"Sensuality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where an officer, holding the rank of lieutenant-colonel, could not tolerate a breakfast in which this odious article was wanting; but, as a savage retribution invariably supervened within an hour or two upon this act of insane sensuality, he came to a resolution that life was intolerable with muffins, but still more intolerable without muffins. He would stand the nuisance no longer; but yet, being a just man, he would give nature one ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... only one point of real beauty in the entire countenance. The mouth was perfect. But the man with a perfect mouth is usually one whom it will be found expedient to avoid. Without a certain allowance of sensuality no man is genial—without a little weakness there is no kind heart. This Frenchman's mouth was not, however, obtrusively faultless. It was perfect in its design, but, somehow, many people failed to take note of the fact. It is so with the "many," one finds. The human ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... distinguished knight was heavy and well-fed, and of a rich and rubicund countenance. From over-indulgence he had become unwieldy, being propped up in a well-stuffed chair, one leg resting on a low stool, his whole frame bloated by indolence and sensuality. He was short-necked and full-chested. His eyes, gray and fiery, were almost starting from his head, by reason of some obstruction to the free current of the blood in that direction. This was accompanied by a wheezing and phlethoric cough, which oft troubled him. At his side sat a priest, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... species of disposition that could not be very agreeable to me, who always despised money, had an unbounded benevolence of heart, and loved pleasure beyond every other consideration. When I say pleasure, I would not be understood to mean sensuality, which constitutes the supreme happiness of those only who are void of sentiment and imagination. Nevertheless, I received some civilities in this place, and, among the rest, the reputation of having for my lover the king of P—'s ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... connection with the lives of Fenelon and Madame Guyon, if not from its intrinsic character. Like most other mystical doctrines, his teachings seem to have been open to the charge, that, while professedly based on the highest spirituality, they had a direct tendency to encourage sensuality in its most dangerous form. Molinos was at first much favored at Rome and by the Pope himself; but at the time of Burnet's journey he was in the custody of the Holy Office, while his books were undergoing the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... moment, crushed. Then her spirit revolted with such turbulence, and the blood so throbbed in her, that she could hardly lie still. How dare he think her like that—a nothing, a bundle of soulless inexplicable whims and moods and sensuality? A thousand times, No! It was HE who was the soulless one, the dry, the godless one; who, in his sickening superiority, could thus deny her, and with her all women! That stare was as if he saw her—a doll tricked out in garments labelled soul, spirit, rights, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in the human countenance—some single virtue, vice, or quality which dominates all petty characteristics. Most faces express weakness—the faces that pass one in the streets. Some are the incarnation of meanness, some pleasanter types verge on sensuality. The face of the man who sat watching Agar expressed indomitable, invincible determination, and nothing else. It was the face of one who was ready to sacrifice any one, even himself, to a single all-pervading purpose. ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... night to poach and caring for nothing but satisfying his gross animal appetites; afraid to look you in the face, hardly able to give an intelligible, certainly not a civil answer; his countenance expressing only vacancy, sensuality, cunning, ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... we get the measure of Sebald as at this hour he is. He turns upon her with a demand to know how she now "feels for him." Her answer, wherein the whole of her nature (as, again, at this hour it is) reveals itself—callous but courageous, proud and passionate, cruel in its utter sensuality, yet with the force and honesty which attend on all simplicity, good or evil—her answer strikes a truer note than does anything which Sebald yet has said, or is to say. She replies that she loves him better now ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... She desires to see him surrounded by flower-pots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like to curl his hair, and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days. Ugh! It makes ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Christians among the higher classes, either altogether overlook or deny, or at least greatly extenuate the corruption and weakness here in question. They acknowledge indeed that there is, and ever has been in the world, a great portion of vice and wickedness; that mankind have been ever prone to sensuality and selfishness, in disobedience to the more refined and liberal principles of their nature; that in all ages and countries, in public and in private life, innumerable instances have been afforded of oppression, of rapacity, of cruelty, of fraud, of envy, and of malice. They own that it ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... and unblamed, Mr. Crauford walked onward in his beaten way; and, secretly laughing at the toleration of the crowd, continued at his luxurious villa the orgies of a passionless yet brutal sensuality. ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot girls, and stands by his whole unfeatured wilderness of an existence, instead of seeking relief in drink or foreign travel. Hence in the French, in that meat-market of middle-aged sensuality, the disgusted surprise with which we see the hero drift sidelong, and practically quite untempted, into every description of misconduct and dishonour. In each, we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... disgusted with the materialistic working of "rational" religion, they become mystics. They quarrel with all that is, because it is not spiritual enough. They would, perhaps, be patient if they thought this the mere sensuality of childhood in our nation, which it might outgrow; but they think that they see the evil widening, deepening,—not only debasing the life, but corrupting the thought, of our people, and they feel that if they ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... play with others in quartets or other chamber music. As a man he had all the worst faults of a genius. The vast sums of money which he accumulated were gambled away. His whole life was disgraced by unbridled sensuality coupled with sordid avarice. This explains in a measure Paganini's inferior rank as a composer. Famous are his variations on the tune "God Save the King," his "Studies," his twenty variations on "Il Carnevale ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... from great dovecots and towers, which last once served for the defence of the manor-house or the little castle. When the fury of the religious wars followed upon that tidal wave of dilettantism and sensuality which swept over Europe from the south to the north, and which we call the Renaissance, and when Huguenots and Leaguers gave such frequent dressings of blood to the vineyards of Perigord, every house and church that was in any way fortified was used as a stronghold ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... with a narrow forehead, small grey eyes, and that peculiar expression of countenance which the vice of indulged avarice seems generally to produce. Though his lips denoted sensuality, their total want of firmness showed the astute Father Mendez that he would be easily moulded to his will. The marquis was perfectly well aware of the way in which the church was at times apt to bleed those whom she designated her most devoted sons, and he winced ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... force and activity of the animal nature, and unless the upper surface of the brain is well developed all over, we may expect some excess in the way of violence, temper, selfishness, perversity, sensuality, dishonesty, avarice, rudeness of manners, moral insensibility, slander, contentiousness, jealousy, envy, revenge, or some other form of wickedness, according ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the sixties went the denominations in the order here named: Congregational, Protestant Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal; in 1871 the Presbyterians went, and then the Baptists. It was dark. Mighty night had beclouded the intellect and obscured the spiritual senses; civilized sensuality swayed with unchecked hand the destinies of the masses. The blinded people groped for light in the pitchlike blackness of ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... worship. The nobility swarmed about him, and sought advancement from his favor. Festivals and shows of all sorts—plays, ballets, banquets, dazzling fireworks—were the costly diversion of the gay throngs of courtiers, male and female, in that court, where sensuality was thinly veiled by ceremonious politeness and punctilious religious observances. Poets, artists, and scholars were liberally patronized, and joined in the common adulation offered to the sovereign. Stately edifices were built, great libraries gathered; academies of art and of science, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Father, and whom, God in turn, calls sons. The flood came not because the generation of Cain was corrupt, but because the generation of the righteous who had believed God, had obeyed his Word, and had possessed the true worship, now had lapsed into idolatry, disobedience to parents, sensuality, oppression. Even so the last day shall be hastened, not by the profligacy of Gentile, Turk and Jew, but by the filling of the Church with errors through the pope and fanatical spirits, so that those very ones who occupy ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... at times, under the aspect of an obscure appeal to sensuality and brings with it a passing desire of the heart and of the senses, which produces an artificial appreciation of ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... were bright but crafty, and his features denoted both sensuality and cruelness. In his youth he may have been a rather fine looking black, but when I saw him his appearance ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... said the sage; "for unalloyed delight give me a good honest article of Sensuality. So soon as my 'Essay upon the Correlation of Mind-forces' shall have brought me fame and fortune, I hope to abjure the higher faculties, devoting the remainder of my life to the cultivation ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... full possession of the field of literature, and erected their tribunals before the middle of the century, whilst at Versailles nothing was spoken or thought of except amusements and hunting, Jesuits and processions, and the grossest sensuality prevailed. The members of the Parisian societies were not a whit more moral or decent in their behavior than those about the court at Versailles, but they carried on open war against hypocrisy, and all that was praised and approved of by ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... her more closely, she drew over her head and shoulders, the soft folds about her exquisite face completing a classic picture of such radiant beauty as is seldom seen nowadays among the increasingly imperfect and repulsive specimens of female humanity which 'progress' combined with sensuality, produce for ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... and proper one, and at night, some competitors, whom he knew, as well as he could know anything which he could not prove, smeared his sign with black paint, utterly destroying it! But the misguided men who stooped to such an act—the victims of sensuality and excess—have years ago ended their journey, and passed to the bar ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... his virtuous father at the age of twenty. He had been educated with singular care, but was wholly given up to coarse sensuality. The people, however, still hoped that he might be worthy of his father, and received him, upon his accession, with loud expressions of joy. For a short time he concealed his true disposition; but his sister Lucilla, jealous of her brother's wife ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... scriptural incidents which contained any horrible, fantastic, or grotesque elements. The crucifix represented a man dying in the agony of torture, and it was the chief symbol of the religion. The suggestion in all this art produced barbaric passion and sensuality. Any one who, in childhood, had in his hands one of the old Bibles illustrated by wood cuts knows what power the cuts had to determine the concept which was formed from the text, and which has persisted through life, in spite of ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... it come to pass that while I was utterly absorbed in pride and sensuality, divine grace, the cure for both diseases, was forced upon me, even though I, forsooth, would fain have shunned it. First was I punished for my sensuality, and then for my pride. For my sensuality I lost those things whereby I practiced it; for my pride, engendered ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... sensitiveness with which Harrington's cultivated mind recoiled from the grossness of vulgar and ignorant infidelity. We called at the cottage of a little farmer, a tenant of his, somewhat notorious both for profanity and sensuality. Presuming, I suppose, on his young landlord's suspected heterodoxy, and thinking, perhaps, to curry favor with him, he ventured (I know not what led to it) to indulge in some stupid joke about the legion and the ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... rapacity;—quite contrary to the finer sensibilities of the heart! Fools, that expect your verdant Millennium, and nothing but Love and Abundance, brooks running wine, winds whispering music,—with the whole ground and basis of your existence champed into a mud of Sensuality; which, daily growing deeper, will soon have no bottom ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... and an ardent love of letters seem to have been lavished for no other purpose than to show that, without a good heart, they serve only to make their possessor the most contemptible of mankind. Lady Mary Wortley's heart was the receptacle of all meanness and sensuality—the prey of a selfishness as intense as rank, riches, a bad education, natural malignity, and the extremes of good and bad fortune, ever engendered in the breast of woman. The remarks on her character, in the volume before us, are, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... liquor in which he had so freely indulged had served to fire his brain and nerve his hand to carry out his wicked intent; and so the jury brought in its verdict, and he was sentenced to be executed, which sentence was duly performed and that closed another act of the sad drama. Intemperance and Sensuality had clasped hands together, and beneath their cruel fostering the gallows had borne its dreadful fruit of death. The light of one home had been quenched in gloom and guilt. A husband had broken over the barriers that God placed around the path of marital love, and his sun had gone ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... flesh and skin. Each feature is as eloquent of rascality as an ape's of idiocy. Experts skilled in physiognomy need no confession from impish lips, but read the life-history from page to page written on features "dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, branded by remorse; the body consumed with sloth and dishonored with selfish uses; the bones full of the sins of youth, the face hideous with secret vices, the roots dried up beneath and the branches cut off above." It is as natural and necessary for hidden thoughts ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... relations between romantic love and devotional religion and to do it in the grand style. That is where Dante is so supremely great. And that is why, for all his greatness, his influence upon modern art has been so morbid and evil. The odious sensuality of the so-called "Pre-Raphaelite School" —a sensuality drenched with holy water and perfumed with incense—has a smell of corruption about it that ought never to ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... who disguise themselves like masquers to deceive the world. For, whilst they give the common people to understand that they are busied about nothing but contemplation and devotion in fastings and maceration of their sensuality—and that only to sustain and aliment the small frailty of their humanity—it is so far otherwise that, on the contrary, God knows what cheer they make; Et Curios simulant, sed Bacchanalia vivunt. You may read it in great letters in the colouring of their red snouts, and gulching bellies ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... on thee! Seeming! I will write against it: You seem to me as Dian in her orb, As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown; But you are more intemperate in your blood Than Venus, or those pamper'd animals That rage in savage sensuality. ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... never to be recalled without a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The King cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into a viceroy of France, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... painting to place before you. Several of the artists here assembled may serve as warnings to you: the Venetians went astray as soon as they made colouring the principal object of attraction, and so by degrees they sank in sensuality. The effeminate Correggio proceeded in this career at a more rapid rate, until he had cast aside every restraint of modesty and morality, and gave himself up to unbridled voluptuousness.[12] Michael ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... to be found in Polytheism, it was so mixed with error as to be practically only evil. As the doctrines of heathen religions were corrupt, so their worship was only a debasing superstition. Their influence was to make men worse, not better; their tendency was to produce sensuality, cruelty, and universal degradation. They did not proceed, in any sense, from God; they were not even the work of good men, but rather of deliberate imposition and priestcraft. A supernatural religion had become necessary in order to counteract the fatal consequences of these ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... is it true?" he asked, with an angry smile. "Is it true that when you were in Petersburg you belonged to a secret society for practising beastly sensuality? Is it true that you could give lessons to the Marquis de Sade? Is it true that you decoyed and corrupted children? Speak, don't dare to lie," he cried, beside himself. "Nikolay Stavrogin cannot lie to Shatov, who struck him in the face. Tell me everything, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... his religion will be subordinate or absent. Essentially he will be a moral man, certainly so far as to exercise self-restraint and live in an ordered way. Unless this is so, he will be unable to give his principal energies to thought and work—that is, he will not be a good typical engineer. If sensuality appear at all largely in this central body, therefore,—a point we must leave open here—it will appear without any trappings of sentiment or mysticism, frankly on Pauline lines, wine for the stomach's sake, and it is better to marry than to burn, a concession to the flesh necessary ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... had to do, to brand and emblazon him with the vices of his nature—but with how much discrimination that little is done! He took up the correct portrait, which Walpole upbraids him with skulking into a court of law to obtain, and in a few touches the man sank, and the demon of hypocrisy and sensuality sat in his stead. It is a fiend, and yet it is Wilkes still. It is said that when he had finished this remarkable portrait, the former friendship of Wilkes overcame him, and he threw it into the fire, from which it was saved by the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... development hypothesis. On the other hand, his long and laborious effort to refute Newton's theory of the composition of white light is now generally regarded as a misdirection of energy. In his Roman Elegies (1790) he struck a note of pagan sensuality. The pensive distichs, telling of the wanton doings of Amor amid the grandeur that was Rome, were a little shocking in their frank portraiture of the emancipated flesh. The outbreak of violence in France seemed to him nothing but madness and folly, since he did not see the real Revolution, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and of mother both they had been deprived in infancy; and, from that period, their home had been with their relative and guardian. The conduct of one charge, at least, had been from boyhood such as to cause the greatest pain to him who had assumed a parent's cares. Hypocrisy, sensuality, and—for his years and social station—unparalleled dishonesty, had characterised James Temple's short career. By some inexplicable tortuosity of mind, with every natural endowment, with every acquired advantage, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... that slept in her dulled eyes and in her sallow-white face and in her thin body awoke and became alive. It was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the secret held back in its long, subtle, serious, and slender lines. Desmond's sensuality was woven with so fine a web that you would have said it belonged less to her body than to her ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... life. I believe not only in the thorns on the rosebush, but in the roses which the thorns defend. Asceticism is the child of sensuality and superstition. She is the secret mother of many a secret sin. God, when he made man's body, did not give us a fibre too much, nor a passion too many. I would steal no violet from the young maiden's bosom; rather would I fill her arms with more fragrant roses. But a life merely ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... come back to me. She'll never be able to make him happy." And so I pictured Sylvia upon her honeymoon, followed by an invisible ghost whose voice she would never hear, whose name she would never know. All that van Tuiver had learned from Claire, the sensuality, the ennin, the contempt for woman—it would rise to torment and terrify his bride, and turn her life to bitterness. And then beyond this, deeps upon deeps, to which my imagination did not go—and of which the Frenchwoman, with all her freedom ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... ideas. The inherited paralysis on a luetic basis is accepted there as a tragic element of human fate. On the height of true art the question of decency or indecency has disappeared, too. The nude marble statue is an inspiration, and not a possible stimulus to frivolous sensuality, if the mind is aesthetically cultivated. The nakedness of erotic passion in the drama of high aesthetic intent before a truly educated audience has not the slightest similarity to the half-draped chorus of sensual ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... a life of dissoluteness—escaped Walter entirely. Perhaps he knew what it meant; but in his heart he felt that it meant something else. What attracted him most was not the food and drink, under which the table "groaned," nor the sinful sensuality painted on the faces of the ladies. It was the freedom and unconventionality of the company that charmed him. In order to emphasize the idea of prodigality, the painter had allowed some big dogs to upset an ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... all sexual pleasures, either with gods, or men, or animals. I shall not give way to sensuality (etc). ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... of mind and flesh there had still remained in Mortimer the capacity for animal affection; and that does not mean sensuality alone, but generosity and a sort of routine devotion as characteristic components of a character which had now disintegrated into the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Hayward was the worst possible thing for Philip. He was a man who saw nothing for himself, but only through a literary atmosphere, and he was dangerous because he had deceived himself into sincerity. He honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for the artistic temperament, and his idleness for philosophic calm. His mind, vulgar in its effort at refinement, saw everything a little larger than life size, with the outlines blurred, in a golden ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... 'be of good heart. I know that God gave me the victory over the French, not that I deserved it, but I fully believe that he wished to punish them; and if what I have heard is true, it is not to be wondered at, for never were there greater disorder, sensuality, sins, and vices seen than now prevail in France; which it is horrible to hear described; and if God is provoked, it is not a subject of surprise, and no one can be astonished.' Many more conversations are said to have passed between the King and the Duke of Orleans, ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... as, on the whole, a rare article in this world. It is in some respects necessarily so. Many men are incapable of stating a fact or telling a truth. They have not the power to comprehend or express either. The majority of men receive truth through such media of prejudice, selfishness, bigotry, sensuality, and the like, that they never get it pure, and are therefore incapable of uttering it correctly, even when their power of expression equals their power of perception, which is not commonly the case. So there is a world ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... dust of the earth—God knew how to create man "but little lower than the angels." Out of a nature seemingly given over to selfishness and sensuality he sometimes forges lofty souls, which can do and dare for ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... had stood for so little in his existence, that he had never stopped to wonder if his domestic relations might have been pleasanter had he gone about the business of selection as carefully as he picked and chose the tobacco for his factory. Even the streak of sensuality in his nature did not run warm as in the body of an ordinary mortal, and his vices, like his virtues, had become so rarefied in the frozen air of his intelligence that they were no longer recognizable as belonging to the common frailties ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... I know, have not only been King of Scotland; he may, by virtue of his temper and ancestry, have been a Scotch King of Scotland. There was something Scotch about his combination of clear-headedness with sensuality. There was something Scotch about his combination of doing what he liked with knowing what he was doing. But I was not talking of the personality of Charles, which may have been Scotch. I was talking of the popularity of Charles, which was certainly ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... reflected in the warmer tones of his replies; a new pain ordered his comments. The situation, too, appealed to him; his instinct responded to the obvious implications of the position in the exact degree of his habit of mind. The familiar, professional gallantry took possession of him, directing the sensuality ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... as hers had been was the prostitution of love, and now she deserved to be loveless for the rest of her life. Vanity and sensuality had been her substitutes for love. She had dealt in travesty and had pretended, even to herself, that she was following reality. It was amazing how she ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... appetites immoderately. In January the temperature suffered an unseasonable rise; some successful captures of walrus also took place; and these circumstances, combined perhaps with some superstitious customs of which we were ignorant, seemed the signal for giving way to sensuality. The lamps were accumulated, and the kettles more frequently replenished; and gluttony, in its most disgusting form, became for a while the order of the day. The Esquimaux were now seen wallowing in ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... consummating all things within themselves, as the dark little Southern infants do, the Northern Jesus-children reach out delicate little hands of wondering innocence towards delicate, flower-reverential mothers. Compare a Botticelli Madonna, with all her wounded and abnegating sensuality, with a Hans Memling Madonna, whose soul is pure and only reverential. Beyond me is the mystery and the glory, says the Northern mother: let me have no self, let me only seek that which is all-pure, all-wonderful. But the Southern mother says: This is mine, this is mine, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... across that purple waste, so silent and unpeopled now! How often has the train of captives looked, with sinking hearts, upon the distant city, and beheld its population pouring out, to hail the return of their conqueror! What riot, sensuality and murder, have run mad in the vast palaces now heaps of brick and shattered marble! What glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence and famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... graduate of one of our greatest medical schools, and one who has studied deeply into the forces that build the body and the forces that tear it down: "The mind is the natural protector of the body. . . . Every thought tends to reproduce itself, and ghastly mental pictures of disease, sensuality, and vice of all sorts, produce scrofula and leprosy in the soul, which reproduces them in the body. Anger changes the chemical properties of the saliva to a poison dangerous to life. It is well known that sudden and violent emotions have not only weakened the heart in a few hours, but have caused ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... sensitive betrayer of the life's good and bad actions—revealed that all had not been well with her; its lines were hard and vicious, and the resentful curve of the upper lip spoke of foolish pride, not unmixed with reckless sensuality. She sat for a moment or two motionless; then, with exceeding care and tenderness, she began to unfold her thin, torn shawl by gentle degrees, looking down with anxious solicitude at the object concealed within. Only a baby—and withal a ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... took his stand, let kings and the devil do their worst. Beyond these he had nothing which so encouraged his heart, and gave him such strength and joy. To the personal insults and imputations of sensuality and so forth, which Henry VIII., this man of unbridled passions, had poured upon him, he replied that he was well aware that, in regard to his personal life, he was a poor sinner, and that he was glad his enemies were all saints and angels. He added, however, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... the moral evil in the world are due to malignant egoism, the source of the remaining fourth is, in a word, sensuality. By sensuality I mean the undue or perverted development of the desires and passions of the animal self,—the desire for food and drink, the sexual desires, the desire for physical or semi-physical excitement, the animal passion of anger, and ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... Insatiable sensuality ruled this Borgia, a man of unusual beauty and strength, until his last years. Never was he able to cast out this demon. He angered Pius II by his excesses, and the first ray of light thrown upon Rodrigo's private life is an admonitory letter written by that pope, the ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... of the individual. Overwrought attachment to satisfactions of the palate, betrayed by constant thinking of viands and pleasures of the table, and by avidity in taking nourishment, betokens a dangerous, if not a positively sinful, degree of sensuality. Then, to continue eating or drinking after the appetite is appeased, is in itself an excess, and mortal sin may be committed even without going to the last extreme. Lastly, it is easy to yield inordinately to this passion by attaching undue importance to the quality of our victuals, ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... deal more serious than that. We are doing our fighting with the Captain looking at us, and that should be a stimulus, a joy and not a terror. Realise God's eye watching you, and sin, and meanness, and negligence, and selfishness, and sensuality, and lust, and passion, and all the other devils that are in you will vanish like ghosts at cockcrow. 'Walk before Me,' and if you feel that I am beside you, you cannot sin. 'Walk before Me, and be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... whom he had forgotten before, but sought now in his despair. Rosa Vanozza possessed all the vices and all the virtues of a Spanish courtesan; her devotion to the Virgin amounted to superstition, her fondness for her children to weakness, and her love for Roderigo to sensuality. In the depth of her heart she relied on the influence she had been able to exercise over him for nearly thirty years; and like a snake, she knew haw to envelop him in her coils when the fascination of her glance ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Sensuality was not encouraged in Canada by the leaders of society, as was notoriously the case in the best circles of England and of France. Dull and devoid of intellectual light as was the life of the Canadian, ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... almost morbid consciousness of the deformity of moral evil, he reverenced in himself and in others the presence of a spirit which connected humanity with its Maker, and by unfolding the greatness of the spiritual capacities of men, he hoped to elevate them above the degradation of sensuality and sin. He was not a teacher of spiritual pride, conceit and self-worship, but of those vital principles of love and reverence which elevate man only by directing ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... and knowledge;" judging that means were to be spent upon learning, and not learning to be applied to means. And as for the privateness or obscureness (as it may be in vulgar estimation accounted) of life of contemplative men, it is a theme so common to extol a private life, not taxed with sensuality and sloth, in comparison and to the disadvantage of a civil life, for safety, liberty, pleasure, and dignity, or at least freedom from indignity, as no man handleth it but handleth it well; such a consonancy it hath to men's conceits in the expressing, and ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... yours is repulsive, forbidding, demoniac! You speak of woman as being the noblest subject of contemplation for man, but interpreted by your book and your experiences this seems in the last analysis to lead you right into sensuality, and what I should call illicit connections. Look at your story of Doris! I do want to know what you feel about that story in relation to right and wrong. Do you consider that all that Orelay adventure was put right, atoned, explained by the fact that Doris, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... would hear of the blunder every day of his life, and it wouldn't be the Home Secretary either. Deemster Mylrea was called upon to punish the crimes of drink, and he was himself a drunkard; to try the offences of sensuality, and ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... bitter satire are the comedies of Marivaux, delicate indeed in observation of life and character, skilled in their exploration of the byways of the heart, brilliant in fantasy, subtle in sentiment, lightly touched by the sensuality of the day. Philippe Nericault Destouches (1680-1754) had the ambition to revive the comedy of character, and by its means to read moral lessons on the stage; unfortunately what he lacked was comic power. In his ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... what has been done? How do I come into the midst of it all?" The vastness of street and house he was prepared for, the multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the systematised sensuality of a ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... revolt, the Anabaptists to madness. Under other circumstances the noble enthusiasm, with other surroundings the strong will, of Jan of Leyden might have left a different mark on the page of history. Dragged down in this whirlpool of fanaticism, sensuality, and despair, we can only look upon him as a factor of the historic judgment, a necessary actor in that tragedy of Muenster, which forms one of the most solemn ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... the learned Dr B—, in his treatise on the Four Digestions, explains in what manner the volatile effluvia from the intestines stimulate and promote the operations of the animal economy: he affirmed, the last Grand Duke of Tuscany, of the Medicis family, who refined upon sensuality with the spirit of a philosopher, was so delighted with that odour, that he caused the essence of ordure to be extracted, and used it as the most delicious perfume: that he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with business, found immediate relief and uncommon ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... become one of spiritual and moral bankruptcy. The Bible has been suppressed and blind human reason has been exalted. There is no bond of morality to hold the people together. Men become slaves of their lusts and appetites, and society, a mass of sensuality, rascality and falsehood. Infidelity, despotism and general bankruptcy prevail every where. There is no royal authority and the palace of justice at ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... been molded to such myriad varieties. It has in full consciousness of its power sacrificed all earthly happiness, toiled and died for rulers, for ideas of which it had no idea, for vague war-cries—it has existed only for sensuality, or beauty, or food—for religion or for ostentation, according to different climate or age or soil—it has groveled for ages in misery or roamed free and proud—and between the degraded slave and the proud free-man there is, as I think, a very terrible difference ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the body, either for exertion or for sensual pleasure, is destructive to our higher faculties, operating in many respects like the indulgence of the lower passions. Hence mankind are imbruted by excessive toil as well as by excessive sensuality ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... influence in his life. To his father, Louis XIV.'s younger brother, who is said to have been son of Cardinal Mazarin, Anne of Austria's lover, and who was the most debased man of his time in all France, he just as surely owed the bias of sensuality to which he chiefly owes his place ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... and conditions of the soul returning to God there is a condition all too easily entered—that of an enervating, pulseless, seductive inertia. In this condition of inert but marvellous contentment the soul would love to stay. This is spiritual sensuality, a spiritual back-water. The true life and energy of the soul are lulled to idleness: basking in happiness, the soul ceases to give and becomes ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... one was committed by a stranger who had been adopted into the tribe. In several other matters of morality they rank above most uncivilized, and even above many civilized nations. They are temperate in food and drink, and the gross sensuality of the Chinese and Malays is unknown among them. They have the usual fault of all people in a half-savage state—apathy and dilatoriness, but, however annoying this may be to Europeans who come in contact with them, it cannot be considered a very grave offence, or be held ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... indignant resignation. "The Raven's Almanack" of the same year, though portentous in its menace of plague, famine, and civil war, is less noticeable for its moral and religious declamation than for its rather amusing than edifying anecdotes; which, it must again be admitted, in their mixture of jocular sensuality with somewhat ferocious humor, rather remind us of King Louis XI. than of that royal novelist's Italian models or precursors. "A Rod for Runaways" is the title of a tract which must have somewhat perplexed the readers who came to it for practical counsel or ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... rightly observes, this sad legend, in its Christianized form, is doubtless descriptive of the struggle between the new and the old faiths. The knightly Tannhauser, satiated with pagan sensuality, turns to Christianity for relief, but, repelled by the hypocrisy, pride, and lack of sympathy of its ministers, gives up in despair, and returns to drown his anxieties ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... thirteenth-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound, austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth. Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5] In particular, deistic France, arbiter elegantiarum, felt with a shiver ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the 'Tannhauser;' it seems to paint with a fatal fascination the beauty of wickedness, the rightness, so to speak, of sensuality. I feel after it as if I had been yielding to a ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the most perfect of poets; and a phrase struck him like a blow: Du, stolzes Herz, A hast es ja gewolit. Where was the pride of his heart? And he raged against himself, as a man bites on a sore tooth, in a heady sensuality of scorn. 'I have no pride, I have no heart, no manhood,' he thought, 'or why should I prolong a life more shameful than the gallows? Or why should I have fallen to it? No pride, no capacity, no force. Not even a bandit! and to be starving ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Latins; on the south and east, of the Greeks. Two nations, pre-eminent above all the rest, represent to us the force of derived mind on either side. As the central power is eclipsed, the orbs of reflected light gather into their fulness; and when sensuality and idolatry had done their work, and the religion of the empire was laid asleep in a glittering sepulchre, the living light rose upon both horizons, and the fierce swords of the Lombard and Arab were shaken ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... he reasoned that no cult, not divinely supported, could survive such desperate depravity as he saw there. The third tale, of the three rings, points the moral that no one can be certain what religion is the true one. The fourth narrative, like many others, turns upon the sensuality of the monks. Elsewhere the author describes the most absurd relics, and tells how a priest deceived a woman by pretending that he was the angel Gabriel. The trend of such a work was naturally the reverse of edifying. The irreligion is ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... indications that Mr. Goldwin Smith does not understand the importance of this fundamental rule. In his Inaugural Lecture, published two years ago, the following extravagant sentence occurs: "Before the Revolution, the fervour and the austerity of Rousseau had cast out from good society the levity and sensuality of Voltaire" (p. 15). This view—which he appears to have abandoned, for in his Irish History he tells us that France "has now become the eldest daughter of Voltaire"—he supports by a reference to an abridgment of French history, much and justly esteemed ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... devotion—a sentiment which they pretend to have received from Mahomet himself by tradition. The fact is, the prophet was very fond of women. The Catholics would seem to think a priest better with absolutely no wife. This is a mere struggle between sensuality and asceticism. There is no love or affection in it. I showed Mohammed an empty bottle. He took a piece of paper and wrote: "The bottle is empty of wine, God fill it again." Such ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... aroused the man's sensuality, excited his imagination. It seemed to him that a girl of her impressionable nature, artistic temperament, intellectual aloofness, once her ardor was awakened would love more passionately than a woman of commoner clay; her caresses, ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... at the portrait, but the likeness had vanished. In the frank sensuality of Sir Frederick's crimson smirk he could find no affinity to Lucia's grave ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Against the creation, the ark, and divers other points, exceptions are said to be taken, the ground whereof is superfluity of wit, without ground of learning and judgment. A second cause of Atheism is sensuality, which maketh men desirous to remove all stops and impediments of their wicked life; among which because Religion is the chiefest, so as neither in this life without shame they can persist therein, nor—if that be true—without torment in ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... and he acknowledged, with the naivete peculiar to the inhabitants of those countries, that of all the enjoyments of life, without excepting sleep, none was comparable to the pleasure of eating good beef (carne de vaca): thus does sensuality obtain an ascendancy, where there is no occupation ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... every side I saw falsehood, treachery, and duplicity welcomed as the ablest servitors of truth, the grandest professions assumed as an excuse for the most vulgar villainy, ambition glozed over by degrading humility, and sensuality all the more disgusting from the saintly robes in which it was paraded and but half concealed. My faith, already enfeebled, died of rapid decline, stifled by these monstrous fooleries. Disenchanted, revolted, disgusted, I resigned my position, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... title of a curious piece in the last number of Frazer's Magazine. It is unique as a sample of kingcraft; and every line supplies a proof of the candor, hypocrisy, unscrupulousness, sense of duty, courage, sensuality, and intellect, of the great Prussian, to whom are partially due the literary merits or ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... which by their very nature are necessarily attracted to each other. The obstacle to their mental and moral union is found in a third person, Densdeth, in whom manly strength and genius have been corrupted by selfishness and sensuality into the worst form of spiritual evil. This person is simply abhorred by Cecil, while Byng finds in him something which tempts appetite, piques curiosity, develops sensuous feeling, and provokes pride, as well as something which excites ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... authority will not serve your turn, read Celsus. That oracle of the ancient makes an admirable panegyric on water; in short, he says in plain terms that those who plead an inconstant stomach in favor of wine, publish a libel on their own viscera, and make their constitution a pretense for their sensuality." ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... oracles can dupe mankind, the wise hold an empire over earth. Even from your vices Arbaces distills his pleasures—pleasures unprofaned by vulgar eyes—pleasures vast, wealthy, inexhaustible, of which your enervate minds, in their unimaginative sensuality, cannot conceive or dream! Plod on, plod on, fools of ambition and of avarice! your petty thirst for fasces and quaestorships, and all the mummery of servile power, provokes my laughter and my scorn. My power can extend wherever ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... he lay low in a garret, considering himself, abandoning himself to sensuality in cocoa, vast buns, tobacco: rioting above all in the thought of the secret truth ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... spread. It chimed in with all that was best, as well as with much that was questionable, in the public mind. That men could be brothers; that they could live without the tawdry luxury, the tasteless and often brutal amusements, the low sensuality, the base intrigue, the bloody warfare, which was the accepted lot of the many; that they could find time to look stedfastly at heaven and hell as awful realities, which must be faced some day, which had best be faced at once; this, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... the soul of the world, contains immortal and mortal elements; the intelligence or reason, and sensuality. The immortality of the soul is also proved by the memory. The subsequent union of life and matter in the production of the universe is the work of an intermediate, equivocal being, the demiurgos. Thus Plato opposes the eternity of the intelligence to Ionic materialism, and the eternity ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... is, that, after death, they go to a place of joy and plenty, in which sensuality is no more omitted than in Mahomet's paradise. There they are to find women in abundance, a country thick of all manner of game to humor their passion for hunting, and bows and arrows of the best sort, ready made. But these regions ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... compared to me. Now will I offer up a sacrifice, Give gifts with lavish hand, and be triumphant." Such men, befooled by endless vain conceits, Caught in the meshes of the world's illusion, Immersed in sensuality, descend Down to the foulest hell of ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... sermons about 'sin' is that what is meant is the things that they are doing every day. I can only ask you to try to remember, while I speak, that I mean those little acts of temper, or triflings with truth, or yieldings to passion or anger, or indulgence in sensuality, and above all, the living without God, to which we are ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... minds the doctrine of Epicurus would inevitably lead to the grossest sensuality and crime; with men whose temperament was more apathetic, or whose tastes were more pure, it would develop a refined selfishness—a perfect egoism, which Epicurus has adorned with the name ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... with regard to classical operatic music, furnished me with the keynote of my conception, which was directed more particularly against puritanical hypocrisy, and which thus tended boldly to exalt 'unrestrained sensuality.' I took care to understand the grave Shakespearean theme only in this sense. I could see only the gloomy strait-laced viceroy, his heart aflame with the most passionate love for the beautiful novice, who, while she beseeches him to pardon ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... grinding the teeth, biting the nails, shrugging corrugations, pulling buttons, or twisting garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, etc.) are relics of past forms of utilities now essentially obsolete. Ancient modes of locomotion, prehension, balancing, defense, attack, sensuality, etc., are all rehearsed, some quite fully and some only by the faintest mimetic suggestion, flitting spasmodic ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... sins, not for them. Sensuality, gluttony, and the life of license repress the life of the spirit, and the soul never blossoms; and this is what it is to lose one's soul. All adown the centuries thinking men have noted these truths, and again and again we find individuals forsaking ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... glorifying a sort of asexual love of perfect men and women, asceticism which permits sex only as a sort of necessary evil and sensuality which proclaims the pleasure of sex as the only joy and scoffs at inhibition influence the lives of us all. The effect of the forbidden, the tantalizing curiosity aroused and the longing to rise above the level of lust make the sex adjustment the most difficult of all and produce the queerest ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... indecency. They spoke of Christ as a Tyburn bird, as digging for roots, as vexed by an aunt, and as sitting in the beer-house among the scum of society. They sang hymns to the devil. They revelled in the most hideous and filthy expressions, chanted the praises of lust and sensuality, and practised a number of sensual abominations too loathsome to be described. At one service held in Fetter Lane, Count Zinzendorf, said Rimius, had declared that the seventh commandment was not binding ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... was the most complete, the most ideal personification of SENSUALITY—not of vulgar, ignorant, non intelligent, mistaken sensuousness which is always deceit ful and corrupted by habit or by the necessity for gross and ill-regulated enjoyments, but that exquisite sensuality which is to the senses what intelligence ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... gratification, enjoyment, happiness, delectation, delight; amusement, recreation, diversion; will, choice, preference, desire; voluptuousness, sensuality. Antonym: displeasure. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... fellow: he must not be frightened, but cajoled. He is the very sort of man to succeed with, and worth a hundred of your sturdy, sensible fellows. With them we want strong arguments and strong temptations; but with such fellows as Parley, in whom vanity and sensuality are the leading qualities—as, let me tell you, is the case with far the greater part—flattery, and a promise of ease and pleasure, will do more than your whole battle array. If you will let me manage, I will get you all into ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... had heard before—admired his jokes, and fooled his egotistical soul till he had no shred of self-respect remaining. He laid his nature bare before me—and I knew what it was at last—a mixture of selfishness, avarice, sensuality, and heartlessness, tempered now and then by a flash of good-nature and sympathetic attraction which were the mere outcomes of youth and physical health—no more. This was the man I had loved—this fellow who told ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... what I thought was intended by the first rehearsal of them, namely, to show how Antichrist got in with his sensuality, and opposed it to the true light of the Word of God, exalting himself above God, and also above all Divine revelation; this was his light against light. But, I say, why is it repeated? For he saith, 'Light was against light in three ranks' again. Truly, I think it is repeated to show ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... stalled oxen, appointed some one to read aloud in the refectory; and the Fathers, obeying the same civilised instinct, had contrived in their theology intelligible points of attachment for religious emotion. A refined mind finds as little happiness in love without friendship as in sensuality without love; it may succumb to both, but it accepts neither. What is true of mere sensibility is no less true of mere fancy. The Arabian Nights—futile enough in any case—would be absolutely intolerable if they contained no Oriental manners, no human passions, and no convinced ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... quotation rose in his mind; he repeated the whole piece, one of the most perfect of the most perfect of poets; and a phrase struck him like a blow: Du, stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt. Where was the pride of his heart? And he raged against himself, as a man bites on a sore tooth, in a heady sensuality of scorn. "I have no pride, I have no heart, no manhood," he thought, "or why should I prolong a life more shameful than the gallows? Or why should I have fallen to it? No pride, no capacity, no force. Not even ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cried, delighted. "Better Seneca for you than sensuality; Virgilius than venery. When you are as ripe as I, you may trifle awhile if you like with lightness." Here I, listening, sniggered, for it was blown about the city that Messer Brunetto had his passions or fancies or vagaries, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... evil genius of the family, and the two together make a pair hard to match. The prince has obstinacy, sensuality, arrogance, and vindictiveness; and his tool has brains, cunning, and inventiveness, for the effective exercise of the other's evil tendencies. Cagliari finally went back to the beautiful Cyrene for consolation; but she was bent on proving ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... on Hayti, he found there about 1,000,000 Indians, of a gentle refinement of manners, living peaceably under their kings or caciques. They were "faint-hearted creatures," "a barbarous sort of people, totally given to sensuality and a brutish custom of life, hating all manner of labour, and only inclined to run from place to place." The Spaniards killed many thousands of them, hunted a number with their bloodhounds, sent a number ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... left Protestantism in a state of vehement intolerance in America, but we soon found, that, to hear the hardest things said against the priesthood, one must visit a Roman Catholic country. There was no end to the anecdotes of avarice and sensuality in this direction, and there seemed everywhere the strangest combination of official reverence with personal contempt. The principal official, or Ouvidor, was known among his parishioners by the endearing appellation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... people take heed of the swiftness of thought—of the impatience of thought? What will the great mass of men be thinking of, if they are taught to shun amusements and the thoughts of amusement? If any sensuality is left open to them, they will think of that. If not sensuality, then avarice, or ferocity for "the cause of God," as they would call it. People who have had nothing else to amuse them have been very apt to indulge themselves in the excitement ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... Oriental traits, and the East entering into her whole life from without found a natural home awaiting it. We should be mistaken, however, in thinking that the Venetians in their great days were enervated and lapped in the sensuality which we are apt to associate with Eastern ideals. Sensuality did in the end drain the life out of her. "It is the disease which attacks sensuousness, but it is not the same thing." The Venetians were by nature men with a deep capacity for feeling, and it is this ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... and write is greater than in New England. And, whereas, they found these islanders a nation of half-naked savages, living in the surf and on the sand, eating raw fish, fighting among themselves, tyrannized over by feudal chiefs and abandoned to sensuality, they now see them decently clothed, recognizing the law of marriage, knowing something of accounts, going to school and public worship more regularly than the people do at home, and the more elevated of them ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... he will neither be sensible of shame at your reproaches, nor of pleasure at the sight of a nephew so worthy of his lineage. Brutified by sensuality, jealous of his power, which he often exercises with cruelty, he will more probably restrain you by force ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... was now walking with him formed a singular contrast with the mild, reverence-commanding appearance of the pope. He was a man of forty, with a wild, glowing-red face, whose eyes flashed with malice and rage, whose mouth gave evidence of sensuality and barbarity, and whose form was more appropriate for a Vulcan than a prince of the Church. And yet he was such, as was manifested by his dress, by the great cardinal's hat over his shoulder, and ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... not among the virtues, among the ornaments of life. Instead of this passion, naturally allied to grace and manners, they infuse into their youth an unfashioned, indelicate, sour, gloomy, ferocious medley of pedantry and lewdness,—of metaphysical speculations blended with the coarsest sensuality. Such is the general morality of the passions to be found in their famous philosopher, in his famous work of philosophic ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... artistic conscience; and the immaculate purity, not alone of his life, but of his thought. How he castigates Donizetti's love of money and his sloth! how his whip scourges the immorality of the French opera, and his whole soul abhors the sensuality of that stage! how steadfastly he refuses to undertake the composition of an opera till the faultless libretto for which he patiently waited year after year could be prepared! We wish our religious societies would call out a few of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... sounding and sympathizing with the whole range of its passions, he brings one majestic harmony out of them all; he represents it fearlessly in all its acts and thoughts, in its haste, its anger, its sensuality, and its pride, as well as in its fortitude or faith, but makes it noble in them all; he casts aside the veil from the body, and beholds the mysteries of its form like an angel looking down on an inferior ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... into the light of day; the men who washed the dishes, the men who carried the garbage, the men who shovelled the coal into the furnaces, and made the heat and light and power. Pent up in dim cellars, many stories under ground, and bound for ever to the service of sensuality—how terrible must be their fate, how unimaginable their corruption! And they were foreigners; they had come here seeking liberty. And the masters of the new country had seized ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... consistency with each other, and infecting Christianity, even at its strongest periods, with fatal terror of doctrine, and ghastliness of symbolic conception, passing through fear into frenzied grotesque, and thence into sensuality. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin |
