"Sensuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tends to render a sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, should palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle in expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity in their relations with language, which they would have not merely a passionate and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicately depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer sort of French critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language; that the language ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... example, what is M. Bergson's starting-point, his somewhat dazzling doctrine that to be is to last, or rather to feel oneself endure. This is a hypostasis of "true" (i.e. immediately felt) duration. In a sensuous day-dream past feelings survive in the present, images of the long ago are shuffled together with present sensations, the roving imagination leaves a bright wake behind it like a comet, and pushes a rising ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... negation of being appear as indispensable in the making of it." But to anyone who should appeal to particular forms of being to refute this paradox, Mr. Blood admits that "to say that a picture, or any other sensuous thing, is the same as the want of it, were to utter nonsense indeed: there is a difference equivalent to the whole stuff and merit of the picture; but in so far as the picture can be there for thought, as something either asserted or negated, its presence or its absence are the same ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Christ attested His transfiguration by the presence of Moses and Elias, so visions should not be believed unless they have the authority of Scripture." Albertus Magnus tries to classify them, and says that those which contain a sensuous element are always dangerous. Eckhart is still more cautious, and Tauler attaches little value to them. Avila, the Spanish mystic, says that only those visions which minister to our spiritual necessities, and make us more humble, are genuine. Self-induced ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... be? Dick, with his great love and rough tenderness and big, protecting arms, or Austin with his conquering ways, his wit, his charm, his perception? Austin could give her the luxury that her sensuous nature delighted in, social position, the brilliant life of London. What could Dick give her? It would always be a joy to dress herself for Austin. Dick would be content if she went about in raiment made of dusters and bath towels. In return, what could ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... Tristram Shandy is a game of digressions, that the whole book is a kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has not read Tristram Shandy at all. The man who objects to the Rossetti pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to their existing at all. And any one who objects to Browning writing his huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essence of The Ring and the Book is that it is the great epic of the ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... frequently mystic and musical; it never deals with the realities and responsibilities of life, but in a witchery of words winds and meanders through the realms of reverie and dream. It may be sweet and sensuous; it is rarely narrative or simple; ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... he lived some hundreds or thousands of years later? I see no reason to doubt that he would have encouraged the study of literature and science. He would probably have praised all art which expresses noble and spiritual ideas, while misdoubting representations of sensuous beauty. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... sensuous joy from all things fair His strenuous bent of soul repressed, And left from youth to silvered hair Few hours for pleasure, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... at her lips—asking a question, giving an answer, with that shadowy smile—that men looked; they were sensitive lips, sensuous and sweet, and through them seemed to come warmth and perfume like the warmth and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... luxurious Villa of Hadrian at Tivoli. This marble is admirably adapted for such sculpture, for it gives to the ideal of the artist the warm vividness of life. And it seems a fit colour, as Nathaniel Hawthorne has said, in which to express the rich, sensuous, earthy side of nature, the happy characteristics of all wild natural things which meet and mingle in the human form and in the human soul; the Adam, the red man formed out of the red clay, in which ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... scores of boys wallowing in those big tubs, six in a tub, with a bit of soap for each. They gave little grunts and shouts of joyous satisfaction. The cleansing water, the liquid heat, made their flesh tingle with exquisite delight, sensuous and spiritual. They were like children. They splashed one another, with gurgles of laughter. They put their heads under water and came up puffing and blowing like grampuses. Something broke in one's heart to see them, those splendid boys whose ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... from their own experience. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shall I say the quadruple or the centuple or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact; Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... and died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to," said Leighton. "The first time I saw her on the stage she seemed to me merely an extra-graceful and extra-sensuous Spanish dancer. Nothing to rave over, nothing to stimulate a jaded palate. I could have met her; I decided I didn't want to. Later on I did meet her, not in her dressing-room, but at a house where she was the last ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... for conjecture was over. The curtains were drawn aside, and Hugh sat down at the piano and began to play a seductive, sensuous accompaniment. Then through a crimson curtain at the rear Pearl flashed in as if blown by the mountain wind. The chrysalis had cast aside its shell and this tropical butterfly had emerged. Her skirts were of yellow satin, and from a black bodice her beautiful bare shoulders rose half ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... use for learning—literature was out of place in the wilderness—the pursuit of letters could have found no sympathy, and for solitary enjoyment, the Frenchman cultivates nothing. Life was almost altogether sensuous: and, though their morals were in keeping with their simplicity, existence to them was chiefly a physical matter. The fertility of the soil, producing all the necessaries of life with a small amount of labor, and the amenity of the climate, rendering defences against ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... of Orleans, ruler of France, spent those hours most dear to him. If he gave thought to affairs of state during the day it was but that these affairs of state might give to him the means to indulge fancies of his own. Alike shrewd and easy, alike haughty and sensuous, here it was that Philippe held ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... feelings aroused: "Ah! Oh! Oh! How delicious that was, it thrills me all over, Percy, do that again with your tongue all the way up." Once more the electricity of my tongue sent vibrations of a new and sensuous pleasure through every nerve and vein of her body. She seemed beside herself, exclaiming: "Let me bite you, and kiss you, my darling. Ah, you have all your clothes still on! I want to feel your soft flesh as well as your touches, it would ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... words. The most abstract expression for DEITY, which language can supply, is but a sign or symbol for an object beyond our comprehension, and not more truthful and adequate than the images of OSIRIS and VISHNU, or their names, except as being less sensuous and explicit. We avoid sensuousness only by resorting to simple negation. We come at last to define spirit by saying that it ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Lucian described the goddess as having a smile somewhat proud and disdainful; yet the eyes, moist and kindly, glowed with tenderness and passion, and the graceful lines of the shoulders, the voluptuous curves of the thighs, are full of sensuous feeling. The goddess, as represented in coins, stood beside a vase, over which her drapery is falling, while with her right hand she shields herself modestly. The head of Aphrodite in the British Museum, with its pure brows, its delicate, voluptuous lips, ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... Cressida, daughter of a Trojan priest. Pandarus, Cressida's uncle, acts as go-between for the lovers. Just as the suit of Troilus is crowned with success, Cressida, from motives of policy, is forced to join her father Calchas, who is in the camp of the besieging Greeks. Here her fickle and sensuous nature reveals itself rapidly. She yields to {173} the love of the Greek commander Diomed and promises to become his mistress. Troilus learns of this, consigns her to oblivion, and attempts, but unsuccessfully, to take revenge ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... experience of metropolitan life: the least important, because it has no intellectual or even emotional significance, and is thus without the slightest aesthetic purpose, having for its end (as an art) only the transient, sensuous gratification of an individual, or, at most, of the comparatively few persons by whom he may be seen in the course of not more than a single day; for every renovation of the dress is, in its kind, a new work of Art. As men emerge ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... down this strange story, perhaps he will detect, through all the haze of Romance, the outlines of these images suggested to his reason: Firstly, the image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as the Materialist had conceived it. Secondly, the image of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of perplexity and resorting to all kinds of ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... to think of these things, and to realize that we were in more or less danger; though the shores are as silent as the grave, the sea sleeps like a mill-pond, and the sun sinks to rest with great dignity and precision, nightly bathing the lonely North in sensuous splendor. ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... deal of fascination, and some truth, in the theory that different nations enjoy opera in different ways. According to this, the Italians consider it solely in relation to their sensuous emotions; the French, as producing a titillating sensation more or less akin to the pleasures of the table; the Spaniards, mainly as a vehicle for dancing; the Germans, as an intellectual pleasure; and the English, as an expensive but not ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... silenced, as though it were not relevant, the continual testimony of all religions to the existence of the spiritual nature in man. The spiritual consciousness proves itself quite as definitely as the intellectual or the sensuous consciousness proves itself—by the experience of the individual, alike in every religion as in every century in which humanity has lived, has thought, has suffered, has rejoiced. The religious, the spiritual nature, is that which is the strongest ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... architectural splendors, amid the bareness and baldness of the New World cities; for the grandeur of its ancient art, amid the poverty of the America of that day; for its impassioned music, in a land almost devoid of musical culture; and she had longed for the beautiful, sensuous, idle life of its people, through all the strain of a strenuous and overworked existence. Her vision had been fair, and at first she was much disappointed. In artistic or architectural magnificence St. Peter's and the Transfiguration could not disappoint a soul ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... she stood in the glistening moonlight. That the time would ever come when her glad laughter would be hushed, when her young heart would beat no more, when the bright, abundant, passionate blood would bound no longer through her veins, when all the vivacious, vivid, sensuous charms of living would be ended for her forever, was a thing that she could no better bring home to her than a bird that sings in the light of the sun could be made to know that the time would come when its ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... mysterious way of flowers, soothed some rebellion of young blood and helped to reconcile her to a lot which, for a shrewd and practical damsel, was, after all, not unenviable. She had no romance in her, and was quite unaware that the roses had helped; but she took a sensuous delight in them, and this had started her upon her hobby. A success or two in local flower-shows had ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... of the sensuous world dwells in us, is an emanation from ourselves; it is we who diffuse it, each person for himself according to his power, and we have it back again in the measure of our out-giving. But I did not comprehend early enough the deep meaning of this well-known truth. . . . ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... Renaissance, a rebirth of the moral nature of man following the intellectual awakening of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Italy, whose influence had been uppermost in Elizabethan literature, the Renaissance had been essentially pagan and sensuous. It had hardly touched the moral nature of man, and it brought little relief from the despotism of rulers. One can hardly read the horrible records of the Medici or the Borgias, or the political observations of Machiavelli, without ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... vindictive, and unscrupulous. The contrast of their portrait busts is remarkable, and gives a fair indication of the character of each of them. Thothmes has the appearance of a soft and yielding boy: he has a languishing eye, a short upper lip, a sensuous mouth and chin. Hatasu looks the Amazon: she holds her head erect, has a bold aquiline nose, a firmly-set mouth, and a chin that projects considerably, giving her an indescribable air of vigour and resolution. The effect is increased, no doubt, by her having attached ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... the starved soul of the child was filled with summer softness, as she slowly returned along the route she had recently come, thinking of the beautiful young lady and the sensuous odor of the flowers which had penetrated to the innermost ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... the narrow lanes you met great wagons drawn by broad-chested cart-horses, carrying home the rich golden store. To any one who has been, during the hot summer months, pent up in London, there is in the first taste of rustic life a kind of sensuous rapture scarcely to be described. George Talboys felt this, and in this he experienced the nearest approach to enjoyment that he had ever known since ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... itself in the contradistinguishing sense of that awful word, it is yet no wonder that, conscious of the sore weaknesses united in one person with this one nobler nature we attribute them to a divinity out of us, (a mistake of the sensuous imagination in its misapplication of space and place, rather than a misnomer of the thing itself, for it is verily [Greek: ho theos en haemin ho oikeios theos],) the effects, I mean, of the moral force after conquest, the state of the whole being after the victorious struggle, in which the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... queen. And the hot tears of Bidasari move us to living pity. In the poetic justice that punishes the queen and rewards the heroine we take a childish delight. In other words, the oriental poet is simple, sensuous, passionate, thus achieving Milton's ideal of poetic excellence. We hope that no philosopher, philologist, or ethnologist will persist in demonstrating the sun-myth or any other allegory from this beautiful poem. It is a story, a charming tale, to ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... burning; he knew that she was content. That she should be content, that it should please her to let him have the unimaginable experience of holding that thrilled and thrilling body close to his, seemed to him to be a marvellous piece of sheer luck and overwhelming good fortune. She was so sensuous and yet so serious. Her gaze stimulated not only love but conscience. In him ambition was superlatively vigorous. Nevertheless he felt then as though he had never really known ambition till that moment. He thought of the new century and of a new life. He perceived the childishness and folly ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... the feud In my New World's childhood haunts, If my childhood she renewed In this pleasant nook of France; Might she make the blouse I wear, Welcome then her homely fare And her sensuous religion! To the market we should ride, In the Mass kneel side by side, Might I warm, each eventide, In my nest, my ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... comment upon the spiritual doctrine embodied in it, Ashe sat so completely absorbed in reverie that he gave no heed to what was being said. In his ascetic life at the Clergy House he had been so far removed from the sensuous, save for that to which the services of the church appealed, that this enervating and luxurious atmosphere, this gathering to which its quasi- religious character seemed to lend an excuse, bred in him a species of intoxication. He sat like ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... suggesting industry and love; the distant city; the delicate and graceful spars of the Hartford; the busy despatch-steamers plying to and fro; the bursting forts and huge ugly monitors; the starry arches of flying shells by night and flying cloud by day; the soft lap of the water; the sensuous, sweet beauty of that latitude of eternal spring; and the soft dark violet of the outer sea, glassing itself in calm or broken into millioned frets of blue, red and starry fire; the danger above and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... a limit to human bliss, And the Mission of San Joaquin had this; None went abroad to roam or stay, But they fell sick in the queerest way,— A singular maladie du pays, With gastric symptoms: so they spent Their days in a sensuous content; Caring little for things unseen Beyond their bowers of living green,— Beyond the mountains that lay between The world and ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... kind of love; Peter proffers another. I do not enter upon discussion as to the distinction between these two apparent synonyms. The kind of love which Christ asks for is higher, nobler, less emotional, and more associated with the whole mind and will. It is the inferior kind, the more warm, more sensuous, more passionate and emotional, which Peter brings. And then, in the third question, our Lord, as it were, surrenders and takes Peter's own word, as if He had said, 'Be it so! You shrink from professing the higher ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... minds which owed their intellectual superiority to a disproportionate development of certain intellectual tendencies, or to a dwarfed or inferior endowment of those natural affections and personal qualifications which tend to limit men to the sphere of their particular sensuous existence. The mind of this school is the representative mind, and all men recognise it as that, because, in its products, that nature which is in all men, which philosophy had, till then, scorned to recognise, which the abstractionists ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... he did so, it came into his mind that it must be these little appliances had fixed the language so that it was still clear and understandable after two hundred years. The haphazard cylinders he substituted displayed a musical fantasia. At first it was beautiful, and then it was sensuous. He presently recognized what appeared to him to be an altered version of the story of Tannhauser. The music was unfamiliar. But the rendering was realistic, and with a contemporary unfamiliarity. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... confessed that, amidst the nations of Western Asia, this level was, on the whole, not a very lofty one. Both the Hamitic and Semitic races were, as a rule, of a naturally sensuous disposition; the former being, moreover, distinguished by a very decidedly material turn of mind. The Kushites, of whom a branch perhaps formed an important portion of the mixed population of Lower Mesopotamia, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... trace the progress of illusion towards hallucination by means of the gradual increase in force and extent of the imaginative, or indirect, as opposed to the sensuous, or direct, element in perception, we have found a second starting-point for this movement in the mechanism of sensation, involving, as it does, the occasional production of "subjective sensations." Such sensations constitute ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... Catskills, was like immediately preceding a clash between rival corporations. The high-strung gaiety, the drinking, the overtranking, the relaxation of mores. Even a Rank Private had it made. Admiring civilians to buy drinks and hang on your every word, and more important still, sensuous-eyed women, their faces slack in thinly suppressed passion. It was a recognized phenomenon, even Max Mainz knew—this desire on the part of women Telly fans to date a man, and then watch him later, killing or ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... awake and associations are but few, can with difficulty he conceived." But between the ages of eight and ten, an appreciation of external beauty is sufficiently common. No one doubts the accuracy of Wordsworth's account, in the Prelude of his early half-sensuous delight in mountain glory. It is impossible to define the influence of Nature, either on nations or individuals, or to say beforehand what selection from his varied surroundings a poet will for artistic purposes elect to make. Shakespeare rests in meadows ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... precautions should be taken against German music. Suppose a person loves the South as I love it—as a great school of recovery for the most spiritual and the most sensuous ills, as a boundless solar profusion and effulgence which o'erspreads a sovereign existence believing in itself—well, such a person will learn to be somewhat on his guard against German music, because, in injuring ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... natural form under the plea of chastity. Yet chastity itself is but an artificial imposition upon nature, expressive of a false shame of the human form. The modern idea of chastity, especially in reference to woman, its greatest victim, is but the sensuous exaggeration of our natural impulses. "Chastity varies with the amount of clothing," and hence Christians and purists forever hasten to cover the "heathen" with tatters, and thus convert him ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... in common Madness, it is Fantasy that superadds itself to sight; on the so petty domain of the Actual plants its Archimedes-lever, whereby to move at will the infinite Spiritual. Fantasy I might call the true Heaven-gate and Hell-gate of man: his sensuous life is but the small temporary stage (Zeitbuehne), whereon thick-streaming influences from both these far yet near regions meet visibly, and act tragedy and melodrama. Sense can support herself handsomely, in most countries, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... his mind: he would have liked to plunge both hands into the dark, luxuriant mass; still better, cautiously to draw his palm down this whitest skin, which, seen so near, had a faint, satin-like sheen. The mere imagining of it set him throbbing, and the excitement in his blood was heightened by the sensuous melancholy of the violin, which, just beyond the pale of his consciousness, throbbed and languished with him under the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... a tale of a mystery connected with an old clock. The lover, an American man of means, is startled out of his sensuous, inactive life in Venice by his lady-love's scorn for his indolence. She begs of him to perform any task that will prove his persistence and worth. With the charm of Venice as a background, one follows the adventures of the lover endeavoring to read the puzzling hints of the old clock as to the ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... beauty into one gulp of vacuity and label beauty nothing, is ignorantly to caricature God's creation, which is unjust to human sense and [5] to the divine realism. In our immature sense of spirit- ual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: "I love your promise; and shall know, some time, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly; and [10] knowing this, I shall be satisfied. Matter is a frail con- ception of mortal mind; and mortal mind ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... easily disposed of as meagre, cold, narrow, and austere,—this side, long suppressed and thrown into shade by the more active front, found expression at last in these pages so curiously compounded of various elements, answering to those traits of the past which Hawthorne's genius revived. The sensuous substance of the early New England character had piously surrendered to the severe maxims which religion and prudence imposed; and so complete was its suppression, that all this part of Puritan nature missed recording itself, except by chance glimpses through the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... tales, and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three dinner invitations in favour of this feast; but though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had ordered because the ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... are ever young, and a certain sensuous and fleshly note is essential to those of Italy if they are to retain the love of their worshippers. Granted. We do not need a scarred and hirsute veteran; but we need, at least, a personage capable of wielding the sword, a figure something ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... which affect the nerves of the mind and body, and thus possesses the power of direct appeal to the public—a power to a great extent denied to the other arts. This sensuous influence over the hearer is often mistaken for the aim and end of all music.... In declaring that the sensation of hearing music was pleasant to him, and that to produce that sensation was the entire mission of music, a certain English Bishop placed our art ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... it is compassionate, helpful, and spiritual. God I called immortal Mind. That which sins, suffers, and dies, I named mortal mind. The physical senses, or sensuous nature, I called error and shadow. Soul I denominated substance, because Soul alone is truly substantial. God I characterized as individual entity, but His corporeality I denied. The real I claimed as eternal; and its antipodes, or the temporal, ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... turned toward the religion of his uncle the abbe only to turn away again antagonized by what seemed to him frivolity in the religions pomp that he saw. But here was a religion not only without the attractions of sensuous surrounding, but a religion that maintained its vitality despite a repelling plainness, not to say a repulsive ugliness, in its external forms. For could he doubt the force of a religious principle that had divested every woman in the little church of every ornament? Doubtless he felt the narrowness ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... with a clear mellow liquor, and the rich leaves, and blossoms stood breathless with delight. The painfully rigid contraction of Balder's features was softening away; he was coming into harmony with the sensuous beauty of the scene, or its refined voluptuousness—serene, unambitious, content with time and careless ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... precedents and limitations, and they found that excess of freedom is sometimes an embarrassment. They were impelled towards literary reminiscence; and Thyrsis soon realized that this was a matter in which the sensuous temperament would have to have its way. "After all," argued Corydon, "to you a name is a name. If you can call the baby and have it answer, isn't that all ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... simple prose, sensuous and passionate for all its simplicity, is told the rest of the story. There are eighteen lines of it altogether in Dr. Sommer's reprint, but as these are long quarto lines, let us multiply them by some three to get the equivalent of the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... 1833, and re-buried with great pomp. Raphael's life and that of Rubens form the ideal painter's life—bountiful, splendid, unclouded, and terminating ere it sees eclipse or decay—to all in whom the artistic temperament is united to a genial, sensuous, pleasure-loving nature. ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... disdain, within graceful limits, to fare sumptuously every day. She valued all that is beautiful and costly in art, of high merit and distinction in literature. Her taste was sure and just, if a little more disposed towards that which is sensuous than towards that which is spiritual. And in all its many forms she appreciated luxury, even entertaining a kindness for that necessary handmaid of luxury—waste. Appreciated these the more ardently, that, with birth-pangs at the beginning of each human life, death-pangs ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and naif, sensuous and spiritual, is as much the type of the perfect medieval lover as Romeo, with his ardour and his vitality, is of the Renaissance one. But the poem—for in spite of the prose passages, the little work is in effect simply a poem—is not all sentiment ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the softness of the night The vagrant will-o'-wisps do greet the sight; Where fragrance baffling permeates the breeze That gently flouts the grasses and the trees; Where every flying thing doth seem to be Instinct with sweetly sensuous melody; Where hills and dales assume their warmest phase, With here and there a scarf of opal haze To soften their luxuriant attire; Where one can almost hear the elfin choir Across the meadow-land, down in the wood, In songs of gladness—there are all things good. Ah! ye who seek the spot where ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... been created high odes to an unknown god, sensuous lyrics of love, apostrophes and addresses to every human passion. But no poet, to my knowledge, has risen to the heights of the maternal instinct. Some contemporary clap-trap about sentimentalism will perhaps decry and ridicule the demand for ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... wagtails flit about her. The water-rat jumps into the stream with a soft plash, and his black body scuttles along to the opposite bank. The green dragon-flies float hither and thither; the beautiful frail-winged water- flies float over trout too lazy to snatch at them. The cow, in her sensuous nirvana, may see and marvel at the warm boating-man as he tows two stout young ladies in a heavy boat, or labours with the oar. Her pleasure is far more enduring than that of the bathers in the lasher up stream, and she has an enormous advantage over the contemplative ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... have been sufficient to render credible the famous story how an illustrious Circle, overcome by the artistic beauty of the forces under his command, threw aside his marshal's baton and his royal crown, exclaiming that he henceforth exchanged them for the artist's pencil. How great and glorious the sensuous development of these days must have been is in part indicated by the very language and vocabulary of the period. The commonest utterances of the commonest citizens in the time of the Colour Revolt seem to have been suffused with a richer ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... standing apart, and I had dropped my voice. "But come and talk to me awhile. I cannot stand those babies," and I indicated with a sweep of my fan the graceful, richly-dressed caballeros whose soft drooping eyes and sensuous mouths were more promising of compliments than conversation. "Neither Alvarado nor Castro is here. Thou too wouldst have gone in a moment had I ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... an interpretation of life. Religious poetry endeavors to express, in beautiful forms, the facts of the religious life. There is poetry that is not religious; poetry which deals only with that which is purely sensuous, poetry which does not hint at spiritual facts, or divine relations; and there is religion which has but little to do with poetry: but the highest religious thoughts and feelings are greatly served by putting them ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Hestia, Hermes, Artemis, were originally powers of nature personified, as some epithets in Homer[4] still indicate; but they became, sometimes under the same names, types of power and lordship, science and art, courage and sensuous beauty. While Dionysus, Demeter, Hades, and Persephone remained earthly, and Helios, Eos, Iris, and Hecate, heavenly divinities, and Oceanus, Poseidon, Amphitrite, Proteus, and Nereus ruled the waters, Zeus was conceived as the god of the sky and of thunder, who hurled the bolts, the great ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... earnest appeal on his face, looks down into mine. Not the man, but his manner, the situation, the music, the stealthy, intoxicating odor of perfume and flowers, the sway of each tropical leaf, the distant gayety, all surcharge my soul; gratify to the fullest extent my sensuous nature—my love of the picturesque and the luxurious. The temptation is strong to depart from my fixed principle. But I do not yield. I half extend my ungloved hand, white and ringless, murmur in a low voice suggestive of suppressed emotion, "You are very good to me! ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... third time! Dash it, why didn't I? Why the deuce didn't I?" I addressed myself as: "You blithering, blithering fool!" And my temples began to ache and now and then to hammer. For, always in these my early days of puberty, excitement and worry produced such immediate sensuous results. ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... over-powering dramatic contrasts—as a twentieth-century Walt Whitman, for example, might see it if he had a dash of Tennyson's technical equipment, of Arnold's sculpturesque polish and restraint, of Lanier's instinct for sensuous beauty. What "songs greater than before known" might such a poet not sing as he wandered close to precious records of the Anglo-Saxon culture of the race amid the stately colonial peace and simplicity of St. Mark's church-yard, with the ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... cosmopolitan sees in Goethe the Weltbuerger, the citizen of the world, the incarnation of die Weltweisheit. The patriot acclaims in him the poet who has sung the myths and legends dear to the German race. The sensuous and voluptuous libertine is enchanted by the eroticism of the "Roman Elegies." The domesticated reader is drawn by that chaste idyll, Herman and Dorothea. The Spinozist and Pantheist are attracted by the general tendencies of his philosophy. The Christian is at liberty to interpret ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... not essential for the safety of the autocracy, an absolutist Church will consult the average tastes of its subjects. If the populace are at heart pagan, and hanker after sensuous ritual, dramatic magic, and a rich mythology, these must be provided. The 'intellectuals,' being few and weak, may be safely rebuffed or disregarded until their discoveries are thoroughly popularised. The ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... occasions on which, from earthly caricatures of justice pious Muslims flee for refuge in their thoughts to the One Just Judge. Indeed, the great final Judgment is, to a good Muslim, a much stronger incentive to holiness than the sensuous descriptions of Paradise, which indeed he ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... said. She was thoughtful, deep natured, tender, and highly strung, though not demonstrative, and these qualities in him were modified by the soft, sensuous, imaginative elements that came to him—all that he inherited, except ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... humanity was everywhere intimately pulsing around her, oppressed her spirit yet not quite unpleasantly. The environment softened her glance upon the spectacle of existence, insomuch that sadness became a voluptuous pleasure. And the environment threw her back on herself, into a sensuous contemplation of the fundamental fact of Sophia ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... hold the masses. But Positivism in another shape, called Secularism,(905) is actively propagated among the lower orders. Replacing the sensuous philosophy and political antipathies of Owen, it is taught, unconnected with the political agitation which marked his views, as a philosophy of life, and a substitute for religion. It asserts three great principles:—first, that nature is the only subject of knowledge; ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... death—is without its value. At the same time it is a mere caricature of all higher religious beliefs when the religious motive is supposed to mean simply a fear of punishment and hope of personal reward, even of the least sensuous or material kind. Love of goodness for its own sake is for the Theist identical with the love of God. Love of a Person is a stronger force than devotion to an idea; and an ethical conception of God carries with it the ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... captured a prince of the blood, had dislocated the policy of a kingdom, and had ruined a man's life. She must have other trophies of her beauty, and Barraclough was one. I was sorry for him, though I cannot say that I liked him. The dull, unimaginative and wholesome Briton had toppled over before the sensuous arts of the French beauty. His anxiety was for her. He had not shown himself timorous as to the result before. Doubtless she had infected him with her fears. Possibly, even, it was at the lady's suggestion that he ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... First Consul, he had been on familiar terms with Cherubini. The soldier and the composer were seated in the same box listening to an opera by the latter. Napoleon, whose tastes for music were for the suave and sensuous Italian style, turned to him and said: "My dear Cherubini, you are certainly an excellent musician; but really your music is so noisy and complicated that I can make nothing of it;" to which Cherubini replied: "My dear general, you are certainly an excellent ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... woman, and she was very conscious of that. Her face was tanned by the mist-filtered sunlight of Rythar; her lips were red and sensuous; her long, platinum-colored hair fell to her shoulders. She compared herself to the small, hard-faced female she had seen in the supply room. Was that a typical Earthwoman? Mryna's lips curled in a scornful smile. Let the gods come down ...
— The Guardians • Irving Cox
... was a subtle, confessing caress. "I shall have my revenge," she murmured, and pressed closer to him again, every sensuous, sumptuous line of her a challenge and ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... near Athens to find his old house thus classically rechristened after it, and thought of it with a gravity he had not felt before. He wondered who had named it. There was no suggestion of the soft, sensuous elegance of the land he had left in those great heroics of nature before him. Those enormous trees were no woods for fauns or dryads; they had their own godlike majesty of bulk and height, and as he at last ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... until the time came—he knew it would come—when she had outgrown his help, and ascended to a plane where he could no longer guide her. His greatest fear was lest, from her overflowing vitality and keen sensuous delight in all the surface activities and pleasures of life, the intellectual side of her nature should be kept in the background and not properly nourished. He had compelled her to study, to think, to write. Who would do this for her in the new home? He knew enough ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... vampyrism which is constantly on the alert to see what, and how much it can gobble up for its own delectation. This is the lowest grade. It begins with the selfism of the individual, its manifestations are named lust. It seeks expression through the sensuous nature, but extends to the ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... I do? She insisted, and said, "Please, please," whereupon I turned the oar over to her and obeyed. I experienced a positive sensuous delight as I crawled into the bed she had made with her hands. The calm and control which were so much a part of her seemed to have been communicated to the blankets, so that I was aware of a soft ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... every fold of her dress radiating the most delicate tones. Yet there was nothing voluptuous or sensual about it. I was raised above earthly things. Men and women were no longer men and women—they were brilliant creatures of whom I was one. It was sensuous, but not sensual. I looked at my own clothes. My everyday suit was idealised. My hands were surrounded by a glow of red fire that made me feel that they must be the hands of a divinity. I noticed them as I reached forward toward the tray ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... of an unerring and unfailing art, an extraordinarily skilful technique. He had it entirely at his command; and he exercised it in a language in which, though it may be singularly artificial and conventional, we can still feel the wonder of its sensuous beauty and the splendour of its expressive power. It is a language that seems alive with eagerness to respond to imagination. Open Homer anywhere, and the casual grandeur of his untranslatable language appears; such ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... with pathetic joy all who can bring some new fancy or trick to their castle-building, rejecting all other without remorse. To this World of Fashion Iola had offered herself, giving freely her great voice and her superb body, now developed into the full splendour of its rich and sensuous beauty. And how they gathered about her and gave her unstinted their flatteries and homage, taking toll the while of the very soul-stuff in her. Devoutly they worshipped at the shrine of that heavenlike ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... neck showing him to be a person of importance. His tawny complexion marked him of mixed race. This conclusion his features did not belie, for the brow, nose, and cheek-bones were Semitic in outline, while the full, prominent eyes, and thick, sensuous lips could with equal certainty be attributed to the Negroid stock. In fact, he was the son of a native African queen, or chieftainess, and a noble Phoenician, and his rank no less than that of absolute king and hereditary chief of a vast and undefined territory which lay around ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... music in Italy more than thirty years ago. He had the true ear and the facile memory for melody common to Italians, who are a singing people, if not a musical race, and which constituted a talent for music when music was considered to be a succession of sounds rather than a series of sensuous impressions. He could listen to an opera, understand it without thought, enjoy it simply, and remember it without difficulty, like thousands of other Romans. Most of us would willingly go back to such childlike amusements if we could. A few possess the power even ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... her confirmation. No words could have told so clearly the sensuous delight that stilled her tongue. There was joy in her soft breathing, in the gently spreading nostrils, in the half- closed eyes. She was experiencing the unspeakable thrill that comes but once ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... light, and shade, of certain places and hours, stressing the purely pictorial effect, and with little or no reference to any other aspect of the places described. It is an enchanting thing to wander through a city looking for its unrelated beauty, the beauty by which it captivates the sensuous sense of seeing. ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... a distrust did he impart to his followers, that they were in the habit of saying, "We assert nothing; no, not even that we assert nothing." Epicurus taught his disciples that truth can never be determined by reason. Arcesilaus, denying both intellectual and sensuous knowledge, publicly avowed that he knew nothing, not even his own ignorance! The general conclusion to which Greek philosophy came was this—that, in view of the contradiction of the evidence of the senses, we cannot distinguish the true from ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... to reply, but sauntered out with her sex-conscious, half-sensuous walk. Outside the door her smile faded, and her face was hard and bitter. She might forget Dick Livingstone, but never would she forgive herself for her confession to Elizabeth, nor Elizabeth ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... perfect flower of our genius for story and song; for romantic life and fine insight into nature; for keen wit and gentler humor. The love of nature, the passion for visible beauty, and chiefly the visible beauty of our land, will here show itself clearly,—a sense of nature not merely sensuous, but thrilling with hidden and mystic life. We shall find such perfection in this more emotional and poetic side of Irish character as will leave little for coming ages to add. In these two early epochs we shall see the perfecting of the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... almost skittish, with the white and green paint he had lavished upon it. Even the garden palings were striped white and green, and so were the boats, for Mr. Polly was one of those who find a positive sensuous pleasure in the laying on of paint. Left and right were two large boards which had done much to enhance the inn's popularity with the lighter-minded variety of pleasure-seekers. Both marked innovations. One bore in large letters the single word ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... tendency.[224] A poet of different calibre is Daumer, whose Hafis (Hamb. 1846) for a long time was regarded as a translation, whereas the poems of the collection are in reality original productions in Hafid's manner, just like Rueckert's Oestliche Rosen.[225] Their sensuous, passionate eroticism, however, is not a genuine Hafid quality, as we before have seen. The same criticism applies even much more forcibly to Schefer's Hafis in Hellas (Hamburg, 1853).[226] Special mention is due to the gifted, but unfortunate, Heinrich Leuthold, whose ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... Virgil had felt the power of the Stoic creed; but he was essaying an epic poem, and he could not possibly dispense with the divine machinery as it stood in his great Homeric model. His Jupiter is indeed, as has been lately said,[569] "a great and wise god, free from the tyrannical and sensuous characteristics of the Homeric Zeus," in other words, he is a Roman deity, and sometimes acts and speaks like a grave Roman consul of the olden time. But still he is an anthropomorphic deity, a purely human conception of a personal god-king; in these lines he smiles on his daughter Venus and ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... surprise are the essence of the successful "spectacle." Just as the scarlet dervish whirl was at its height the character of the music changed, slackened, softened, died from the angrily sensuous into an ethereal delicacy. The stage filled with clouds that faded in golden light, and a huge and glittering stairway rose towards the painted sky. On either side of it hung in the blue ether guardian angels with outstretched wings, and between their attentive ranks stood ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... glimpse of bud, while others, panting and wide open, seemed consumed with infatuation for their persons. There were pert, gay little things that filed off, cockade in cap; there were huge ones, bursting with sensuous charms, like portly, fattened-up sultanas; there were impudent hussies, too, in coquettish disarray, on whose petals the white traces of the powder-puff could be espied; there were virtuous maids who had donned ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... pavements of polished jasper and bespattered the conquerors. The Dagombas, finding themselves inside this extensive abode of luxury, where beautiful fountains shot high into the morning sunlight, sweet-smelling flowers bloomed everywhere and sensuous odours from perfuming-pans hung heavily in the air, seemed suddenly transformed into a demoniac horde bent upon the most ruthless devastation. They remembered that times without number had the Sofas of Samory burnt their villages and towns, and carried hundreds of their tribesmen ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... embarrassing way, a vision of thirty years before, when George was a little boy in buckskin pants and jacket, and was beginning to ride the prairie with him. This boy was like George, yet not like him. The face was George's, the sensuous, luxurious mouth; but the eyes were not those of a Baragar, nor yet those of Aunt Kate's family; and they were not wholly like the mother's. They were full and brimming, while hers were small and whimsical; yet they had her quick, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... wrote on, she acknowledges, at hap-hazard, tempted and led away by the new horizons which the artistic and historical researches her work required kept opening to her view. But the powerful contrast between the two pictures,—of bright, sunshiny, free, sensuous, careless Venetian folk-life, and of the stern gloom of the mediaeval castle, where the more spiritual consolations of existence come into prominence—is singularly effective and original. So also is the charming way in which ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... trinity, which frequently occurs in the form of a triangle (three points united by three straight lines), is shown how the divided and sensuous nature is led by the higher power of the number 3 to a harmony of powers and to a new unity. The symbol of reason attaining victory over matter becomes visible. A representation of trinity is possible by means of the conventional ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Bronte there is no emerald and beryl and chrysoprase; there are no vine-leaves in her hair, and on her white Oread's feet there is no stain of purple vintage. She knows nothing of the Dionysiac rapture and the sensuous side of mysticism. She can give nothing to the young soul that thirsts and hungers for ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... indeed, to be trodden down like beasts, but to be elevated and softened by them, and made useful in the toils which white men could not endure?" Ultra-Calvinists united with politicians in building up a public sentiment in favor of slavery as the best possible condition for the ignorant, sensuous, and superstitious races who, when put under the training and guardianship of a civilized and Christian people, had escaped the harder lot which their fathers endured in the deserts and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... Locke, who came after him, was the first to ask it, and he endeavored to answer it in his "Essay concerning Human Understanding." The result of his speculations was, that the mind is a tabula rasa, that this tabula rasa becomes gradually filled with sensuous perceptions, and that these sensuous perceptions arrange themselves into classes, and thus give rise to more general ideas or conceptions. This was a step in advance; but there was again one thing taken for granted by Locke,—the perceptions. This led to the next step ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the door was furnished with a sort of gross opulence that never failed to jar on Mr. Taynton's exquisite taste and cultivated mind. Pictures, chairs, sofas, the patterns of the carpet, and the heavy gilding of the cornices were all sensuous, a sort of frangipanni to the eye. The apparent contrast, however, between these things and their owner, was as great as that between Mr. Taynton and his partner, for Mr. Godfrey Mills was a thin, spare, dark little man, brisk in movement, with a look in his eye that betokened a watchfulness ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... awakens owes nothing to rhythmical language nor to subtle interpretations of sensuous emotion; it proceeds from a perception of eternal truth, the truth that has love, faith, courage, and self-sacrifice for the cornerstones of ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... a fair shape. Short-necked, florid and plethoric, he had the air of the man who seldom makes a long illness at the end. His eyes were very blue, and the lids were puffed and heavy, whilst the mouth, Mr. Caryll remarked in a critical, detached spirit, was stupid rather than sensuous. He made his survey swiftly, and the result left ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... resentful of all restraint. Hers was such beauty as lies in rich blood beneath dark coloring, in dusky hair and eyes, in the soft, warm contours of youth. Already she was slenderly full, an elemental daughter of Eve, primitive as one of her fur-clad ancestors. No forest fawn could have been more sensuous or ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... to tune the fiddle carefully and abstractedly. His eyes were half-closed, giving them a sulky look, and his head was averted. He made no reply to Ingolby, but his head swayed from side to side in that sensuous state produced by self-hypnotism, so common among the half- Eastern races. By an effort of the will they send through the nerves a flood of feeling which is half-anaesthetic, half-intoxicant. Carried into its fullest expression it drives ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... than Van Berg, in his worship of beauty, never existed; but it was the beauty of a complete man or a complete woman. Even in his early youth he had not been so sensuous as to be captivated by that opaque fragment of a woman—an attractive form devoid of a mind. Indeed with the exception of a few boyish follies, his art had been his mistress thus far, and it was beginning to absorb both ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain; but the mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... over him that this cannot endure. The disciples childishly marvel at the splendid Temple, but its gorgeousness strikes him as earthly, sensuous, perishable, and he says, "There shall not one ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... of Hebbel's dramatic production. Hebbel died in Vienna December 13, 1863. His lyric poetry, for the most part the product of his earlier years, is marked above all by a tendency towards symbolism, these symbols usually of a rich sensuous beauty and often of a rare delicacy. A homely realism is, however, by no means lacking. The musical quality of his verse attracted the genius of Robert Schumann, who set ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... impression; consciousness &c (knowledge) 490. external senses. V. be sensible of &c adj.; feel, perceive. render sensible &c adj.; sharpen, cultivate, tutor. cause sensation, impress; excite an impression, produce an impression. Adj. sensible, sensitive, sensuous; aesthetic, perceptive, sentient; conscious &c (aware) 490. acute, sharp, keen, vivid, lively, impressive, thin-skinned. Adv. to the quick. Phr. the touch'd needle ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... greatness and vanity of man's life—man who lives like the angels and dies like the brutes—the mortal paradox that has puzzled all thinkers from the Psalmist to Pascal. For the unbeliever this must ever be the ugly reverse of all glories that are merely material, though the sensuous optimist need not allow the skeleton at the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... father! How he had toiled and planned to aggrandize this only son, who seemed far more delighted with an old coin or an old picture than with the great works which bore his name. In all manner of ways he had made it clear to his family that in the dreamy, sensuous atmosphere of Italian life he remembered the gray earnestness of Scottish life with ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... who is the supreme Soul; the ultimate Self of all beings. In the deepest sen se , purity means fitness for this vision, and also a heart cleansed from all disquiet, from all wandering and unbridled thought, from the torment of sensuous imaginings; and when the spirit is thus cleansed and pure, it becomes at one in essence with its source, the great Spirit, the primal Life. One consciousness now thrills through both, for the psychic partition wall is ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... crisis of acute love, sensuous and poetic. It seemed to him sometimes that one day he had taken flight, with hands extended, and that he had been able to clasp in full embrace that winged and magnificent dream which is always hovering over ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... women with eyes like wet green berries Glide across the slick mirror of their own smiles And vanish through lengths of gold and marble drawing rooms. The marble smiles, As sensuous as snow; Hips ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... difference of Paganism and Christianism; one great difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance of the first Thought of men,—the chief recognized virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... choice indued by the desire for beauty, and—change. The years elapsed like a series of pictures from the fairy-tale of Prince Charming. They formed a frieze of bewitching groups in all the attitudes which express wooing and granting, languishing and triumphing. Each year was a Decameron, each month a sensuous Florentine tale, with a woman's name for title and contents. What a retrospect! His past life resembled a dream whose details blended indistinctly with one another, leaving only a confused recollection of sighs, kisses, and tears, melting eyes, half-parted lips, ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... sir?" asked Stafford, as he and Falconer made their way round the room through which was floating the last thing in waltzes, a soft and sensuous melody which sang ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... day. Nature was trembling and fainting in the ecstasies of sensuous heat. Beside the railway the trenches which in spring were gurgling brooks were now dry and brown, and the reeds which had bent forward to kiss the water now leaned over from very weakness, dusty and sickly. The fields were ripening to the harvest. ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... ears. They showed delicately against the two shining masses. Her forehead and chin were of noble and courageous shape. If there was fault, it was in the breadth and height of brows masterful rather than feminine. She had not one delicious sensuous charm to lure man. Her large eyes were blotted with a hopeless blankness. She waited to see what would be ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... the money game. And at that point, he owned ingenuously, he would have to be briefly insincere. He could unroll his own past, but not Esther's. The minute the stage needed her he realised he could never summon her. He might betray himself, not her. It was she, the voice incarnate of greed and sensuous delight, that had whipped him along his breathless course, and now he had to conceal her behind a wilful lie and say they were his own delights that ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... The first instalment of this fabulous novel was featured in Argosy-All-Story-Weekly for May 14, 1921. Described as a "different" serial, it was introduced by a cover by Modest Stein. In the foreground was the profile of a girl of another dimension—ethereal, sensuous, the eternal feminine—the Nervina of the story. Filmy crystalline earrings swept back over her bare shoulders. Dominating the background was a huge flaming yellow ball, like our Sun as seen from the hypothetical Vulcan— splotched with murky, mysterious globii vitonae. There ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... by which a soul comes to its self-realization has been a favorite study with poets, dramatists, and novelists. Marguerite, in "Faust," was a simple, sweet, sensuous, traditionally religious girl until she was rudely startled by the knowledge that she was a great sinner; that moment the scales began to fall from her eyes. In her, Goethe has shown how one class of persons, and that a large class, come ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... alluring refinements. They felt contempt for their old Latin speech and for their literature, with the tiresome asceticism it eternally preached. The Christian ideal had grown to be one of penance and mortification of the flesh, and to a few ardent souls these sensuous delights were an open highway to death eternal. Eulogius became the leader of this band of zealots. In lamenting the decadence of his people, he wrote, "hardly one in a thousand can write a decent Latin letter, and yet ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... of the pines; even the dazzling white of a herd of cattle worked upon me so powerfully that I murmured to myself with a sigh, 'How sad it is that I cannot remain to enjoy all this, and thus gratify my sensuous nature.' ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... had forced themselves into the peaceful country, where their rajah, like many another, had been free to carry on a happy lawless existence, cutting throats, selling slaves, committing acts of piracy, and indulging in every vile and sensuous custom, was one not to be lost. Rajah Gantang wanted no peace, or order, or prosperity in the land where he could seize on the wretched people, and make them pay him in gold, tin, rice, poultry, fruit, or any precious commodity, for the right to pass down the river, which he, and a few ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... Haynes, whose large dark head and heavy shoulders look as if they sustained the whole weight of an intolerable world. His features, designed for sensuous composure, brood in a sad and sulky resignation to ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... 'comprehended,' indeed, 'the worth of constancy' and other virtues as well as most men, and could have written about them better than most men; but somehow 'a sinister influence or agency,' a periphrasis for a sensuous temperament, was perpetually present, which confined his virtues to the sphere of theory. An apology sometimes is worse than a satire. The case, however, seems to be sufficiently plain. We need not suspect that Hazlitt was consciously acting a part and nursing his 'frenzy' ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... subtle interpretation; unsuggestive, since she was already saying all that could be said, and following out every principle by which she lived to the furthest confine of its contents. It presented the same kind of rounded-off completion and satisfactoriness as that suggested by an entirely sensuous and comfortable person. There were no corners in it, no vistas hinting at anything except at some perfectly normal lawn or set garden, no mystery, no implication of any other theory or glimpse of theory ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... conception, a fine sense of harmony, and a power and decision of expression which neither overloads nor falls short of the thought. In tone it is half way between Shelley and Keats, neither so ideal as the one nor so sensuous as the other. Keat's Endymion is so thick with fancies, and verbal daintinesses, and sweet sensations, that with all its wonderful affluence of beautiful things it lacks unity of impression. The mind of the poet is so possessed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... the book beautiful a covering of leather, and full leather, not merely a back and hinges. We have a wide range of beauty in leathers, from the old ivory of parchment—when it has had a few centuries in which to ripen its color—to the sensuous richness of calf and the splendor of crushed levant. The nature of the book must decide, if the choice is yet to be made. But, when the book has been covered with appropriate leather so deftly that the leather seems "grown around the board," and ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... 1. The combination of sensuous impressions into perceptions (Wahrnehmungen); which consists essentially in this—that the sensation, impressing itself directly upon our experience, is by the intellect, now beginning to act, co-ordinated in ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... it constantly does, in the mixed modern race. But the daughter surpassed her mother. Delia's eyes, of a lovely grey blue, lidded, and fringed, and arched with an exquisite perfection; the curve of the slightly bronzed cheek, suggesting through all its delicacy the fulness of young, sensuous life; the mouth, perhaps a trifle too large, and the chin, perhaps a trifle too firm; the abundance of the glossy black hair, curling wherever it was allowed to curl, or wherever it could escape the ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
