in the learned and dignified forms of modern paganism, the wife is the slave rather than the companion of her husband. She is kept apart from him. The education of her mental faculties is neglected. She is not allowed ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... before, but none like Gustave Herve in his old age—at least no one of the same power. He, perhaps you have read, taught absolute Materialism and Socialism developed to their logical issues. Patriotism, he said, was a relic of barbarism; and sensual enjoyment was the only certain good. Of course, every one laughed at him. It was said that without religion there could be no adequate motive among the masses for even the simplest social order. But he was right, it seemed. After the fall of the French Church at the beginning of the century and ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... A name applied to the older satyrs. They were fond of wine and of every kind of sensual pleasure, and hence represented the luxuriant powers of nature, and were connected with the worship ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... stealing-nay, gently taking away the knowledge which an all-wise Providence has given to man as his inheritance; how it reduces his natural immunities to sensual misery! And, too, it forbids all legitimate influences that could possibly give the menial a link to elevation, to the formation of a society of his own. We would fain shrink from such a system of debasing mankind-even more, from ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... remained in Florence he might have been a better artist; the splendor and luxury of the Venetians brought out corresponding traits in Jacopo, and he fell short of the purity which the influence of Florence might have given him. He is one of the masters in whom the sensual influence of the study of pagan art was fully manifested. Many of his subjects were mythological; among them were the story of Phrixos and Helle, Mercury, Apollo, Pallas, Mars, and Neptune, the last two being colossal figures on the steps of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... She despised crinolines, girls, Macassar oil, sewing, and deportment. She adored walking, fishing, boys, and climbing trees. She did outrageous things with a genuine innocence that made the most sensual of the boys careful not to take advantage of her in any bad way. That she climbed out of her bedroom window at night to go and meet some three of the boys from the Grammar School and with them test the wishing pool on the moor on Midsummer ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... her husband, whom one of the number did not hesitate to denounce in language so coarse and disgusting, that the latent instincts of the wife were shocked beyond measure. Her husband was not the brutal, sensual tyrant this refined lady, in her intemperate zeal, represented him. None knew the picture to be so false as Mrs. Uhler, and all that was good and true in her ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... of September, a Monday, that Jack sat in the smoking-room, in Norfolk jacket and gaiters, drinking tea as fast as he possibly could. He had been out on the moors all day, and was as thirsty as the moors could make him, and he had been sensual enough to smoke a cigarette deliberately before beginning tea, in order to bring his thirst to ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... nothing. Bernard Shaw is a Puritan and his work is Puritan work. He has all the essentials of the old, virile and extinct Protestant type. In his work he is as ugly as a Puritan. He is as indecent as a Puritan. He is as full of gross words and sensual facts as a sermon of the seventeenth century. Up to this point of his life indeed hardly anyone would have dreamed of calling him a Puritan; he was called sometimes an anarchist, sometimes a buffoon, sometimes (by the more discerning stupid ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... and by taking from his store of sermons a different one from that he had intended to preach. It was his duty to scourge natural man out of the flock committed to his charge by an angry and a jealous God, and he had felt deep within him a damnable stirring of sensual pleasure as the perfumed breath of the new season had blown across his face. If the anointed of the Lord had thus yielded to the insidious wiles of unregenerate nature what greater dangers lay in wait for the weaklings ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... in order to kiss it again. It seemed she must be touching something belonging to him. As to Fontan, he gave himself airs and let himself be adored with the utmost condescension. His great nose sniffed with entirely sensual content; his goat face, with its quaint, monstrous ugliness, positively glowed in the sunlight of devoted adoration lavished upon him by that superb woman who was so fair and so plump of limb. Occasionally he gave a kiss in ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... movement, in order that the nation might maintain its military hardihood and be in a situation to furnish undiminished supplies of soldiers. The self-esteem and arrogance of the Persians were no less remarkable than their avidity for sensual enjoyment. They were fond of wine to excess; their wives and their concubines were both numerous; and they adopted eagerly from foreign nations new fashions of luxury as well as of ornament. Even to novelties in religion, they were not strongly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... stem of some splendid palmiste, brutally decapitated, naked as a mast;—petty frail growths of banana- trees or of bamboo slowly taking the place of century-old forest giants destroyed to make charcoal. But beauty enough remains to tell what the sensual paradise of the old days must have been, when sugar ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... 053) himself, and sending everywhere good preachers, who by their doctrine and example might urge on princes and people throughout the world their several duties, and who might make a holy war upon the passions of mankind, rooting up those sensual desires which, according to St. James, are the source of wars and divisions in the church and in the state." This treatise was published in Germany about the year 1700, from a manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge; and may be found at the end of Van der Hardt's ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... and altered beauty my lord's fire for his wife disappeared; with his selfishness and faithlessness her foolish fiction of love and reverence was rent away. Love!—who is to love what is base and unlovely? Respect!—who is to respect what is gross and sensual? Not all the marriage oaths sworn before all the parsons, cardinals, ministers, muftis, and rabbins in the world, can bind to that monstrous allegiance. This couple was living apart then; the woman happy to be ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... All our 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 Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... master-mechanic; a dark man with gloomy eyes and a permanent frown. Jovial good-nature went with the master-mechanic's gray eyes twinkling easily to a genial smile, but it stopped rather abruptly at the straight-lined, sensual mouth, and found a second negation in the brutal jaw which was only thinly masked by the neatly trimmed beard. Hallock's smile was bitter, and if he had a social side no one in Angels had ever discovered it. In a region where fellowship in some sort, if it were only that of the bottle ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... stability of the rest, for on October 7, 1107, during the vacancy which occurred after Walkelin's death, it fell. The monkish chroniclers attributed the fall to the fact that William Rufus, "who all his life had been profane and sensual and had expired without the Christian viaticum" (Rudborne), was interred beneath it in 1100. William of Malmesbury, however, with a degree of incredulity rare in his days, says it may have been that it would have fallen in any case "through ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... and thinking viciousness fashionable. Farmers, I think, are often worthless fellows. Few lords will cheat; and, if they do, they'll be ashamed of it: farmers cheat and are not ashamed of it: they have all the sensual vices too of the nobility, with cheating into the bargain. There is as much fornication and adultery among farmers as amongst noblemen.' BOSWELL. 'The notion of the world, Sir, however is, that the morals of women of quality ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... diabolical mythology. Their gods are as the stars for multitude. Nor are they able to conceive of these except as influenced by the same passions as themselves. Is there any reverence in approach to such? Not at all. Low, sensual, earthly depravity marked ever that approach. That is the level of the lapsed fallen wisdom of earth's wise. How does it compare with Solomon's? We may almost say as earth to heaven,—hardly that,—rather as hell to earth. Solomon, then, clearly shows us the highest ...
— Old Groans and New Songs - Being Meditations on the Book of Ecclesiastes • F. C. Jennings
... Skippy's depression 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 the ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... be due to an alien inspiration, yet still the steady movement onwards of this religion through some centuries, might be due exclusively to the code of laws bequeathed by Mahomet in the Koran. And this has been the opinion of many European scholars. They fancy that Mahomet, however worldly and sensual as the founder of a pretended revelation, was wise in the wisdom of this world; and that, if ridiculous as a prophet, he was worthy of veneration as a statesman. He legislated well and presciently, they imagine, for the interests of a remote ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... quaint humour, and sometimes wild humour, on the middle island, but never this half-sensual ecstasy of laughter. Perhaps a man must have a sense of intimate misery, not known there, before he can set himself to jeer and mock at the world. These strange men with receding foreheads, high cheekbones, and ungovernable eyes seem to represent ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... the Kailouees. I imagine they must resemble all the men we shall find in the interior, in one respect—the love of women. They are eloquent in describing the beauties of the cities of Soudan—eloquent, I mean, in their sensual style, of which I cannot venture to give a specimen. The Tanelkums, children of the desert, are, like the Haghars, far less sensual in their imaginations, and indulge less in amorous conversation. There ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... transition, almost all that constitutes the wealth of a nation, all the higher goods of life, would have to be cast to the waves, and henceforth all men would have to content themselves with the gratifications afforded by potatoes, brandy and the pleasures of the most sensual of appetites. And then, the equal education of all, demanded by the communists, would have no result but this, that no one would acquire a higher scientific training.(490) But, after all, there lurks concealed in communism much more of envy than is ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... bitter regret, what biting of lips, what flushes of shame, what heart-shocks that stopped the life-blood, and—well, truth must out—what caressing memories of the young hero who first leaped over her young love's ramparts! what loathing of the sensual lout who had been carelessly suffered to take command of the fortress!—Why, Mr. Asmodeus! you don't mean my friend, Mrs. Smith!—Did I mention any such name? No, Mrs. Grundy, I mean Mrs. Hidehart, a mild, patient, smiling wife. But, up in a little corner closet of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... truths; "it cannot know them, because they are 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 sense which St. Chrysostom[75] gives to it in the following ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... that it was which shattered him. For also he was a child of Paradise, and in the struggle between two natures he could not support himself erect. That dreadful conflict it was which supplanted his footing. Had he been gross, fleshly, sensual, being so framed for voluptuous enjoyment, he would have sunk away silently (as millions sink) through carnal wrecks into carnal ruin. He would have been mentioned oftentimes with a sigh of regret as that ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... religious and irreligious sentiments. The world was weary and jaded; it had lost confidence in human reason and faith in social ideals, and while the materialists abandoned themselves to hideous orgies and sensual debaucheries, the higher-minded went to the opposite excess and sought by flight from the world and mortification of the flesh to attain to supernatural states of ecstasy. A book has come down to us under the name of Philo[60] ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... people, who are Idolaters, are fat folks with little noses and black hair, and no beard, except a few hairs on the upper lip. The women too have very smooth and white skins, and in every respect are pretty creatures. The men are very sensual, and marry many wives, which is not forbidden by their religion. No matter how base a woman's descent may be, if she have beauty she may find a husband among the greatest men in the land, the man paying the girl's father and mother a great sum of money, according to ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... severer tokens of the Divine displeasure. He who sins in the darkness of a benighted intellect sees not so clearly, through the shadows that surround him, the countenance of an offended God; but he who sins in the broad noonday of a clear and radiant mind, when at length the delirium of sensual passion has subsided and the cloud flits away from before the sun, trembles beneath the searching eye of that accusing Power which is strong in the strength of a godlike intellect. Thus the mind and the heart are closely linked together, and the errors ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... that sensual corruption is particularly engendered by an artificial state of society, which necessarily fosters morbidity of imagination and nervous excitability. A primitive and patriarchal life, on the contrary, leads to moderation in all things, and ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... upon the window, but he was fast asleep. He seemed to me a new man. I had grown so accustomed to his sarcasm, his irony, that I had almost persuaded myself that he had never truly loved Marie, but had felt some sensual attraction for her that would, by realisation, have been at once satisfied. This was another man. Here was a struggle, an agony that was not ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... the wide distribution of wealth with its comforts and luxuries were responsible, as well as the practical completion of the pioneer days of the people, the rich blossoming of science and art, and above all the tremendous influx of warm-blooded, sensual peoples who came in millions from southern and eastern Europe, and who altered the tendencies of the cool-blooded, Teutonic races in the land. They have changed the old American Sunday, they have revolutionized ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... room seemed beings well suited to so sensual an atmosphere. The women were strangely beautiful, and all were attired in dresses of the most fantastic devices and brilliant hues. Their figures were round, supple, and elastic; their eyes dark and languishing; their lips full, ripe, and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... subjects. Whether the Roman rulers set that purpose consciously before them, one dare not affirm. Their notion probably was (for they were as worldly wise as they were unprincipled) that the more frivolous and sensual the people were, the more quietly they would submit to slavery; and the best way to keep them frivolous and sensual, the Romans knew full well; so well, that after the Empire became Christian, and many heathen matters were ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... Arabs of her imaginings, and of whose lives she had the haziest idea. When not engaged in killing their neighbours she visualized them drowsing away whole days under the influence of narcotics, lethargic with sensual indulgence. The pictures she had seen had been mostly of fat old men sitting cross-legged in the entrance of their tents, waited on by hordes of retainers, and looking languidly, with an air of utter boredom, at some miserable slave ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... rulers of the Osmans, such as Mohammed II and Suleiman. Notwithstanding his Hellenic culture, which sat on him not much better than the Roman armour sat on his Cappadocians, he was throughout an Oriental of the ordinary stamp, coarse, full of the most sensual appetites, superstitious, cruel, perfidious, and unscrupulous, but so vigorous in organization, so powerful in physical endowments, that his defiant laying about him and his unshaken courage in resistance look frequently like talent, sometimes ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... it only needed two things to make him toe the line of sensual infatuation; the first being the graciousness of every line of her beautiful person when she met him by chance; and the second, the ungraciousness of her distinctly unpleasant manner upon the same occasion, over both of which ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... was prettier, but of a more stubborn type; more passionate, less organised, and infinitely more assertive. Black-haired, black-eyed, swarthy, large-mouthed, snub-nosed; the very type and essence of unrestrained, impulsive, emotional, sensual nature. A seeing eye would have noted inevitable danger for the early years of her womanhood. She seemed amazed by the self-abnegation implied by her companion's statement; after a pause ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... fortune's fingers to sound what stop she please." The evil elements still exist in the world, and are numerous and formidable; but man, by nobleness of life and word, by patience and self-mastery, can master them, bring them into subjection, and make them tend to eventual good. Caliban, the gross, sensual, earthly element—though somewhat raised—would run riot, and is therefore compelled to menial service. The brute force of Stephano and Trinculo is vanquished by mental superiority. Even the supermundane ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... been certain restraints upon a very free life, even had the poet been disposed to lead one. Society in small country towns is notoriously inclined to be intolerant, and Shakespeare's son-in-law, Dr. Hall, was one of the great and growing body of Puritans that looked askance at sensual indulgence in any form. Moreover, there was a strong feeling against the stage in Stratford; it found expression only a year after Shakespeare's return, when the Town Council passed a resolution that stage ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... sense of the term, he certainly is, but it is of the earlier type. Cyrenaic would be a juster epithet, the "carpe diem" doctrine of the poem is too gross and sensual to have commended itself to the real Epicurus. Intense fatalism, side by side with complete agnosticism, this is the keynote of the poem. Theoretically incompatible, these two "isms" are in practice ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... immortal and rational, seated in the brain, that it may overlook and regulate the body; a second, consisting of the surly and irascible passions which, like belligerent powers, lie encamped around the heart; a third, mortal and sensual, destitute of reason, gross and brutal in its propensities, and enchained in the belly, that it may not disturb the divine soul by its ravenous howlings. Now, according to this excellent theory, what can be more clear, than that your fat alderman is most likely to have the most regular ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... free and fair, Awoke from out its sensual sleep; By you unchained, the slave of care Into the arms of joy could leap. Each brutish barrier soon was set at naught, Humanity first graced the cloudless brow, And the majestic, noble stranger, thought, From out the wondering brain sprang boldly now. Man in his glory ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... clarion, fill the fife, To all the sensual world proclaim: One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... monumental. No one else could have looked upon that slight figure, huddled down in the big old rocker, without having experienced a feeling of restraint; no one could have observed the drawn, frowning brows, and the hard lines about the still somewhat sensual mouth, without using an added caution in approaching him. There were fires stirring behind Charlie's dark eyes which were ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... must consider the race he belongs to, say the German, the Northman, the formation and character of his intellect, his ways in general of thinking and feeling, that tardiness and frigidity of sensation which keeps him from rashly and easily falling tinder the empire of sensual enjoyments, that bluntness of taste, that irregularity and those outbursts of conception which arrest in him the birth of refined and harmonious forms and methods; that disdain of appearances, that ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... The sensual and the cold will equally condemn my affection as romantic: few minds, my dear Bell, are capable of love; they feel passion, they feel esteem; they even feel that mixture of both which is the best ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... construction of systems, but the truth 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 ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... clean of heart, who marries a man and becomes the mother of his children and is then condemned to live the life of a mere animal. And all too frequently the opposite also obtains. Sometimes a man of high, pure purpose finds that he has chosen as the mother of his children a coarse, sensual woman. Now why in the world were these two people attracted to each other? This is one of life's biggest puzzles to those who have thought much along this line. In many instances extreme youth is the reason ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle
... his bad manners. She knew that men deemed him a bounder. But his very boorishness, his savage outbreaks against conventionality, attracted her. Under the thin veneer of civilisation, he was simply an animal; she knew it and it appealed to her baser nature, the sensual strain in her. That he was beast, and wild beast at that, did not affright her; she felt that she could always dominate him when she would. Once or twice the beast had come out into the open; but she had driven it back with a whip—and she believed that she ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... an effort was made to revive the Christmas entertainments of the Court at Whitehall, but they do not appear to have recovered their former splendour. The habits of Charles the Second were of too sensual a nature to induce him to interest himself in such pursuits; besides which the manners of the country had been changed during the sway of the Puritans. Pepys states that Charles II. visited Lincoln's Inn to see the Christmas ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Christmas-tree affair, full of pretty amenity, and tender ballads, and bon-bons. But some day, the truth will avenge itself, and without the least air of burlesque show us that often narrow and sordid existence, abounding in sensual appetites, coarse or childish pleasures, and paltry aims, and varnished with a weak and extravagant sentimentality,—that social order still so feudally aristocratic and feudally plebeian, in which the poor are little better than vassals, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... thick-set than his father, had, however, much the same strong energetic head, crowned with coarse black hair, and the same frank but somewhat stern eyes set in a face of clear complexion, barred by thick moustaches. But his mouth differed—a sensual, voracious mouth it was, with wolfish teeth—a mouth of prey made for nights of rapine, when the only question is to bite, and tear, and devour others. And for this reason, when some praised the frankness in his eyes, another would retort: "Yes, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... perpetrated by men aspiring to a state of holy sanctity; there are instances to be met with of priests violating the rules of decorum and morality; of monks revelling in the dissipating pleasures of sensual enjoyments, and of nuns whose frail humanity could not maintain the purity of their virgin vows. But these instances are too rare to warrant the slanders and scurrility that historians have heaped upon them. And when we talk of the sensuality of the ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... is an artisan, a man of the people, ill-adapted to elegant and refined society, out of his element in a drawing room and, moreover, of low birth, badly brought up, sullied by a vile and precocious experience, highly and offensively sensual, morbid in mind and in body, fretted by superior and discordant faculties, possessing no tact, and carrying the contamination of his imagination, temperament and past life into his austere morality ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in 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 was none ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yet recorded {1} of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... liking; satisfactory &c (good) 648. refreshing; comfortable; cordial; genial; glad, gladsome; sweet, delectable, nice, dainty; delicate, delicious; dulcet; luscious &c 396; palatable &c 394; luxurious, voluptuous; sensual &c 377. [of people] attractive &c 615; inviting, prepossessing, engaging; winning, winsome; taking, fascinating, captivating, killing; seducing, seductive; heart-robbing, alluring, enticing; appetizing &c (exciting) 824; cheering &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... name of mother or of wife. Thy votress from my tender years I am, And love, like thee, the woods and sylvan game. Like death, thou knowest, I loathe the nuptial state, And man, the tyrant of our sex, I hate, A lowly servant, but a lofty mate; Where love is duty on the female side, On theirs mere sensual gust, and sought with surly pride. Now by thy triple shape, as thou art seen In heaven, earth, hell, and everywhere a queen, Grant this my first desire; let discord cease, And make betwixt the rivals lasting peace: Quench their hot fire, or far from me remove The flame, ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... elegant play of the cultivated fancy, which could do their real power, their practical system, neither good nor harm. And one cannot help feeling, while reading the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual Love, which Castiglione, in his admirable book "The Courtier," puts into the mouth of the profligate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely to dilettantism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself. But in England, during Elizabeth's reign, the practical ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... character. But, in the case of Boz, his aim was much more intellectual and, as it were, refined. For his object was to show what was a fat person's view of this world, as seen through the medium of Fat. The Fat Boy is not a selfish, sensual being by nature—he is really helpless, and the creature of necessity who is forced by his bulk to take a certain fat view of everything round him." If we reflect on it we shall see how clearly this is carried out. It is curious that, in the instance of the ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... during his fits of debauchery; and he was not unmindful of it when he had the wherewithal to compensate them. Like most of those wayward inebriates who followed the sea as a calling, he was a perfect sailor; and even his capricious sensual habits did not prevent him being sought to rejoin ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... however, were not her only recommendation; her mind was unusually acute, and her memory was stored with much and varied information. She knew, for example, that the age in which she lived was one of cruelty and bloodshed; that the second Charles, who, at that time, filled the throne, was a sensual tyrant; that Lag, Clavers, Douglas, Johnstone, and others, were bloody persecutors; and that even Sir Roger Kirkpatrick himself, the humane and amiable in many respects, was "a friend of the castle"—of the court—and would not permit any of ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... was not deficient in talents, but he wanted application. Very early he showed strong propensities to active amusement and sensual pleasures. The school and college were little attended to, and the time that ought to have been appropriated to books and study was wasted in frolics and carousals. As soon as he was able to manage a gun and a horse, they were procured; and these, and the company to which they introduced him, afforded ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... 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 pretenders ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... glorifying its possible power over ours, to be confounded with those thoughtless and trivial rhetoricians who flatter woman with a false lip worship; and, like Lord Byron's buccaneers, hold out to them a picture of their own empire, built only upon sensual or upon shadowy excellences. We find continually a false enthusiasm, a mere bacchanalian inebriation, on behalf of woman, put forth by modern verse writers, expressly at the expense of the other sex, as though woman could be of porcelain, whilst man was of common earthern ware. Even the testimonies ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... what an odious thing mere Coupling is! A thing which every sensual Animal Can do as well as we—but prithee tell me, Is there nought else between the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... the means of judging are left us, seem to have been right; but his life was, it seems, irregular, negligent, and sensual. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... strength, shame for a sentiment so inhuman bound them the more straitly to his service; and even the evil they knew of him swelled their solicitude, for the thought of death is always the least supportable when it draws near to the merely sensual and selfish. Sometimes they held him up; sometimes, with mistaken helpfulness, they beat him between the shoulders; and when the poor wretch lay back ghastly and spent after a paroxysm of coughing, they would sometimes peer into his face, doubtfully exploring it for any mark of life. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stamping out the seed of enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... kindling within him of the idea of humanity, the individual man participates in the divinely human life of the species. Now the main element of that idea is, that the negation of the merely natural and sensual life, which is itself the negation of the spirit, is the sole way to true spiritual life. This alone is the absolute sense of Christology. That it is annexed to the person and history of one individual is a necessary result of the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... watchful eyes, the predatory nose were like those of some hunting animal. Yes, that was decidedly the strongest impression he gave. And yet in his face there was nothing animal in a bad sense. Certainly it showed no grossness. The man was wild, untamed, rather than sensual, and despite his careless use of the plains vernacular he seemed to be rather above the average in education and intelligence. At any rate, without being stupidly tongue-tied, he knew enough to remain silent when there was nothing to say, and that was a blessing, for Mrs. Austin ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... stage represents, in the forefront of the palace, a sort of hall formed of tall marble columns, between which hang heavy purple draperies, supported by golden ropes and concealing all the background. The architecture suggests the most sensual and sumptuous moments of the Venetian or Flemish Renascence, as seen in the pictures of Veronese or Rubens, with garlands, horns of plenty, fringes, vases, statues, gildings, lavishly distributed on every side. In the middle stands a massive ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... eagerly they search for and imbibe the knowledges of such things as pertain to the memory raised above the sensual things of the body, was made manifest to me from the circumstance that when they looked into the things which I knew respecting heavenly subjects, they ran over them all, and kept on stating the nature of each. For when spirits come to a man, they ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the clarion, fill the fife, To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... one, and one for aphorisms Was hunting; this the priesthood follow'd, that By force or sophistry aspir'd to rule; To rob another, and another sought By civil business wealth; one moiling lay Tangled in net of sensual delight, And one to witless indolence resign'd; What time from all these empty things escap'd, With Beatrice, I thus gloriously Was rais'd aloft, and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... right to be considered the complete expression of that scepticism and sensual sadness into which later Victorian literature was more and more falling away: a sort of bible of unbelief. For a cold fit had followed the hot fit of Swinburne, which was of a feverish sort: he had set out to break down without having, or even thinking ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... administer the Sacraments. They still profess to believe themselves visited by super-natural beings, by the Apostles and other saints. It is not generally known that the heaven of the Swedenborgian bears a close resemblance to the Mahometan's idea of heaven,—a place of sensual delights; and one of their books which is as hard to obtain as the others are easy, named "Conjugal Love," is not particularly ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... bad 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 ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the Paris Constitutionnel, is a transcendent specimen of the voluptuary. He is a large, fleshy, sensual, though by no means coarse-looking man, with the marks of high living and animal enjoyment on all his features. He first made a fortune by selling a quack medicine, after which he became proprietor of the Constitutionnel. His paper is conducted on the quack medicine ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... the night of Nature from that of man, and the repose of her scenes from the misrule of his sensual haunts; what a contrast between the refreshing return of her morning, and the feverish agonies of his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... woman worthy the affection of a soldier. Believe me, couldst thou look upon those of Europe, to whom, after Heaven, we of the order of knighthood vow fealty and devotion, thou wouldst loathe for ever the poor sensual slaves who form thy haram. The beauty of our fair ones gives point to our spears and edge to our swords; their words are our law; and as soon will a lamp shed lustre when unkindled, as a knight ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... envy, and pride: holy joy, which banishes carnal sadness, sloth, and all disrelish in spiritual exercises; peace, which crushes the seeds of discord, and the love and relish of heavenly things, which extinguish the love of earthly goods and sensual pleasures. One whose soul is slothful, sensual, and earthly, deserves not to bear the name of a Christian, much less of a minister of the gospel. There never was a saint who did not carry his cross, and walk in the steps of Christ crucified. St. Alexander would have thought ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... watched with a thoughtful smile that preacher more mighty than himself. A youth, decked out in the most fantastic fopperies of the middle age, stood with clasped hands and brimming eyes, as remorse and pleasure struggled in his face; and as he looked, the fierce sensual features seemed to melt, and his flesh came again to him like the flesh of a little child. The slave forgot his fetters; little children clapped their hands; and the toil-worn, stunted, savage woman sprung forward to kneel at her feet, and see herself transfigured in ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Olivet's southern ridge, right opposite the Temple, stood the three altars, and there the king worshipped; and, if he did, he would have a crowd of imitators. The lessons of such a fall are many. First, it teaches the destructive effect of yielding to sensual indulgence. Solomon's unbridled and monstrous polygamy sapped his manhood and his principle, darkened his clear spirit, blinded his keen eye, and turned a youth of noble aspiration and a manhood of noble accomplishment into an old age without ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... purpose. In intent she is a murderess, no less than Lucrezia Borgia or the Marquise de Brinvilliers. And the authors have drawn her character cleverly enough. They have shown her in the first act as a shallow-souled materialist, and in the later acts as a vain, irritable, sensual, unscrupulous creature. But have they given us any insight into her psychology? No, that is just what they have not done. They have assigned to her certain characteristics without which cruel and cold-blooded ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of naturalness as respects all the bodily tastes and tempers, and the endeavour should be to keep him in that key, to let no stimulation of excess or delicacy disturb the simplicity of nature, and no sensual pleasure in the name of food become a want or expectation of his appetite. Any artificial appetite begun is the beginning of distemper, disease, and a general disturbance of natural proportion. Nine tenths of the intemperate drinking begins, not in grief and destitution, as we so often ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... having 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
... forming him, Nature had taken so much pains with the building up of the body, that she had forgotten the mind, so that he had no more spiritual matter in him than sufficed to keep his blood hot, and enable his sensual organs to work out their own selfish gratifications; or, to perpetrate a metaphor, he was all the polished mahogany of a piano, without any more musical springs than might respond to one keynote of selfishness. And surely Anabella had approved ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... surrounded by charming scenery, wild flowers, the depths of a forest glade, or even the gentle splash of a mountain stream, makes one always want to open one's arms wide to embrace and hold fast the beautiful in Nature, as though one's Physical Ego, wooed by the Beautiful which is the sensuous (not sensual) expression of the Spiritual, longed to become one with the Physical, as the Personality or Transcendental Ego craves to become one with the Reality. It is the same intense feeling which makes a lover, looking into the eyes of his beloved, long to become united in the perfection of ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... happiest achievements of Titian and one of the greatest things in portraiture. There is no flattery here of the "Divine Aretino," as with heroic impudence the notorious publicist styles himself. The sensual type is preserved, but rendered acceptable, and in a sense attractive, by a certain assurance and even dignity of bearing, such as success and a position impregnable of its unique and unenviable kind may well have lent to the adventurer in his ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... nourish useful citizens, while the former, who at the best are useless, are often even downright enemies to the nation.[123] All this is only a wordy transcript of Mandeville's coarse sentences about "the sensual courtier that sets no limits to his luxury, and the fickle strumpet that invents new fashions every week." We cannot wonder that all people who were capable either of generous feeling or comprehensive thinking turned aside even from truth, when it was mixed in this amalgam of destructive ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the clarion, fill the fife! To all the sensual world proclaim One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... consider their counteracting influences, for, without doubt, by checking the selfish tendencies and restraining the animal propensities, they assist in controlling the sensual passions, and thus balance the mind and body. Such an equilibrium we call happiness. If the emotions be acute and vehement, they will absorb all other impressions and revel in their culminating and delightful experiences. They exhaust all the bodily ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the face. She, too, flung a look at the priest, but a more honest one, although in flinging it she shrank away from him. The priest, a sensual, loose-lipped man, whose mere aspect invited one to kick him, smiled sideways and downwards with a deprecating air, and spread out his hands as who should say that here was no place for ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... great change at hand. Indeed, the writing on the wall was not difficult to read. The learned and virtuous Malesherbes and many another distinguished member of the suppressed parlements warned the king of the dangers menacing the crown, but so sunk was its wearer in sensual stupefaction that he only murmured: "Well, it will last my time," and with his flatterers and strumpets uttered the famous words—"Apres nous le deluge." So lost to all sense of honour was Louis, that he defiled his hands with bribes from tax-farmers who ground the faces of the poor, and became ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... and jollier; his strong intellect struggled against increasing sensual tendencies. What the issue might have been, I know not. He died suddenly, and his destiny was transferred to another sphere. So there dropped out of California-life a partisan without bitterness, a satirist without malice, a wit without a sting, the jolliest, freest, readiest man that ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... shouting mass of men about a prize-ring, it may be soldiers sacking a town,—when the action seems so senseless that we are at a loss to account for it; but the account of it lies in the mystery of our sensual nature, in the ultimate animal that we are. The savage joy that is being expressed by the participants in such scenes is ultimately a sensual joy. These men who delighted in the torture of our Lord were sensualists; and there are few of us who if we will watch our selves closely will not find ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... unquestionably the most original, the most characteristic, the deepest and most lyrical of his productions. Here is the Sage of Craigenputtock at his best, at his grimmest, and, we must add, in his most incoherent mood. To make men think, to rouse men out of the slough of the conventional, the sensual, the mechanical, to make men feel, by sheer force of poetry, pathos, and humour, the religious mystery of life and the "wretchlessness of unclean living"—(as our Church article hath it)—nothing could be more trumpet-tongued than Sartor. The Gospel according to Teufelsdroeckh ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... exercising his supernatural gifts in the most puerile and useless fashion. It is impossible, therefore, to regard his ambition as a lust for knowledge in the usual meaning of that term, differentiating it from sensual experience. If Faustus is to be labelled according to his dominant trait, then let us describe him as the embodiment of sense-gratification. He is a sensualist from the moment that he takes up the book of magic and ponders over what it may bring him. A degraded form of him has been ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... of human suffering, countries depopulated, and fields deluged with blood. Such are the results of desire, when not directed to objects worthy of a moral being, and not kept under the rigid control of conscience, and the immutable laws of moral rectitude. When, in any of these forms, a sensual or selfish propensity is allowed to pass the due boundary which is fixed for it by reason and the moral principle, the mental harmony is destroyed, and even the judgment itself comes to be impaired and distorted in that ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... 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
... eyes large and lustrous as the eyes of Juno, with bold carriage and in free toilettes, step forward out of the past with the proud and insolent graces of the divinities of some Bacchanalia." With the provocative and sensual charm which is so powerful in its appeal, she had a rare skill in displaying her beauty to its fullest advantage. Her cult of the toilette, the Duc de Luynes tells us, went with her even by night. She never went to bed without decking herself with all her diamonds; and her most seductive ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... thought that in spite of the splendid appearance of the royal personage he had never seen a human countenance so repulsive and so depraved. The brutal, languid eye looked out at him from a face whose unwholesome complexion, heavy jaw, and sensual mouth sent a thrill of sickening disgust through him. As he gazed at the retreating figure of the Duke, which, in ifs heaviness and lethargy, bore the mark of excesses as unmistakably as did the coarsened face, all the disgraceful stories, the rumors, the ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... profession Of meekness, wisely give a demonstration, Of all his works, from a good conversation. But if your hearts are full of bitterness And strife, boast not, nor do the truth profess. This wisdom is not from above descending, But earthly, sensual, and to evil tending: For where there's strife and envying there's confusion And ev'ry evil work in the conclusion. But the true wisdom that is from above, Is, in the first place, pure, then full of love, Then gentle and entreated easily, Next merciful, without ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... guided the counsels of statesmen, and, a poet himself, was an inspiration to poets. Everywhere in Italy the monks of his order were travelling, restoring the shrines, preaching against the voluptuous and unworthy pictures with which sensual artists had desecrated the churches, and calling the people back by their exhortations to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... responds—the pithy epigram of the Characteristics, the Chesterfieldian grace in his advice "On the Conduct of Life," the palpitating movement with which he gives expression to his keen enjoyment of his sensual or intellectual existence, and the subdued solemnity of his reveries which sometimes remind us that he was writing in an age which had rediscovered Sir Thomas Browne. The following sentence proves how accurately he could catch the rhythm of the seventeenth century. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... was such a decadence. In a moment the Medici prestige, which had been steadily growing under Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo until it was world famous, crumbled to dust. Piero was a coarse-minded, pleasure-loving youth—"The Headstrong" his father had called him—whose one idea of power was to be sensual and tyrannical; and the enemies of Florence and of Italy took advantage of this fact. Savonarola's sermons had paved the way from within too. In 1494 Charles VIII of France marched into Italy; Piero pulled himself together and visited the king to make terms for Florence, but made such ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... his daughter, while still in the heat of his prime, he had foresworn all traffic with women. Yet now, along with the tacitly admitted claims of the son, arose the claim of the mistress, mother of that son—in no sensual sort, but with a certain wildness of bygone romance, wind and rain-swept, unsubstantial, dim and grey. Ever since conviction of the extreme gravity of his physical condition dawned on him, the idea of penetrating ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... with that insulting look of sensual admiration which some men think the highest compliment they can pay to a woman. And just in the middle of all this, Hector Bracondale arrived upon the scene. He had been searching for her everywhere; in that crowd one could miss any one with ease. He stood and watched her before she caught ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... stem with heart and hand The roaring tide of life, than lie, Unmindful, on its flowery strand, Of God's occasions drifting by! Better with naked nerve to hear The needles of this goading air, Than in the lap of sensual ease forego The godlike power to do, the godlike aim to ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... 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
... that is, perhaps, the most general 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
... his foes; and so, could he but gratify his gullet, he thought that decency and self-control need be observed in nothing. By idleness and sloth he stained his glorious lineage, living a loose and sensual life; and his soul, so degenerate, so far perverted and astray from the steps of his fathers, he loved to plunge into most abominable gulfs of foulness. Fowl-fatteners, scullions, frying-pans, countless cook-houses, different cooks to roast or spice the banquet—the choosing of these stood to him ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... successful reign of thirty-three years, B.C. 527, and his two sons, Hippias and Hipparchus, succeeded him in the government, ruling, like their father, at first wisely but despotically, cultivating art and letters and friendship of great men. But sensual passions led to outrages which resulted in the assassination of Hipparchus. Hippias, having punished the conspirators, changed the spirit of the government, imposed arbitrary taxes, surrounded himself with an armed ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... looked up and the light fell on his face. It was deeply lined and of a curious dead color, but, while, it bore a sensual stamp and something in it hinted at cruelty, it was, Blake felt, the face of ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss |
