"Cult" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bruckner cult is a striking symptom of a certain decadence in German music; an incapacity to tell the sincere quality of feeling in the dense, brilliant growth of technical virtuosity. In the worship at the Bayreuth ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... such a change toward the end of the nineteenth century. The unification of the Empire with its era of material prosperity and progress strengthened the roots of national consciousness; the gospel of the superman with its absolute ego-cult stimulated individual self-assertion; the wave of altruism which swept across the world at the same time roused the slumbering sense of social responsibility. These three forces—national consciousness, individual ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... and zealous always for the monarchy, the Catholic hierarchy indignantly spurned the overtures of a republic whose most cherished principle was atheism—which had abandoned the worship of God for the cult of Reason. "For God and the King" had been the priestly motto from time immemorial, and the new Republic repudiated obligation not to one only but to both. Accordingly, the vast influence of the Church was exerted on the side of loyalty to ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... cult of the Grand Act is a snare and a delusion. Whatever may happen hereafter—even the Grand Act itself—posterity is likely to look back upon August, 1914, as the moment when the British Empire reached the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the footpaths of the thoughtless, An Orphic priest and bard, I bring to light again a hymn Of a thrice-ancient cult. For until now my thought flowed on, A river under earth. Amidst men's tumult my lyre's rhythm, A sudden wonder rose. At night I start, at night I climb The mountain difficult; I wish alone and first to greet Light Apollonian While among mortal men below Darkness ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... alive one particular interpretation of a composer's work, or works; who dictates these interpretations to his pupils, and who talks of other artists who feel the bounden duty of self-expression through the said works as 'outsiders', and 'not in the cult'. Such musicians do not appear to see that such an attitude is 'idolatry' pure and simple. They have not pondered the well-known anecdote of Brahms, who, when asked by a singer whether his interpretation of one of his songs was ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... stepping-stone to something else to-morrow." Taking no interest in public affairs, her inherited craving for command had resorted for expression to a meticulous ordering of household matters. It was indeed a cult with her, a passion—as though she felt herself a sort of figurehead to national domesticity; the leader ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... physical activity, will have a value. Yet, as a matter of fact, such things have very little substantial value in an ordinary citizen's life at all, except in so far as they play their part in the elaborate cult of athletic exercises, with which we beguile the instinct which craves for manual toil. All the races, and games, and athletics cultivated so assiduously at school seem now to have very little aim in view. It is not important for ordinary life to be able ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is celebrated for its "Caves of Thousand Buddhas"; Sir Aurel Stein wrote the following remarks in his Ruins of Desert Cathay, II., p. 27: "Surely it was the sight of these colossal images, some reaching nearly a hundred feet in height, and the vivid first impressions retained of the cult paid to them, which had made Marco Polo put into his chapter on 'Sachiu,' i.e. Tun-huang, a long account of the strange idolatrous customs of the people of Tangut.... Tun-huang manifestly had managed to retain its traditions ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... ix. xv.), and his Terminal Review (iii. 735-47) with a few unimportant and uninteresting details taken from Al-Makrizi, and probably from the studies of the late Rogers Bey (pp. 191-92). Here the cult of the Uncle and Master emerges most extravagantly. "It was Lane who first brought out the importance of the 'Arabian Nights' as constituting a picture of Moslem life and manners" (p. 192); thus ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... worship; and it is probable that, as Adam's Peak was venerated from a remote antiquity by the aborigines of Ceylon, being connected by them with the worship of the sun, the sacred footprint may belong to this prehistoric cult. Models of the footprint are shown ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... wonderfully active—active in mind and body,' Watts-Dunton says to me. 'I come to the shore now and then, just to see how he's getting on. But I spend most of my time inland. I find I've so much to talk over with Gabriel. Not that he's quite the fellow he was. He always had rather a cult for Dante, you know, and now he's more than ever under the Florentine influence. He lives in a sort of monastery that Dante has here; and there he sits painting imaginary portraits of Beatrice, and giving them all to Dante. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... about Christian Science, and could easily be led to expose its falsity. He would wittily say it wasn't Christian and wasn't science; merely the chuckleheadedness of a lot of women. This because a local adept of the cult had told him, and—what was worse—told Mrs. Penniman and Winona, that if he didn't quit thinking he was an invalid pretty soon he would really have something the ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... hundreds of miles from the spot, in fact the north of France is the nearest. Each slab is about twenty feet in height and they are fashioned rudely in the form of a temple. It is said that in the design geometrical figures were used, and that some sun cult was practised by those who reared them, for the sun's shadow passes through various points only on Midsummer and on May Day. The Druids are supposed to have used this as the great shrine of their faith, and worshippers ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... was necessary, as he said himself to that other great artist whose name is Stephen Heller, to try several times before one succeeded in meeting him. These trials ["essais"] being no more to my taste than to Heller's, I could not belong to that little congregation of faithful ones whose cult verged on fanaticism. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... found a unanimity of opinion among what might be termed the middle group of dietetic explorers as counter-distinguished from the pioneering cult and the modern or comparatively modern. Each one was so absolutely certain that he was so absolutely right and so absolutely certain that all his contemporaries were so ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... steady, promising young officer. It would damage, at any rate, his immediate prospects and lose him the good will of his general. These worldly preoccupations were no doubt misplaced in view of the solemnity of the moment. For a duel whether regarded as a ceremony in the cult of honour or even when regrettably casual and reduced in its moral essence to a distinguished form of manly sport, demands perfect singleness of intention, a homicidal austerity of mood. On the other hand, this vivid concern for the future ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... shoulders bare, her hair free, advances, eager for the fight. The 'cult of the ancient gods,' with forehead chapleted after the fashion of the pagan priests, dares to attack her, and is overthrown. The legion of martyrs that Faith has called together cry in triumphant unison.... Modesty (Pudicitia), ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... as no priest, no lover's cult could grant madness; the wine that entered her throat with the touch of the mountain rocks was white, intoxicant: she, the chaste, was betrayed by the glint of light on the hills, the granite splinter of rocks, the touch of the stone where heat melts toward ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... whose bold lead they profess to follow, lies at rest in the Jewish cemetery of his native Breslau under the simple epitaph "Thinker and Fighter," and at his death the extraordinary popular manifestations seemed to inaugurate the cult of a modern Messiah—the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... love, was independence. In my childhood I had devoted myself to a morose cult, and had, so to speak, consecrated my heart to it. One day my father, solicitous about my future, spoke to me of several careers between which he allowed me to choose. I was leaning on the window-sill, looking at a solitary poplar-tree ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... me a character, sir," the man remarked, with a ghost of a smile. "My name is Edward Owston. I was clerk at a large drapery firm, Messrs. Appleby, Sons, and Dawson, in St. Paul's Churchyard, for fourteen years. I have a verified character from them. They were obliged to cult down their staff, owing to foreign competition, and—I have never succeeded—in obtaining another situation. There is nothing against me, sir. I would have worked for fifteen shillings a week. I walked the streets till my boots were worn through and my clothes hung around me like ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Only he who consorts with chambermaids knows it, only he who steals to their pillow and listens to the unconscious utterance of a dream, hears it. He alone knows it who makes a woman of himself, and initiates himself into the secrets of her cult of inconstancy! But man, who asks for it openly, he who opens a loyal hand to receive that frightful alms, he will never obtain it! They are on guard with him; for reply he receives a shrug of the shoulders, and, if he rouses himself in his impatience, they rise in righteous indignation ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... embroidered slippers and symbolic head-dress. His lectures and religious rites had been attended by hundreds—many of them rich society women, who came rolling up to the temple in their limousines. Also there had been a school, where children had been initiated into the mystic rites of the cult. The prophet would take these children into his private apartments, and there were awful rumors—which had ended in the raiding of the temple by the police, and the flight of the prophet, and likewise of the majordomo, and of Peter Gudge, ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... It's all of that. Long ago the ruling powers discovered that if the rabidly discontented were permitted to preach dynamite and destruction unlimited they would not be so apt to practice their cheerful doctrines. So, without let or hindrance, any apostle of any creed, cult or propaganda, however lurid and revolutionary, may come here of a Sunday to meet with his disciples and spout forth the faith that is in him until he has geysered himself into peace, or, what comes to the same ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the right of suffrage which affords the citizen the most effective means to make his influence felt in social questions and in the improvement of the public affairs. How are we to inculcate in our children, that sacred pledge of the future of the nation, the cult and worship of native land and liberty if we do not give their mothers that practical education involved in the exercise of the right of suffrage; if they are taught that government and politics are strange gods at whose shrines they are forbidden to worship; if they feel upon themselves ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... body was laid in the grave, supplied with all these magic texts which were to restore and revive the soul and guide it across waters and through dangers to the place of Osiris. But the chapel was not wanting, the cult of the ka was maintained, the statues were placed in the hidden room, the food and drink were brought daily to the door of the grave. Thus, while a special immortality was evolved for the king, the funeral customs continue to ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... blame Methodism for these horrors simply because it is, as we know, the cult of ugliness, but there may have been another cause for the change; it was perhaps to some extent a reaction against the stilted, the pompous and silly epitaph which one finds most common in the first ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... The cult of Mr. Ransome reached its height at four o'clock on this Sunday afternoon, when Ranny's Uncle John Randall (Junior) and Aunt Randall dropped in to tea. Both Mr. and Mrs. Randall believed in Mr. Ransome with the fervent, immovable faith ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... by bright moonlight, whilst dancing in the open air, their impromptu songs contain a greeting to the shining orb that presides over their festivity and with its silvery rays enhances its enjoyment. But in this there is nothing to suggest a special cult. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... devotion to the beauty that can be expressed by art, and the most intense indifference to the beauty of holiness? Ah! brethren, it wants something far deeper-going than pictures to purge the souls of men. And whilst, as before, I thankfully acknowledge the refining influence of this new cult, I would protest against the absurdity of putting it upon a pedestal as the guide and elevator ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... trained to better glorify God; and regimen, chastity, and temperance are given a new momentum. The physical salvation thus wrought will be, when adequately written, one of the most splendid chapters in the modern history of Christianity. Military ideals have been revived in cult and song to hearten the warfare against evil within and without. Strength is prayed for as well as worked for, and consecrated to the highest uses. Last but not least, power thus developed over a large ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the late Professor Deeping had collected relative to this sect of religious murderers were truly extraordinary. Of the cult's extinction at the time of writing he was clearly certain, but he referred to the popular belief, or Moslem legend, that, since Hassan of Khorassan, there had always been a Sheikh-al-jebal, and that a dreadful being known as Hassan of Aleppo ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... man of firm mind; their efforts to recapture his attention were futile. For the music of Charm's foreign voice was in his ear. Worship of the cloth is not a national, it is a more or less universal cult, I take it. It is in the blood of certain women. Opposite the two fussy, jealous bourgeoises, were others as importunate and aggressive. They were of fair, lean, lank English build, with the shifting eyes and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... bright with the lamps of the small houses, from which projected wooden balconies painted in gay colours, and with the glowing radiance of the moon, was mysterious despite its gaiety, its obvious dedication to the cult of pleasure. Alive with the shrieking sounds of music, the movement and the murmur of desert humanity made it almost solemn. This crowd of boys and men, robed in white from head to heel, preserved a serious grace ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... likely that outside of its purely literary aspect (a large aspect in every respect in. France) the Moussorgsky cult of the last few years was a mere outgrowth of the political affiliation between France and Russia; as such it may be looked upon in the same light as the sudden appreciation of Berlioz which was a product of the Chauvinism which followed ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of it, but kept a regard for things higher than the bare sod, things of grace in form, in bloom, in odor, and worthy of "but-hanical nayum." No mere chauffeur he, of the little two-wheeled machine whose cult, throughout the most of our land, has ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... beside that is not imitation Of something in Europe in this hybrid nation. Return to this globe five hundred years hence— You'll see how the fundamental color of the coon In art, in music, has altered our tune; We are destined to bow to their influence; There's a whole cult of music in Dixie alone, And that ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... one of the most persistent, apparently real, though very indefinite, of psychological spooks. Whereas people have been accustomed to speak of the imagination as an entity sui generis, as a lofty something found only in long-haired, wild-eyed "geniuses," constituting indeed the center of a cult, our author, Prometheus-like, has brought it down from the heavens, and has clearly shown that imagination is a function of mind common to all men in some degree, and that it is shown in as highly developed form in commercial leaders and practical ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... is a group of ruins perched, after the Mexican and Central-American plan, on the summits of pyramidal mounds which mark the site of an ancient theogonic center of the Mayas. Here the temples all evidently refer to a cult based upon the constellations as symbols. The figures and the names, of course, were not the same as those that we have derived from our Aryan ancestors, but the star groups were the same or nearly so. For instance, the loftiest of the temples at Izamal was connected with ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... too, the cult of appearances went hand in hand with generosity and enthusiasm. "C'est presque un monde," she writes to Voltaire, "a creer, a unir, a conserver!" First comes the administration of justice, and her ukase of 1762, on its ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... in the garret could no longer doubt that their protector was the stranger of the expiatory mass on the night of the 22nd of January, 1793; and a kind of cult of him sprung up among them. Their one hope was in him; they lived through him. They added special petitions for him to their prayers; night and morning the pious souls prayed for his happiness, his prosperity, his safety; entreating God to remove all snares far from ...
— An Episode Under the Terror • Honore de Balzac
... the cult of Osiris, Judge of the Dead, I came to Denderah, the great temple of the "Lady of the Underworld," as the goddess Hathor was sometimes called, though she was usually worshipped as the Egyptian Aphrodite, goddess of joy, goddess of love and loveliness. It was early morning when I went ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... must be referred the rise of that system of necromancy which, originating in America, has had great vogue in other countries, and here in its native land has taken such form as really to constitute a new cult. Making no mention of sporadic instances of what in earlier generations would have been called (and properly enough) by the name of witchcraft, we find the beginning of so-called "spiritualism" in the "Rochester rappings," produced, to the wonder of many witnesses, by "the Fox girls" in ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... poor girl's affection turned to mademoiselle. Her voice, her gestures, her eyes, her silence, her thoughts, went out to her mistress with the fervor of expiation, with the contrition of a prayer, the rapt intensity of a cult. She loved her with all the loving violence of her nature. She loved her with all the deceptive ardor of her passion. She strove to give her all that she had not given her, all that others had taken from her. Every day her love clung more closely, more devoutly, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... preservative instinct which teaches them to be flighty, lightsome, and false. Here and there one finds a passionate and exaggerated adoration of "pure forms" in philosophers as well as in artists: it is not to be doubted that whoever has NEED of the cult of the superficial to that extent, has at one time or another made an unlucky dive BENEATH it. Perhaps there is even an order of rank with respect to those burnt children, the born artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying to FALSIFY ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Guerdon and I, I am sure, are safe. Let us hear your gruesome prophecy, my dear Saton, and if it comes true, we will form a little society, and you shall be our apostle. We will study occultism in place of bridge. We will be the founders of a new cult." ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Cambry saw in the "swaying rocks" the emblems of the suspended world. The "barrows" and "gals-gals" have undoubtedly been tombs; and as for the "men-hirs," people went so far as to pretend that they had a form which led to the deduction that a certain cult reigned throughout lower Brittany. O chaste immodesty of science, you respect nothing, ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... that bad luck which has troubled you deeply. I tell you wherein lie the certain conditions for your success. Keep your cult for form; but pay more attention to the substance. Do not take true virtue for a commonplace in literature. Give it its representative, make honest and strong men pass among the fools and the imbeciles that you love to ridicule. Show what is solid at the bottom of these intellectual ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Lastly: "The laws apply to the aforenamed Catholics whenever they enter into betrothal or matrimony with non-Catholics, baptized or not, even when they have obtained a dispensation from the obstacle of a mixed religion or of a disparity of cult; except the Holy See decrees otherwise ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... nature of the Christian Science appeal largely explains the rapid spread of this cult. Christian Science is quite unlike other religions in this, that while they promise at most salvation—an intangible boon—Mrs. Eddy promises her followers health, relief from bodily pain and sickness, and thus addresses herself to a universally and urgently felt want. A merely spiritual ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... called the one persistent follower of this cult. He has consistently embodied his convictions in his pictures, the value of which to English art cannot yet be determined. This is also true of the marvellous work of Burne Jones; but although they have but few faithful followers, ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... active, was something like the famous recipe for making cannon—to first take a round hole and then enclose it with iron; whatever you do keeping fast hold of your round hole. Yet how distinguish what our will may wisely save in its completeness, from the heaping of cat-mummies and the expensive cult of enshrined putrefactions? ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... would damage, at any rate, his immediate prospects, and lose him the good-will of his general. These worldly preoccupations were no doubt misplaced in view of the solemnity of the moment. A duel, whether regarded as a ceremony in the cult of honour, or even when reduced in its moral essence to a form of manly sport, demands a perfect singleness of intention, a homicidal austerity of mood. On the other hand, this vivid concern for his future had not a bad effect inasmuch as it began to rouse ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... fellow-creatures. A resort to the consolations of religion hindered these operations not at all. He would go and talk with an interesting, experienced and sympathetic Father of the Huysmanite sect of the Isis cult, about all the irrational little proceedings he was pleased to regard as his heaven-dismaying wickedness, and the interesting, experienced and sympathetic Father representing Heaven dismayed, would with a pleasing affectation of horror, suggest simple and easy penances, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... present day. In China also there is a similar fusion of religious beliefs, where there are three established cults—those of Brahma, Confucius, and of the Taoeists, or nature-worshippers. The Confucian religion is rather a system of ethics than a cult; but the rites of the Buddhist and Taoeist temples are attended indiscriminately by the majority of the Chinese, the priests of the separate temples alone confining themselves to the worship of a particular deity. In ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... we again spent in Italy, in continuous gaiety amongst a brilliant cosmopolitan world of men and women who for the most part lived in palaces, surrounded with art and luxury. Here in Rome on every side was to be found the Cult of the Beautiful. Wonderful temples, gems of classical sculpture, masterpieces of colour in oil and fresco—the genius and the aspirations of men rendered permanent for us by Art; but the Temples, those silent emblems of man's ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... Doc Madison, his voice lowered a little. "I found this tucked away as a filler in a corner of the newspaper this evening. It's headed, 'A New Cult,' with an interrogation mark after it. Now listen, while I ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... competent but not gifted, yet they could turn out wood engravings not inferior to Bewick's own. And so we find that such capable technicians as Nesbit, Clennell, Robinson, Hole, the Johnsons, Harvey, and others all contributed to the Bewick cult. ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... tribes.[35] After the conversion of the Malays to the faith of Muhammad, the traditions of Hinduism were gradually confused with the aboriginal superstitions, and neither have been entirely obliterated by the cult which superseded them. The belief in the power of malignant spirits to cause misfortune, sickness, and death is still strong among the Malays, whose pawangs or medicine-men claim to be able to propitiate ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... Malays; and all or most are such as must have been exterminated among the Malays on their conversion to Islam, if they had formed part of their culture in their pre-Islamic period. Such are the religious beliefs and customs of the Ibans with the cult of the PETARA; the NGARONG; the rite with the clay crocodile for getting rid of farm pests (vol. ii. p. 88); the use in weaving of a number of designs of animal origin; the adornment of the edge of the ear with many ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... loveth a cheerful sneezer, and Mr. Masters deserves great credit for lending himself to the cult ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... doing harm to the whole of humanity. They have invented an esthetic system for the use of the rich, and they have killed the Revolution. The chic put an end to the Revolution. And now everything is coming back; enthusiasm for the aristocracy, for the Church; the cult of kings. People look backward and the Revolutionary movement is paralysed. The people that irritate me most are those esthetes of the Ruskin school, for whom everything is religious: having money, buying jewels, blowing one's ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... "And do you know there are people thousands of miles away from Harley Street who actually admire me, who are stirred and moved by what I write, who make a cult and a hero of me. They say I have soul, forsooth. But I am all body; you know that. You doctors know that it is only body that we put on paper, body that lifts us high, or drags us low. Why, my best romances come straight from my liver. My pathos springs from its condition of disorder, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... living. Social customs are almost invariably intertwined with religious views, among savages as well as among the more advanced Mohammedans whose rules relating to family organization form an integral part of the whole cult. The emotional elements play a large part in some cases, in the fanatical creeds of the Dervish and Mahdist and in the "revivals" under nearer observation. In Greek cosmology and worship, aesthetics figured to a large degree. Temperamental ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... sickly. She was certain of her husband; she knew his declarations of faithfulness to her. But when the painter spoke of his artistic interests in her presence, he did not hide his worship of beauty, his religious cult of form. Even if he was silent, she penetrated his thoughts; she read in him that fervor which dated from his youth and had grown greater as the years went by. When she looked at the statues of sovereign nakedness that decorated ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... study of various masters, brilliant, morbid, or essentially rotten, was the basis of this cult—not originality. Its devotees were the devotees of Richard Strauss, of Huysmans, of Manet, of Degas, Rops, Louis Le Grand, Forain, Monticelli; its painters painted nakedness in footlight effects with blobs for faces and blue shadows where they were needed to conceal the defects of impudent ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... in comparative theology in this distinction between the Being of Nature (cf. Kant's "starry vault above") and the God of the heart (Kant's "moral law within"). The idea of an antagonism seems to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes and the Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism. So, too, Buddhism seems to be "antagonistic." On the other hand, the Moslem teaching and modern Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify the two; God the creator is altogether and without ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... are not living in state here," said Rachel; "I never could enter into the cult some people, mamma especially, pay to ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... same volume Chesterton writes of the spread of aestheticism, and that the cult of the Soul had a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... thin, ascetic Winnie Wilberforce, who, as a theosophist, is understood to believe that, in a former incarnation, he came near to having an affair with a danseuse; he was expounding the esoterics of his cult to a high-coloured brunette with many turquoises, who, in turn, was rather inclined to the horse-talk of ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... faith older superstitions and beliefs still lingered which had disappeared from the religion of the state or appeared in it in another form. The place of the priest was in large measure taken by the sorcerer and the magician, the ceremonies of the public cult were superseded by charms and incantations, and the deities of the official creed were overshadowed by a crowd of subordinate spirits whose very existence was hardly recognized among the more cultured classes. The Babylonian was inordinately superstitious, ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... have in time grown to mortal height. Whether fairies be the decayed poor relations of more successful deities, gods whose cult has been forgotten and neglected (as the Irish Sidhe, or fairy-folk), or diminutive animistic spirits, originating in the belief that every object, small or great, possessed a personality, it is noticeable that Celtic fairies are of human height, while those of the Teutonic peoples are ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... toward those who are not;—with the possible exception of Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and members of a few other denominations outside the direct Apostolic Succession. Yet I confess I was shocked at the conversion (or perversion) of my old neighbour, McPherson, to a cult which, for want of a better word, I ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... been reading my poems all this while!—There is renunciation in our words, renunciation in the metre, renunciation in our music. That is why fortune always forsakes us; and we, in turn always forsake fortune. We go about, all day long, initiating the youths in the sacred cult of fortune-forsaking. ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... expel the drones, after they have done their work of fertilizing the queen, in the most cruel and summary manner. Their apparent attachment to the queen, and their loyalty to her, are not personal. They do not love her. It is the Spirit of the Hive, or the cult of the swarm solicitous about itself. There are no brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, among the bees; there are only co-workers, working not for the present, but for the future. When we enter the kingdom of the bee, we must leave all our human standards behind. These little people ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... ten years there has been born every few days a new medical "ism," a new religious cult. Why? Because human nature is an unstable equation. We are never satisfied with the old order of things and there will always be a following wherever there is a leader. These "isms" and cults do not survive. Some ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... The ritual then of the murderers was a Greek ritual, their cult a Greek cult—preferably, perhaps, a South Greek one, a Spartan one, for it was here that the highly conservative peoples of that region clung longest and fondliest to this semi-barbarous worship. ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... is within, is dark, shuts out the light, etc. Possibly the derivation was symbolic. Votan was called "the heart of the nation," and at Tlazoaloyan, in Soconusco, he constructed, by breathing or blowing, a "dark house," in which he concealed the sacred objects of his cult. In this myth we find an unequivocal connection of the idea of "darkness" ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... will, on his coronation, swear not to take any measures against the four propositions of the Gallican Church,"[5138] he will become a grand functionary, a sort of arch-chancellor like Cambaceres and Lebrun, the arch chancellor of the Catholic cult.—Undoubtedly, he resists and is obstinate, but he is not immortal, and if he does not yield, his successor will: it suffices to choose one that is manageable, and to this end things ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... when they had first received her, the Brodricks had established a regular cult of Jane Holland. It had become the prescribed event for Jane to spend every possible Sunday at Putney Heath with the editor of the "Monthly Review." Her friendship with his family had advanced from Sunday to Sunday by slow, well-ordered steps. Jane had no illusions as to its foundation. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... Rimmon the god of the air, Nebo the interpreter and prophet of Bel-Merodach, were all adored in Palestine, and their names were preserved to later times in the geography of the country. Even Ashtoreth, in whom all the other goddesses of the popular cult came to be merged, ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... art-loving forerunners. Here and there among the indifferent public, men were attracted by the artistic view of life and women by the emotional intensity of the new creed. Oscar Wilde became the prophet of an esoteric cult. But notoriety even did not solve the monetary question, which grew more and more insistent. A dozen times he waved it aside and went into debt rather than restrain himself. Somehow or other he would fall on his feet, he thought. Men who console themselves in this way usually fall ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... apparent from his works that Vergil examined such material, just as he delved into Varro's antiquities and Cato's "origins" for ancient lore. His remarks on Praeneste and Antemnae, his knowledge of ancient coin symbols, of the early rites of the Hercules cult, show the results of these early habits of work. It must always be noticed, however, that in his mature art he is master of his vast hoard of material. There is never, as in the Culex and Ciris, a display ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... all de rest ob de womans," said the negro, as they hurried through the streets; "awrful dif'cult to manidge. Come 'long, we'll go home and hab a ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... soul—intense, flaming, unquenchable soul—and, I must say it, the dressmaker, the hairdresser, and the rest directed by our young friend here," pointing to the little nurse. "Why, she had us all on the job. We all became devotees of the Haley Cult." ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... been guilty of trying to rationalize an unsolvable mystery, to find an intellectual solution forbidden to man. In some obscure way the question seems to be involved in that other of the function of the Blessed Virgin as the fount of mercy and compassion, and at this time when the cult of the Mother of God had reached its highest point of potency and poignancy anything of the ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... cult. America can boast of many of his most distinguished specimens, while the Louvre and the Luxembourg are without a single one. The Musee de Lille at Marseilles has several examples; the private collections of M. Delpiano at Cannes and a few collections in Paris make ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... if anything connected with this stupid catastrophe can be amusing, to see the secretly crestfallen attitude of technicians. They are the high priests of the modern cult of perfected material and of mechanical appliances, and would fain forbid the profane from inquiring into its mysteries. We are the masters of progress, they say, and you should remain respectfully silent. And they take refuge behind their ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... names as "scientific management" and the "economics of engineering." Viewed in this perspective such a development appears to be commendable and valuable in its main purpose. Unfortunately, some, if not all, of the adherents of this new cult of "economy" and "efficiency" fail to appreciate how very restricted and special it is, compared with the whole broad ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... meaning. She was filled with apprehension as she considered the effect which this infatuation, if it should continue to gain strength, might have upon one of Paul's dreamy temperament and excessive ideality. That she had devoted her own lonely and useless life to the cult of the past did not greatly matter, although in the light of her present happier faith she saw and regretted her mistake; but as for permitting Paul's life to be overshadowed by the same influence she could not consent to it. Something must be done ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... who sail Potomac's even tide To Vernon's shades, our Chieftain's hallowed mound; Or who at distant shrines high paeans sound In Alfred's cult, old England's morning pride; Or seek Versailles, conceited as a bride, With garish memories of kins strewn round; Or lay your spirit's cheek on Forum ground, For here a mighty Caesar lived and died: To these and other stones, O ye who speed, ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... impelled by no fanatical zeal, and have no creed or cult of my own to vindicate. I am influenced only by a noble love of truth and a sublime sense of duty in arraying myself with the despised minority,—perhaps I may say by a sense of fair play for the "under dog." I do ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... the letters of Horemheb, the commander-in-chief of his army, begging him to send reinforcements to Syria, imploring him to realize the danger that menaced Asia, you would feel as impatient as I do with his mission work at Tel-el-Amarna, his cult of flowers and ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... is a Mexican god, and when the Mexicans had taken twenty or thirty Spaniards prisoners, these twenty or thirty had to be sacrificed to Vitzliputzli. There was no help for it, it was a national custom, a cult, and it all took place in the turn of a hand—belly open, ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... times, and cannot decide whether he was a water-god, or a fire-god, or a corn-god, but he was undoubtedly associated with Marduk, either as his son or as a fellow-god. It is certain that as early as B.C. 2000 he was regarded as one of the "Great Gods" of Babylonia, and about 1,200 years later his cult was general in Assyria. He had a temple at Nimrd in the ninth century B.C., and King Adad-Nirari (B.C. 811-783) set up six statues in it to the honour of the god; two of these statues are now in the British Museum. Under the last Assyrian ...
— The Babylonian Story of the Deluge - as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh • E. A. Wallis Budge
... must often be accepted rather than understood. But those who wish to understand somewhat the psychological process which led in antiquity to the deification of kings during their life-time could not do better than study the cult of Constantine among the modern ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... issues forth from the brain, is still so uncertain that if it illumine one point more strongly the others are forced into blacker darkness? Here we find that the bees (or nature acting within them) have organised work in common, the love and cult of the future, in a manner more perfect than can elsewhere be discovered. Is it for this reason that they have lost sight of all the rest? They give their love to what lies ahead of them; we bestow ours on what is around. And we who love here, perhaps, have no love left for what ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... were still more of a word-civilization than the English. Our architectural, painting, and sculptural history is concerned with men now living, or their immediate predecessors. And even such work as we have is pretty largely a cult by the wealthy. This is the more a cause for misgiving because, in a democracy, the arts, like the political parties, are not founded till they have touched the county chairman, the ward leader, the individual voter. The museums in a democracy ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... some time before Germany learned of the new prodigy: for reasons which will be treated later, the growth of the Sterne cult in Germany was delayed, so that Yorick was in the plenitude of his German fame when England had begun to look askance at him with critical, fault-finding eye, or to accord him the more damning ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... golden State my future home, and now, thirty years later, I have not reached there yet. Vainly have I tried to break the thraldom of my fate, for I did not know that here I was to meet face to face with the mighty mystery of an ancient cult, the God of a long-forgotten civilization, a psychic power which has ordered my path in life and ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... would be very interesting to trace the influence of the chivalric idea on religious Mysticism. Chivalry, the worship of idealised womanhood, is itself a mystical cult, and its relation to religious Mysticism appears throughout the "Divine Comedy" and "Vita Nuova" (see especially the incomparable paragraph which concludes this latter), and in the sonnet of M. Angelo translated by Wordsworth, "No mortal object ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... that there shall come a time when death shall be overcome, is a persistent part of every prophecy, and of every religious cult. In these days we find that science is speculating upon the probability of discovering a specific for senile death, as well as for the final elimination of death ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... favoured by the Shogunate, and the ancient nobility whom the Shogun represented. Upon this, every temple was required to declare itself either Shinto or Buddhist, and to remove the emblems and ornaments peculiar to the discarded cult, whichever that might be. That no little excitement and dispute followed upon this proclamation, will be readily understood; especially when we bear in mind that, for several hundred years, Buddhist and Shinto clergy ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... deliberately. "Your little granddaughter belongs to the new cult; and I can assure you she is dyed in the wool, and moreover is all wool and a ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... Nippur, Bel, or at Eridu near the Persian Gulf, Ea, the god of the great deep, was revered. In the name of the local deity offerings were brought, hymns were sung, and traditions were treasured, which extolled his might. The life of these little city states centred about the temple and its cult. To make it more glorious the artisans vied with each other, and the kings made campaigns that they might dedicate ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... behaviour, I say, we have a clue to the labouring-man's temper. The courage, the carelessness of discomfort, the swiftness to see what should be done, and to do it, are not inspired by any tradition of chivalry, any consciously elaborated cult. It is habitual with these men to be ready, and those fine actions which win our admiration are but chance disclosures in public of a self-reliance constantly practised by the people amongst themselves—by the women quite as ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... Ottley a vague idea that he wanted to get her on his side—that she might be a useful ally; but he was always charming to elderly women, and inclined to be brusque with younger ones, excepting Edith; he remembered his own mother with so great a cult of devotion, and his late wife with ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... by the Suez Canal route in the usual manner. Reaching the shores of South Europe he sat down to write his autobiography—the great literary success of its year. This book was followed by other books written with the declared purpose of elevating humanity. In these works he preached generally the cult of the woman. For his own part he practised it under the rites of special devotion to the transcendental merits of a certain Madame de S—, a lady of advanced views, no longer very young, once upon a time the intriguing wife of a now dead and forgotten diplomat. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the craft of printing was scanty, on the other hand, he was supposed to be past master of an art which workmen pleasantly call "tipple-ography," an art held in high esteem by the divine author of Pantagruel; though of late, by reason of the persecution of societies yclept of Temperance, the cult has fallen, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... retirement in a large old house standing a little by itself in Cambridge Gate. He used to declare that this situation combined all the advantages of London and the country, also that the Park that was good enough for the Regent was good enough for him. He had a decided cult for George IV; and there was even more than a hint of Beau Brummel in his dress. The only ugly thing in the house was a large coloured print of the pavilion ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... think that men are going to stand for it?" yelled Sayre, waving his hands, "ordinary, decent, God-fearing, everyday young men like you and me? If this cataclysmic cult gains ground among American women—if these exasperating suffragettes really intend to carry out any such programme, everybody on earth will resemble everybody else—like those wax figures marked 'neat,' 'imported,' and 'nobby'! And I told Amourette that, ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... all their ambition in the study of the Law, and consoled themselves with the Messianic hope. Empty casuistry and dry dogmatism sufficed for the intellectual needs of the most enlightened. A piety without limit, the rigorous and minute observance of Rabbinical prescriptions, and a cult compounded of traditional and superstitious practices accumulated during many centuries, filled the void left in their minds by the wretched life of the masses. To satisfy the cravings of the heart, they had the homilies of the Maggidim ("preachers"), a sort of popular instruction based on sacred ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... association. Christianity, appealing to all bloods, in some measure to all economic classes, and spreading into all sections of the eastern Mediterranean region, did not to any great extent create communities. And what was true of Christianity was in like manner true of the Mithras cult, widely diffused in the second Christian century. Even Mohammedanism, a faith seemingly well calculated to create autonomous states, in contact with a world prepared by Roman organization could not completely identify itself ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of the regularly appointed priest, offered the sacrifices upon the new altar, as he had seen Tiglath-Pileser do. To cap the climax, Ahaz introduced certain pagan religious ideas, copied from the Assyrian worship, into the cult of the Temple, simply to please and gratify ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... another; and a belief in graven images may supply in the third century the target, which is supplied by a belief in the supreme wisdom of majorities in the nineteenth. But the general principles—the cult of the Muses and the Graces for their own sake, and the practice of satiric archery at the follies of the day—appear in all the elect of this particular election, and they certainly appear in Peacock. The results no doubt are distasteful, not to ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... "coolness," these are not endowments that in such connection can be admired or praised. For surely the gambler who cannot face bravely those very slings and arrows of variant if not always outrageous fortune which form the chief indices of his dingy profession, cuts a mean enough figure in the cult of it. "Jim" Fisk had traits like these, but who now applauds them? As well admire the courage of a house-breaker in scaling a garden-wall at midnight, or his exquisite tact in selecting a bed-chamber well-stored with jewels ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Hedonists, of course. It is a club to which I belong. We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes when we meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian. I am afraid you are not eligible. You are too fond of ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... which she commonly kept Eldorado face-powder; and herself occupied a sofa in the apartment of a friend of humanity in the next street. These arrangements enabled her to admit an experimenter on hypnotism, a mental healer who had been much abused by the orthodox members of her cult, and was evolving a method of her own, an ostensible delegate to an Occidental Conference of Religions, and a lady agent for a flexible celluloid undershirt. For a few days Mrs. Grubb found the society of these persons very stimulating and agreeable; but before long the hypnotist ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... longer send men off their heads. It is technique meeting technique, intellectual companionship, blowing on old ashes—or creating passion with the imagination. Life is very sad for the women who have made a cult of men, and the cult of men is ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... who seek to bridge the chasm 'Twixt man to-day and protoplasm, Who theorize and probe and gape, And finally evolve an ape— Yours is a harmless sort of cult, If you are pleased with the result. Some folks admit, with cynic grace, That you have rather proved your case. These dogmatists are so severe! Enough for me that Fanny's here, Enough that, having long survived Pre-Eveic forms, ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 'F.A.N.N.I.E.S.,' the dear mud-besplashing F.A.N.Y.s. (to judge from the language of the sometime bespattered, the adjective was not always 'dear'), with them cheeriness is almost a cult; at 6 a.m. in the morning you may always be sure of a smile, even when their sleep for the week has only ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... thou servest the Gods, dost thou, thou many-coloured mystery?" This he said having reference to my splendid robes. "Well, I serve the Goddesses, which is a softer cult. And there's this between us: that though what they put in my mind I say, neither can I read their meaning," and he glanced at ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... tribes of India, by the use of intoxicating drugs or the inhaling of stupefying fumes; among the dervishes, by whirling in a mad dance of religious fervour until vertigo and insensibility supervene; among the followers of the abominable practices of the Voodoo cult, by frightful sacrifices and loathsome rites of black magic. Methods such as these are happily not in vogue in our own race, yet even among us large numbers of dabblers in this ancient art adopt some plan of self-hypnotization, such as the gazing at a ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... terrestrial machinery of the poem. He has profoundly impressed upon it the human likeness often called anthropomorphic, and which supplied the basis of Greek art. He has repelled on all sides from his classical and central system the cult of nature and of animals, but it is probable that they kept their place in the local worships of the country. His Zeus is to a considerable extent a monarch, while Poseidon and several other deities bear evident marks ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... that he was critical of Lincoln, but merely that Lincoln was not one of his special heroes. This fact, however, made a sounder foundation for my feelings about America and the American people than would the mere cult of the individual. I learned first to understand the greatness of the separation issue, to realise the magnificence and the significance ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey |
