"Austerity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intensely excited the poor Romanists, who looked on him as a genuine "saint" of the ancient breed. The stamp of heaven seemed to them clear in a frame so wasted by austerity, so superior to worldly pomp, and so partaking in all their indigence. That a dozen such men would have done more to convert all Ireland to Protestantism, than the whole apparatus of the Church Establishment, was ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... A pharisaical austerity rendered him redoubtable by the license he assumed in his public reprimands, whether to plaintiffs, or defendants, advocates or magistrates; so that there was not a single person who did not tremble to have to do with him. Besides this, sustained in all by the Court (of which he was the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... indebted, and which it recognizes here, there, and in every region. He was a source of great edification to me—and to many others of our Society who had come to me from Manila and who were afterward my guests—by his great piety, austerity, eloquence, penitence, and blameless and exemplary life. In this way time passed until September of the year fifteen hundred and ninety-six, when, the division and allotment of the fourteen fathers who had arrived in the previous ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... from her mother's clinging hands Rosa began to repeat the Salve Regina. "Hail, Queen, Mother of mercy. Thou our life, our sweetness, our hope, hail!" Her voice gradually rose and lost more and more of its cool austerity, as though she were intoxicating herself with the sweet beauty of the words, until it became warm and soft and melting as she said, "To Thee we call, to Thee we sigh, as we grieve and weep in this vale of tears." And then passing from the Salve to another prayer, she ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... Himavat where the deities had performed their great sacrifice, she stood there for another hundred billions of years, supporting her weight upon only the toes of her feet with the object of gratifying the Grandsire with such an act of austerity. Wending thither, the Creator and Destroyer of the universe again addressed her saying, "Upon what art thou engaged, O daughter? Accomplish those words of mine." Addressing the divine Grandsire, the maiden once more said, "I ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... elements, which they called respectively gnomes, sylphs, salamanders, and ondines. To this strange sect some of the savage opinions on the subject of spirits seem to have been transmitted in a philosophical form from classical antiquity. They taught that it was possible for the philosopher by austerity and study to rise to intercourse with these elemental spirits, and even to obtain them in marriage. But the orthodox regarded the Cabalists as magicians and their spirits as foul incubi. See Lecky, "History of Rationalism," vol. i. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... coffee. She had seated herself apart, with a somewhat wearied expression on her face. Her black velvet gown, unrelieved by any trimming, gave her an air of austerity. In this small drawing-room smoking was allowed, and several boxes of cigars were placed beside her on the pier-table. The doctor drew near; as he selected a cigar he asked her: "Is ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... having regard to the thunders of Claudius Clear, that George Ponderevo is decidedly more chaste than nine men out of ten, and than ninety-nine married men out of every hundred. And the book emanates an austerity and a self-control which are quite conspicuous at the present stage of fiction, and which one would in vain search for amid the veiled concupiscence of at least one author whom Claudius Clear has praised, and, I think, never blamed—at least on that score. I leave him ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... because of the danger that crowded audiences would spread the plague when it became epidemic. In spite of this official opposition, however, the sober citizens formed a goodly part of theater audiences until after the accession of King James, when the rising tide of Puritanism led to increased austerity. At no time were the majority of the citizens entirely free from a love for worldly pleasures. They swelled the crowds at the taverns, and their wives often vied with the great ladies of ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... established and obligatory, and the same reasoning then holds good with regard to the other conditions mentioned. Nor must it be said that the special duties mentioned at the beginning of the section—sacrifice, study, charity, austerity, Brahmakarya—all of them belong to the state of the householder (in which case the text would contain no reference to the other conditions of life); for on that supposition the definite reference to a threefold ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... Frances Allan was chiefly responsible. The one weak spot in the armor of austerity in which John Allan clothed himself was his love for his wife, and it was often against what he felt to be his better judgment that he acquiesced in her system of child-spoiling. He felt a solemn responsibility toward the boy, and he did his duty ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... consisted of broth, potatoes, and artichokes, which also comprised my breakfast, as well as dinner, during my sojourn of three days in this monastery, where they esteem even fish and eggs to be too carnal. Such is the austerity of their lives, that this monk, who was their physician, informed me that it required three entire years to become inured to it, but that those who stood the ordeal mostly attained a very great age. Their clothing, food, and medicines are each confined to such as they themselves can manufacture ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... brought from a mining ditch at great expense, and was of insufficient quantity. In this emergency Mulrady thought of sinking an artesian well on the sunny slope beside his house; not, however, without serious consultation and much objection from his Spanish patron. With great austerity Don Ramon pointed out that this trifling with the entrails of the earth was not only an indignity to Nature almost equal to shaft-sinking and tunneling, but was a disturbance of vested interests. "I and my ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... has produced an infinity of mistakes and evils of various kinds. Jesus, our Savior, prescribed one and the same rule of life or duty to all His disciples. But the Christian doctors, either by too great a desire of imitating the nations among whom they lived, or from a natural propensity to austerity and gloom, (a disease that many labor under in Syria, Egypt, and other provinces of the East,) were induced to maintain that Christ had prescribed a twofold rule of holiness and virtue; the one ordinary, the other extraordinary; the one lower, the ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... 200 nautical miles in the early 1970s, the Faroese no longer could continue their traditional long-distance fishing and subsequently depleted their own nearby fishing areas. The government's tight controls on fish stocks and its austerity measures have caused a recession, and subsidy cuts will force nationalization in the fishing industry, which has already been plagued with bankruptcies. Copenhagen has threatened to withhold its annual subsidy of $130 million - roughly one-third of the islands' budget ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... enemy of human kind who has thrown around us the gloom of superstition, and taught that austerity and ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... glint of mischievousness in her withdrawn eyes at this moment mitigated the austerity of her command as they both ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the nobler designs of Christianity: and that plantation though it has had more adversaries than perhaps any one upon earth, yet, having obtained help from God, it continues to this day." Mather occasionally relieves the austerity of his descriptions with images full of tender feeling: after having spoken of an English lady whose religious ardor had brought her to America with her husband, and who soon after sank under the fatigues and privations of exile, he adds, "As for her ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... philosophy of the unseen was one, for whom, as was said of a very different French writer, "the visible world really existed." Austere as he seems, and on well- considered principle really is, his temperance or austerity, aesthetically so winning, is attained only by the chastisement, the control, of a variously interested, a richly sensuous nature. Yes, the visible world, so pre-eminently worth eye-sight at Athens just then, really existed ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Meanwhile, austerity was an appanage of the stoics, in whose faultless code the dominant note was contempt for whatever is base, respect for all that is noble. A doctrine of great beauty, purely Greek, as was everything else in Rome that was beautiful, its heights ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.—But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... the kind and presented on a public stage, in spectacle, dialogue and action, living pictures of men and manners, for the suppression of vice, and the circulation of virtue and morality. Even the Gymnosophists, severe as they were, encouraged dramatic representation. The Bramins, whose austerity in religious and moral concerns almost surpasses belief, were in the constant habit of enforcing religious truths by dramatic fictions represented in public. The great and good PILPAY the fabulist, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... Imola. The numerous institutions there, which owe their existence to his Episcopal zeal and Christian charity, are monuments of his pastoral care. The virtue of which Archbishop Mastai was so bright a pattern had no sourness in it, no outward show of austerity; nor was it forbidding and intolerant, but sweet and gentle. Words of forgiveness were always on his lips, and his hand was ever open to distress. He labored assiduously to reform, wherever reform was needed, but, what rarely happens, without ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon All this, and cast a wide and tender light, Which softened down the hoar austerity ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... care for such qualities, or to be of much account in the destinies of leading Englishmen. Republicanism was in the air. Chesterfield was thinking of the France of his youth; but France had changed. In 1765, Horace Walpole was depressed by the solemnity and austerity of French society. Their style of conversation was serious, pedantic, and seldom animated except by a dispute on some philosophic subject.[375] In fact, Chesterfield was admiring the France of Louis the Fourteenth ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... sympathy and of humor, Milton stands first in that other great order which is too didactic for humor, and of which Schiller is the best recent representative. He was called the lady of his college not only for his beautiful face, but because of the vestal purity and austerity of his virtue. The men of the former class are intuitive, passionate, impulsive; not steadily conscious of their powers; fitful, unsystematic. Their love is ecstasy; their errors are the intoxication of joy; their sorrows are the pangs ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... pride and pretensions to strict orthodoxy in all outward observances. Abdulmelik ben Salih, who was a well-known general and statesman of the time, was especially renowned for pietism and austerity ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... it a day of general gloom and austerity. The man who has been toiling hard all the week, has been looking towards the Sabbath, not as to a day of rest from labour, and healthy recreation, but as one of grievous tyranny and grinding oppression. The day which his Maker intended as a blessing, man has ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... monarch—the tribune intruding with his veto within the chamber of the patrician order. His own establishment was formed upon the English model, and amidst the gayety and ease of Fontainebleau he assumed an air of republican austerity. When the fine ladies of the court would attempt to drag him to the card-table, he shrugged his shoulders with an air of affected contempt for the customs and amusements of the old regime. Meanwhile, the deference ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... his grandmother's;" but the proud lady was not skilled in this humble art, and never even suspected that a person in Mrs. Gratacap's lowly station would dare to pass judgment upon one in her lofty position. She replied, with increased austerity,— ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... first feeling upon returning to Switzerland, after our sojourn in Italy, was of a certain chill and austerity in the atmosphere, a lack of heartiness, in sharp contrast to the rich feast of beauty, the warm color and compelling charm of Italian towns. This impression was accentuated by the fact that it rained ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... he should go, and hitherto she had been wonderfully successful. All through his married life she had resided at the palace and been the ruling power, and when his wife had died twenty years before, snuffed out by the cold austerity of the Bishop's sister and the ecclesiastical monotony of Blanford, Miss Matilda had assumed the reins of power, and had ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... the time being his craze was for kindness. It was not enough for him to be kind naturally: he wished to be thought kind: he professed kindness, and acted it. Out of reaction against the hard, dry activity of his kinsfolk, and against German austerity, militarism, and Philistinism, he was a Tolstoyan, a Nirvanian, an evangelist, a Buddhist,—he was not quite sure what,—an apostle of a new morality that was soft, boneless, indulgent, placid, easy-living, effusively forgiving every sin, especially the sins of the flesh, a morality which ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... little time, the outward world puts on a drear austerity. On some October morning there is a heavy hoarfrost on the grass and along the tops of the fences; and at sunrise the leaves fall from the trees of our avenue, without a breath of wind, quietly descending by their own weight. All summer long they have ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... below the Narrows. The rocks are polished smooth and bare as they rise from the water's edge, and it is as desolate and barren a land as one's imagination could picture, but withal possesses a rugged grand beauty in its grim austerity that is impressive. ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... Esther, sought his father. But the expression of his apprehensions was so vague, he was so incapable of giving his fears any definite shape, that he made no more impression than the woman. The calm austerity of the Solitary's face almost melted into a smile at the idea that any event could occur except in the determined course of things. It was the pride of the human heart; it was the presumption of the human intellect that dreamed of freedom of choice or of action. If individual wills were ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... in the attitude of deep contemplation. The rough soutane and leather belt, the beads and missionary cross partly hid in his breast, declared him to be a follower of St. Ignatius. In the hallowed austerity of his whole appearance, in the sweetness blended with religious gravity, and in the respect and love manifested in the ever increasing crowd, one easily learned he was more than an ordinary man. The people of Naples knew him by the endearing name of ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... bitterness against their suffering sisters was nearly always instigated by a desire to conceal their own defects, to raise themselves, as they thought, by depreciating others, and to lay hypocritical claim to a superior austerity and goodness which was not theirs. The really pure—and for the honour of the past age of Montalluyah, I must say there were some few who were truly good—were those only from whom the sinner received sympathy and encouragement to return to the path ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought Becket's robes too rich and his meals too poor. But then the modern man was really exceptional ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... piquet; his daughter's children, who amuse him by their laughter, and play round his chair in the garden of his hotel; his faithful wife, and one or two friends as old as himself, form his society. His son the Abbe is with them but seldom. The austerity of his manners frightens his old father, who can little comprehend the religionism of the new school. After going to hear his son preach through Lent at Notre-Dame, where the Abbe de Florac gathered a great congregation, the old Count came away quite puzzled ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... girl seems to be still lingering, while yet love and motherhood have wrought once more their old transforming miracle on sense and spirit. In her afternoon dress of dainty sprigged silk, with just a touch of austerity in the broad muslin collar and cuffs—her curly brown hair simply parted on her brow, and gathered classically on a shapely head—her mouth a little troubled, her brow a little puckered over Lady Barnes's discontents—she was a very gracious ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the hero proceeds from the same wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... boy strong and full of blood. The very discipline that had given a gloomy cast to his mind had given strength and fortitude to his body. He was austere, because austerity was all that he had ever known or had a chance of knowing; but too often austerity is but the dam that holds back the flood of potential passion. Not to know the power which rages behind the barricade is to leave the structure weak for a hapless day when, carrying all before ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... sentiment. The thing for which I am trying is a genuine recollection of the way in which the growth of this emotion was marked within myself. Things are very much otherwise to-day; but nearly three-score years ago there was a certain purposed austerity practised by the most dutiful and praiseworthy parents, which froze the natural budding affections of a child. Before I had arrived at the technical age of manhood, my father had become the dearest friend I had in the world, and the friendship lasted till his ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... fell power of death which did not even respect the person of a High Court judge, and had stripped him of every vestige of human dignity in the pangs of a violent end. The face he had last seen on the Bench full of wisdom and austerity of the law was now distorted into a livid mask in which it was hard to trace any semblance of the features of ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... attack. Drawn on by Ferrier's interrogative glance, she quietly repeated, with more detail, and even greater austerity, the arguments and considerations she had made use of in her wrestle with Sir James. Chide clearly perceived that her opposition was hardening with every successive explanation of it. What had been ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... seemed to him better boldly to admit an error than to be the slave of consistency. And this same feeling showed itself in other matters besides art: in ethics, as is shown by some verses which he addressed to a young friend, urging him not to be bound by a too rigid austerity: ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... not so easily frightened," she asserted; adding, with a touch of the austerity which was her Puritan birthright: "Nor quite so ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... fanaticism. While her husband was a worshiper from a love of God and his holy laws, she was prompted by fears of the wrath to come. He bowed in thankfulness, even while he wept their loss, to the Power that had borne his little ones to a brighter world, while her life gained new austerity from the thought that they had been taken from her as a judgment on her worldliness and idolatry. She loved to dwell upon the sufferings of the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, and emulate their rigid lives, forgetting ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... ground to believe that we have found that mercy which also sets open the door for them to come and partake with us. Ministers, I say, should do thus, both by their doctrine, and in all other respects. Austerity doth not become us, neither in doctrine nor in conversation.37 We ourselves live by grace; let us give as we receive, and labour to persuade our fellow-sinners, which God has left behind us, to follow after, that they may partake with ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... "smugged in" to play for a village to which he had no pretensions to belong. In process of time the youth became a man, and by virtue of his cricket reputation he obtained a post in the Court of Queen's Bench. The gentleman whom I have referred to as looking with such austerity at Mr. Bumpkin is that very Don O'Rapley; the requirements of a large family necessitated his abandonment of a profession which, although more to his taste, was not sufficiently remunerative to admit of his indulging it after the birth of his sixth child. But ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... mortal man can ever hope to be favored with. Such a genial warmth! A little too warm, it might be, yet only to such a degree as to assure an American (a certainty to which he seldom attains till attempered to the customary austerity of an English summer-day) that he was quite warm enough. And after all, there was an unconquerable freshness in the atmosphere, which every little movement of a breeze shook over me like a dash of the ocean-spray. Such days need bring us no other happiness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of customs in which to them the character of the Christian is embodied. These customs can be expressed and embodied only in the life of common people working on the land. They make plainness, industry, and patience, austerity of life and other agricultural virtues constitute sanctity. It is impossible to believe sincerely in their mode of life and not be a farmer. It is easy to believe the Pennsylvania Germans' code, if one is a farmer, and it is ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... had jeopardised her soul with divorce. He feared now she meant to lose it irrevocably through remarriage. As a foil to his austerity, therefore, she would be audaciously ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... I surrender myself wholly to thee. O touch me with thy wand divine again; stir me once more in thy mysterious alembics; remake me to suit the majestic silence of thy hills, the supernal purity of thy sky, the mystic austerity of thy groves, the modesty of thy slow-swelling, soft-rolling streams, the imperious pride of thy pines, the wild beauty and constancy of thy mountain rivulets. Take me in thine arms, and whisper to me ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... repellent haughtiness of bearing, his demeanour towards his officers became more courteous; and although, as heretofore, he kept himself entirely aloof, except when occasions of duty brought them together, still, when they did meet, there was more of conciliation in his manner, and less of austerity in his speech. There was, moreover, a dejection in his eye, strongly in contrast with his former imperious glance; and more than one officer remarked, that, if his days were devoted to the customary practical arrangements ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... Lady Mountjoy, in her most austere voice. She had a voice which could assume austerity when she knew her power to be in the ascendant. As Florence entered the room Miss Abbott left it by a door on the other side. "Take that chair, Florence. I want to have a few minutes' conversation with you." Then Florence sat down. "When a young ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... in general to have been better acquainted with ecclesiastical history, and with the origin and progress of that system of opinions upon which the authority of the church was established; and they had thereby the advantage in almost every dispute. The austerity of their manners gave them authority with the common people, who contrasted the strict regularity of their conduct with the disorderly lives of the greater part of their own clergy. They possessed, too, in a much higher ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... in Ambrosio's mind with secret pleasure that a young and lovely woman had thus for his sake abandoned the world. But he recognised the need for austerity. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... spoken of only from hearsay. By this neglect, is he atoning for the renewal of glory in which he shone during the seventeenth century, when the Jansenists, in their inveterate obstinacy, identified him with the defence of their cause? The reputation of sour austerity and of argumentative and tiresome prolixity which attaches to the remembrance of all the writers of Port-Royal, save Pascal—has that affected too the work of Augustin, enlisted in spite of himself in the ranks of these pious schismatics? And yet, if there have ever been any beings ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... mind that it would be indiscreet of her further to prolong the colloquy. She dipped him a courtesy, half mocking and half respectful, wished him good-day, and, diving into the caravan, slammed the door in his face. The little marquis seemed at first astonished at the austerity of the ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... in Agramante's camp. Even if Castro thought that the hour of his triumph was at hand, he was too experienced and too Spanish to be precipitate. He may well have had an inkling that, if many were repelled by Luis de Leon's austerity and implacable righteousness, his own reputation as a pedant and reactionary did not mark him out for leadership. His lack of expository power may also have struck him as a disqualification.[42] Further, on tactical grounds, he may have argued that his notorious hostility to Luis de ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... Canons held for her—either that glorious fulfillment of life, or the simple austerity of death—he would have a part in it, would have served her to the last, true to the love he bore her, ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... perceptibly rebuked by it, and became reserved, as if he deemed that sullenness enhanced dignity. I never in the whole course of my acquaintance saw him kithe so unfavourably as he did on that occasion. In the course of the evening, however, he condescended to thaw, and before the party broke up, his austerity began to leaf, and hide its thorns under the influence of a relenting temperament. It was, however, too evident—at least it was so to me—that without intending wrong, or any offence, the unchecked humour of his temper was, by its caprices, calculated to prevent him from ever gaining that regard ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... might be, the terrors of his shaggy eyebrows. A little gentleness of manner goes a long way with such young folk as we were all then, when it is seen naturally and easily worn for our sakes, and in sympathy with our accustomed glee, by one who in his ordinary deportment may have added the austerity of religion to the venerableness of old age. Smiles from old Laurence Logan, the Seceder, were like rare sun-glimpses in the gloom—and made the hush of his house pleasant as a more cheerful place; for through the restraint laid on reverent youth by feeling akin ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... indeed, on perfectly good terms with the government. For the feeling which, next to solicitude for his own comfort and repose, seems to have had the greatest influence on his public conduct, was his dislike of the Puritans; a dislike which sprang, not from bigotry, but from Epicureanism. Their austerity was a reproach to his slothful and luxurious life; their phraseology shocked his fastidious taste; and, where they were concerned, his ordinary good nature forsook him. Loathing the nonconformists as he did, he was not likely to be very zealous for a prince whom ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... grandmother's time, as she had arranged it after she had quitted the Island, and come to the mainland.—A little later I will speak of this Island which had already a mysterious attraction for my youthful imagination.—It was a simple country house, notable for its Huguenot austerity; and it was a home where immaculate cleanliness and extreme ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... of blackness, thin of limb and waist, attired with nun-like austerity in garments that hung as if withering upon her, she stood against the background of ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... superbly a five-franc piece on the table, rose, and bowed. He was grave; his long frock-coat gave him an air of decency and austerity. ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... received in this audience, which took place at the hotel of Prince Eugene, where the King of Prussia resided in Paris. We waited for some minutes in the salon, and when Frederick William entered from his cabinet I remarked on his countenance an air of embarrassment and austerity which convinced me that he had been studying his part, as great personages are in the habit of doing on similar occasions. The King on entering the salon first noticed Berthier, whom he addressed with much kindness, bestowing praises on the French troops, and complimenting the Marshal ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... contagion: it is to hear the Church; it is to consider those only as true miracles of which she approves, and of which she sanctions the publication; it is to believe firmly that no one who is in revolt against the Church will ever perform a miracle favorable to his sect, whatever appearance of austerity, piety, charity, or sanctity, he may put on; which St. Thomas bases mainly on this principle: that it is impossible that God, who alone can give the power of working a true miracle, shall ever communicate that power to confirm a false ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... College, Dublin; or, at any rate, from Squire Johnston, Esq., who paternizes many of the pupils; Book-keeping, by single and double entry—Geometry, Trigonometry, Stereometry, Mensuration, Navigation, Guaging, Surveying, Dialling, Astronomy, Astrology, Austerity, Fluxions, Geography, ancient and modern—Maps, the Projection of the Sphere—Algebra, the Use of the Globes, Natural and Moral Philosophy, Pneumatics, Optics, Dioptics, Catroptics, Hydraulics, Erostatics, Geology, Glorification, Divinity, Mythology, Medicinality, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... was that snaky-headed Gorgon-shield That wise Minerva wore, unconquered virgin, Wherewith she freezed her foes to congealed stone, But rigid looks of chaste austerity, And noble grace that dashed brute violence With sudden ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... thoroughfares in London which have always avoided any suspicion of respectable regularity either in their reputation or their architecture. The dead monotony of Woburn or Eaton Square, for example, the massive austerity of the Cromwell Road, and the cliff-like cornices of Victoria Street, are the antithesis of the extraordinary variety to be found in Park Lane, High Street Kensington, Maida Vale and Cheyne Walk. This last reveals, between Blantyre and Tite streets, the whole social order of England ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... deeply moved by the great works and phenomena of nature than those who live among them. It is the visitor from distant cities, or the callow youth with tawdry clothes and tawdry thoughts who disturbs the great silences and austerity of majestic scenes with half-felt effusive words or cheap impertinences. Oddly enough, the awe that the wilderness dweller knows at the sight of some great, mysterious canyon or towering peak seems to increase, rather than decrease, with familiarity. His native scenes never grow ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... great cynicism in clothes, a Spartan austerity in its food, the profound contempt of a barbarous people for arts and enjoyments. The Thermidorian reaction was, on the contrary, elegant, opulent, adorned; it exhausted all luxuries, all voluptuous pleasures, as in the days of Louis XV.; with one addition, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... on. She had taken the opportunity to put on a little rouge. Philip thought it was excitement which had brought a faint colour to her pale cheeks; he was touched by her child-like delight, and reproached himself for the austerity with which he had treated her. She laughed when she got out into the air. The first tram they saw was going towards Westminster Bridge and they got on it. Philip smoked his pipe, and they looked at the crowded street. The shops were open, gaily lit, and people were ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... big flight of rooks, blue-black against the ethereal blue of the distance, winged their way slowly homeward to the long avenue of dark trees leading to a farm in the valley. The charm of the place was clear and sane, its beauty simple almost to austerity. This the young girl welcomed. It washed her imagination free of the curious questionings, involuntary doubts and suspicions, which the house and garden at The Hard, steeped in tradition, thick with past happenings, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... money from eight to twelve shillings. They were painted in a theatrical style, which Millet himself detested—all pink cheeks, and red lips, and blue satin, and lace collars; whereas his own natural style was one of great austerity and a certain earnest sombreness the exact reverse of the common Parisian taste to which he ministered. However, he had to please his patrons—and, like a sensible man, he went on producing these cheap daubs ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... of recalling to Thorpe the essentials of the situation. He had allowed the talk to drift to a point where it became almost affable. He sat upright with a sudden determination, and put his feet firmly on the floor, and knitted his brows in austerity. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... claim him, or clear up the mystery which conceals his birth; and the Monks, who find their account in the favour which is shewn to their establishment from respect to him, have not hesitated to publish that He is a present to them from the Virgin. In truth the singular austerity of his life gives some countenance to the report. He is now thirty years old, every hour of which period has been passed in study, total seclusion from the world, and mortification of the flesh. Till these last three ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... returned to the cook-room with my piece of ice, struck as I went along by the sudden comfortable quality of life the gushing of the black smoke out of the chimney put into the ship, and how, indeed, it seemed to soften as if by magic the savage wildness and haggard austerity and gale-swept loneliness of the white rocks and peaks. It was extremely disagreeable and disconcerting to me to have to pass the ghastly occupants of the cabin every time I went in and out; and I made up my mind to get them on deck when I felt equal ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... about the honour of the army or the honour of England was like talking about the honour of their mother. It is not done. And yet, as Mark Antony said, "They were all honourable men," and there seemed an austerity of virtue in them which no temptation would betray—the virtue of men who have a code admitting of certain easy vices, but not of treachery, or ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... back after a fruitless hunt. They've got me, the thieves!" said Crozier, with a look which gave his long face an almost tragic austerity. Then suddenly the look changed, the mediaeval remoteness passed, and a thought flashed up into his eves which made his expression alive ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the path of duty to the front walk, only waiting to be sure his summons would be obeyed. Stonie was sturdy, freckled, and in possession of Uncle Tucker's big gray eyes, Rose Mary's curled mouth and more than a tinge of Aunt Viney's austerity of manner. ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... watched him unobtrusively but closely, and saw the tawny face of her son grow keener and keener, and his eyes more serious. She noticed that his lips were compressed in a peculiar manner, imparting an odd expression of austerity to his face. It seemed as if he were always angry at something or as if a canker gnawed at him. At first his friends came to visit him, but never finding him at home, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... fickle public. As a man there is no doubt that he was warm-hearted and vigorous, but his was not the nature to come forward with captivating geniality. On the contrary he expects the hearer to come to him, and is too reserved to meet you more than half-way. That this austerity has proved a bar in the way of a wide-spread fame, while to be regretted, is unavoidable; remove these characteristics from Brahms and he ceases to be Brahms. Those, however, who may think that Brahms is always austere and grim, holding himself aloof from broad human emotion, should remember ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... advancing in favor with men, while thirst for truth was burning him, he yielded to the seductions of the wealthy youth of his time; though he had been early trained by his pious mother in the love of virtue and the hatred of iniquity, yet the apparent austerity of virtue seemed now to affright him, and the pleasures of life and the allurements of vice captivated his ardent disposition; and while he never seems to have plunged into the extravagances and disorders common to so many of his companions, nor to have ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... bough, was enough to freshen the spirit of even a John Jay Queerington. His cosmic conscience, which usually worked overtime, striving to solve problems which Nature had given up, seemed to be asleep. His fine, serious face relaxed somewhat from its austerity, and as the days passed he read less ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... much emphasis has always been placed on her virtues, and so little has been written of her charm, that this tribute is only fair to Her Majesty. She is tall, perhaps five feet eight inches, with deep-blue eyes and beautiful colouring. She has a rather wide, humorous mouth. There is not a trace of austerity in her face or in any single feature. The whole impression was of sincerity and kindliness, with more than a ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... not imitate the austerity of his master and in Kara's absence was in the habit of having little orgies of his own. He would bring up dancing girls from Durazzo for his amusement and invite prominent men in the neighbourhood to his feasts and entertainments, for he ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... I remained long enough at Kom, and in the mood in which I had reached it, I might have devoted the rest of my life to following the lectures of Mirza Abdul Cossim, and acquired worldly consideration by my taciturnity, by my austerity, and strict adherence to Mahomedan discipline. But fate had woven another destiny for me. The maidan (the race-course) of life was still open to me, and the courser of my existence had not yet exhausted half of the bounds and curvets with which he was wont to keep me in constant exercise. ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... he interrupted, "and try with you to find an issue to this horrible situation. Strange rumors are afloat about M. Favoral. It is said that his austerity was but a mask, his sordid economy a means of gaining confidence. It is affirmed that in fact he abandoned himself to all sorts of disorders; that he had, somewhere in Paris, an establishment, where he lavished the money of which ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... not even conceive that the austerity of the abbeys can profit it. The doctrine of mystical compensation escapes it entirely. It cannot represent to itself that the substitution of the innocent for the guilty is necessary when to suffer merited punishment is concerned. Nor does ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... really say nothing—except that I feel their truth, and am grateful for them. But may I not applaud (even the Pope is "applauded," you know) such a perfect touch as—for instance—in Chapter XVI—"the final softening of that sweet austerity which hid Lucy's heart of gold"; and again "Italy without the forestieri" "like surprising a bird on its nest"; and the scene beheld of Eleanor—Lucy pressing the terra-cotta to her lips;—and Italy "having not enough faith ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which morning callers greet their friends before they begin their first gentle attempts at miscellaneous conversation. It was true that she gave her hand to Miss Mackenzie, but she did even this with austerity; and when she seated herself,—not on the sofa as she was invited to do, but on one of the square, hard, straight-backed chairs,—Miss Mackenzie knew well that pleasantness was not to be the ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... slave of the strange man who blended austerity with charitable judgment, and appeased his passion by blood from his heart. He was not himself a mystic, but a sensitive youth whom the world's rubs had taught the uses of a thick hide. Either you have that by nature, or you earn it by practice. Glyde ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... usual from recent agitation of some kind. Her head-dress was so arranged as to almost hide hair that was white, no doubt with age, for there was not a trace of powder on the collar of her dress. The extreme plainness of her dress lent an air of austerity to her face, and her features were proud and grave. The manners and habits of people of condition were so different from those of other classes in former times that a noble was easily known, and the shopkeeper's wife felt persuaded that ...
— An Episode Under the Terror • Honore de Balzac
... long detours over broken ridges to get around some deep gorge through which the gray-green stream dashed its foamy way downward. They were well into the mountains, and above them the higher Andes raised their snowy peaks in forbidding austerity. It was daily growing colder, and their clothes were now only ragged strips. Then came days when sharp, biting winds whipped through the canyon they followed, or headed against them on some plateau, and they were forced to face new issues. ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... wellbeing of the family, and not cumbering the earth with useless and unfortunate beings. This changed view upon population will partly follow from the substitution of rational ideas for those prejudices which have penetrated morals with an austerity that is corrupting and degrading.[77] The movement will be further aided by one of the most important steps in human progress—the destruction, namely, of the prejudices that have established inequality of rights between the two sexes, and which are so mischievous even to the sex that ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... who was condemned to death by Governor Endicott, at Boston, is a lamentable instance of the narrow-minded and cruel policy of the rulers of that community. She was banished from the state, but 'felt a call' to return and rebuke the austerity of the men of Boston, and reprove them for their spiritual pride. She was accompanied by two friends, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, and all three were seized, imprisoned, and, after a summary trial, were sent to the gallows. The two men were ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... has been staggered at the austerity of Christ's morality not less has it been shocked at the quality of His mercy. His gentleness to the sensual sinner has been compared, with amazement, to the sternness of His attitude to the sins of the spirit. Not the profligate or the harlot ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... much struck with the undemonstrativeness of their meeting, for there was high esteem for austerity in the Puritan world, in contrast to the utter want of self-restraint shown by the more ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... discriminated gloomily; "but appearances are risky things to judge by. It may have charms for a voluptuary like you; but I"—and he took a tone of high austerity—"I, as an Englishman, have my suspicions ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... traced by experts along the natural highways of Western Europe. Some of them, so the books tell us, reached the end of their journey while Britain was still joined to the continent. Others arrived too late and were cut off by the straits of Dover. I like to form an imaginary picture, which the austerity of the scientific conscience will, I know, repudiate with horror, of the unhappy congregation, mournfully assembled bag and baggage on the edge of the straits and gazing wistfully across at the white cliffs of England, which they were ...
— Progress and History • Various
... imperiousness of lips and nostril, was still there in all its beauty. The coverlet had slipped from her shoulder; its familiar cold contour startled him. He remembered how, in their early married days, he had felt the sanctity of that Diana-like revelation, and the still nymph-like austerity which clung to this strange, childless woman. He even fancied that he breathed again the subtle characteristic perfume of the laces, embroideries, and delicate enwrappings in her chamber at Robles. Perhaps ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... said Madame, smiling most kindly on them, "but I am sure your Mama would not allow such thorough waste of time," assuming a slight austerity ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... philosophy, they were suspected for seducers by no less a man than Cato the Censor, who moved it in the Senate to dismiss them speedily, and to banish all such Attic babblers out of Italy. But Scipio and others of the noblest senators withstood him and his old Sabine austerity; honored and admired the men; and the censor himself at last, in his old age, fell to the study of that whereof before he was so scrupulous. And yet at the same time, Naevius and Plautus, the first Latin comedians, had filled the city with all the borrowed ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... the most shameless licentiousness; but others, such as Marcion, were noted for their ascetic strictness. All the more respectable Gnostics appear to have recommended themselves to public confidence by the austerity of their discipline. They enjoined rigorous fasting, and inculcated abstinence from wine, flesh-meat, and marriage. The Oriental theology, as well as the Platonic philosophy, sanctioned such a mode of living; and, therefore, those by whom it was practised were in ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... peacekeeping commitments, and the containment of internal unrest in the underdeveloped north have placed substantial demands on the government's budget and have led to inflationary deficit financing, depreciation of the cedi, and rising public discontent with Ghana's austerity program. ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... duties much resolution is necessary, and a serious kind of perseverance that requires a more firm support than emotions, however lively and true to nature. To give an example of order, the soul of virtue, some austerity of behaviour must be adopted, scarcely to be expected from a being who, from its infancy, has been made the weathercock of its own sensations. Whoever rationally means to be useful, must have a plan of conduct; and, in the discharge of the simplest duty, we are ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... turn to feel resentment, and this was indeed an insinuation not only unwarrantable in itself, but one which a man of so peaceable and guileless a life, affecting even an extreme and rigid austerity of morals, might well be tempted to repel with scorn and indignation; and Aram, however meek and forbearing in general, testified in this instance that his wonted gentleness arose from no lack of man's natural spirit. He laid his hand commandingly on young Lester's ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tide about the feet of that remote and exquisite being whose personal charm alone had made a convent possible in the chaos that followed the discovery of gold. All the novices, many of the older nuns, the pupils invariably, worshipped Sister Dominica; whose saintliness without austerity never chilled them, but whose tragic story and the impression she made of already dwelling in a heaven of her own, notwithstanding her sweet and consistent humanity, placed her on a pinnacle where any display ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... demanding an explanation from Mrs. Goddard seemed to grow in magnitude, she gradually arrived at the conclusion that it was John's fault. Half an hour ago, in the flush of triumph she had indignantly denied that anything could be John's fault. She now resolved to behave to him with great austerity. Such an occurrence as his falling in love could not be passed over with indifference. It seemed best that he should leave Billingsfield ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... have been long united; and I trust, that no force, but that of death, will be able to dissolve the ties that bind us. Wherever you are, the heart of your St. Julian is with you. Wherever you go, his best wishes accompany you. If in this letter, I have assumed an unbecoming austerity, your lordship will believe that it is the genuine effusion of anxiety and friendship, and will pardon me. It is not that I am more exempt from youthful folly than others. Born with a heart too susceptible for my peace, I am continually guilty of irregularities, that I immediately wish, ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... repulsed, Mesmer quitted France, angrily vowing her to the deluge of maladies from which it would have been in his power to save her. In a letter written to Marie Antoinette, the Thaumaturgus declared that he had refused the government offers through austerity. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... N. unsavoriness &c adj.; amaritude^; acrimony, acridity (bitterness) 392.2; roughness &c (sour) 397; acerbity, austerity; gall and wormwood, rue, quassia^, aloes; marah^; sickener^. V. be unpalatable &c adj.; sicken, disgust, nauseate, pall, turn the stomach. Adj. unsavory, unpalatable, unsweetened, unsweet^; ill-flavored; bitter, bitter as gall; acrid, acrimonious; rough. offensive, repulsive, nasty; sickening ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... softening emotion came over Razumov—made his knees shake a little. He repressed it with a new-born austerity. All that sentiment was pernicious nonsense. He couldn't be quick enough; and when he got into a sledge he shouted to the driver—"to the K—- Palace. Get on—you! Fly!" The startled moujik, bearded up to the very whites of his ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... speaking was exactly what a conventional demagogue's ought not to be. It was pure to austerity; it was stripped of all superfluous ornament. It never gushed or foamed. It never allowed itself to be mastered by passion. The first peculiarity that struck the listener was its superb self-restraint. The orator at his most powerful ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... are all wrong. As it is, each takes us up into the serene heavens, whither the smallest bubble rises as surely as the largest, and paints earth and sky for us. Any sincere thought is irresistible. The very austerity of the Brahmans is tempting to the devotional soul, as a more refined and nobler luxury. Wants so easily and gracefully satisfied seem like a more refined pleasure. Their conception of creation is peaceful as a dream. "When that power awakes, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... talent, and greater industry, and had already gained a certain amount of notoriety. He was an obstinate worker, cold and meditative, though devoted to his profession, and affected, with some ostentation, perhaps, a great rigidity of principle, and austerity ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... clarionet (or clarinet), having inadvertently sucked down a fly which in an adventurous mood has strolled into one of those little holes in the instrument, coughs himself half out of his evening clothes, does the conductor forsake his air of austerity and use language unbefitting a solemn occasion? Does he pick up his music-stand and hurl it at the offender? He does not. It would be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... NAPOLEON'S measure in FRENCH feet); then settles on the above dimensions from unexceptionable authority (Preuss, Buch fur Jedermann, i. 18; Preuss, Fredrich der Grosse, i. 39 and 419).] Has a fine free expressive face; nothing of austerity in it; not a proud face, or not too proud, yet rapidly flashing on you all manner of high meanings. [Wille's Engraving after Pesne (excellent, both Picture and Engraving) is reckoned the best Likeness in that form.] Such a man, in the bloom ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... are bitterly hostile The despair of the official wire-puller Blind and unreasoning opponent Ignoble strife for power Surrounded by a cohort of admiring friends In an imperative voice Marked by copiousness and vivacity Touched with sombre dignity A ridiculous misconception Habitual austerity of demeanor Ostentation and lavish expenditure A person of exquisite tact Intolerant of bumptiousness The obvious danger of dallying This was grossly overstated A mass of calumny and exaggeration Inimical ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... Gazette. 'The workmanship of these heart-breaking little studies is, as we should expect from Mr. Gibson, honest and exact. Their grim view of human destiny, its all-pervading greyness, is presented with appropriate austerity; and this restraint and detachment increase their vividness and force.... The beautiful sonnets in the section called "Home" show that he, too, ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... of his thoughts was the girl he had seen just twenty-four hours before. He caught himself remembering little things he had not consciously noticed at the time, as, for instance, the strange contrast between the mischief in her eyes and the austerity of her brow, or the queer little fashion she had of winking rapidly four or five times, and then opening her eyes wide and looking straight into the depths of his own. He considered it quite a coincidence that he had unconsciously returned to the spot on ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Jinny's superior intellect, and that Jinny occasionally, with the instinct of her sex, presumed upon it. After the Sunday episode, already referred to, she was given her liberty on that day, a privilege she gracefully recognized by somewhat unbending her usual austerity in the indulgence of a saturnine humor. She would visit the mining camps, and, grazing lazily and thoughtfully before the cabins, would, by various artifices and coquetries known to the female heart, induce some credulous stranger to approach her with the intention of taking ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... Rufinus had erected a stately church and monastery. A bishop and a deacon were sent to accuse the archbishop, and presented to him a list of charges, in which pride, inhospitality and Origenism were brought forward to procure the votes of those who hated him for his austerity, or were prejudiced against him as a suspected heretic. Four successive summonses were signified to Chrysostom, but he indignantly refused to appear until four of his notorious enemies were removed from the council. Without entering into ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... He unites great austerity with great good-nature. He unites great sensibility with great force and will power. He loves solitude, and he loves to be in the thick of the fight. His love of nature is equaled only by his love of the ways and marts ...
— Camping with President Roosevelt • John Burroughs
... being poor. In barbaric and disorderly countries it is almost honourable to be indigent and unquestionably virtuous to give to a beggar, and even in the more or less civilised societies of earth, so many children come into life hopelessly handicapped, that austerity to the poor is regarded as the meanest of mean virtues. But in Utopia everyone will have had an education and a certain minimum of nutrition and training; everyone will be insured against ill-health and accidents; there will be the most ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the austerity of her manners, the rigid discipline which she maintained in the convent, and the inexorable disposition which she showed toward those who, having committed a fault, ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... still enshrined, thy rites, Though dark Tibet, that dread ascetic, falls, In strange austerity, whose trance appals,— Before thee, and a suppliant on thee calls. Continue still thy silence high and sure, That something beyond fleeting may endure— Something that shall forevermore allure Imagination on to mystic flights Wherein alone ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... their pleasures and to comply with the desires of the multitude, as a steersman shifts with the winds. Quitting that loose, remiss, and, in some cases, licentious court of the popular will, he turned those soft and flowery modulations to the austerity of aristocratical and regal rule; but, employing this uprightly and undeviatingly for the country's best interests, he was able generally to lead the people along, with their own will and consent, by persuading and showing them what ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... of water, upon the delicate bracingness of air, who experienced so passionate a preference for the whole gamut, the whole palette, of spring, of temperate climates and of youth and childhood; a person who felt existence in the terms of its delicate vigour and its restorative austerity, was bound to become, like Plato, a teacher of self-discipline and self-harmony. Indeed, who can tell whether the teachings of Mr. Pater's maturity—the insistance on scrupulously disciplined activity, on cleanness and clearness of thought and feeling, on the harmony attainable only through moderation, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... say was the proverb?" she asked; and for second her eyes met his; but she immediately withdrew them startled by the cold austerity of ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... ascetic, or hermit, who flies from society and lives in retirement, or who practises a greater degree of mortification and austerity than others do, or who ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... with the locality. Passing through a large antechamber containing several nuns, who bowed to the ground as he passed, he ran rather than walked to a reception-room, which, it must be confessed, bore but little trace of that austerity which is ordinarily ascribed to the interior of ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... willingly to assist in word and deed, if not to superintend them. This noble young man, who harbored the best intentions and strove to attain a perfect purity of morals, would have easily kept men from him by a certain dry austerity, if his fine and rare literary cultivation, his knowledge of languages, and his facility at expressing himself by writing, both in verse and prose, had not attracted every one, and made living with him more agreeable. It had been announced to me that he would pass through Leipzig, and I ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... France from the age of absolutism to the age of revolt and final revolution. There is distinct advance in Massillon, and advance more than is accounted for by his somewhat later time, toward the easier modern spirit in church and in state, from the high, unbending austerity of that antique ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... and the light from the dash lay palely upon her face, softening its austerity. "I don't get this at all," Philip said. "From your letter I assumed you had two or three places you wanted me to sell, but not a whole town. There must have been at least a thousand people living here, and a thousand people just don't pack up and move out all at once." When she volunteered ...
— The Servant Problem • Robert F. Young
... interfered with his spiritual exercises. He expressed to the Bishop of Toledo his determination to devote, for the rest of his days, every moment to the service of God. With the utmost scrupulousness he carried out this plan. He practiced rigid fasts, and conformed to all the austerity of convent discipline. He renounced his pension, and sitting at the abstemious table with the monks, declined seeing any other company than that of the world-renouncing priests and friars around him. He scourged himself with the most cruel severity, till his back was lacerated ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... successor—will help to explain the former period; and the persecutions that had given a life and soul-interest to the disputes so imprudently fostered by James,—the ardour of a conscious increase of power in the commons, and the greater austerity of manners and maxims, the natural product and most formidable weapon of religious disputation, not merely in conjunction, but in closest combination, with newly awakened political and republican zeal, these perhaps account for the character ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... fancy, and its powers of captivation, heightened by absence, and, perhaps even by despair, pursued me with incessant grief. I concealed in silence the anguish that preyed upon my heart, and resigned myself a willing victim to monastic austerity. But I was now threatened with a new evil, terrible and unexpected. I was so unfortunate as to attract the admiration of the Marquis Marinelli, and he applied to my father. He was illustrious at once in birth and fortune, and his visits could only be unwelcome to me. Dreadful ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... false austerity and outward show of abnormal abstinence in His life furnished an imagined excuse for unfounded charges of excess, through which He was said to be a glutton and a winebibber. (Matt. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... passage in their Rule, "the Sisters of Charity shall have in everything they do a definite intention to please Him, and shall try to conform their life to His, especially in His poverty, His humility, His gentleness, His simplicity and austerity." Therein was to lie their strength and the secret of their courage; before them stood their crucified Lord, bidding them ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... take it: a welcome gift it was. He examined my face, I thought, with austerity, as I came near: the traces of tears were doubtless very visible ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... washing the town's soiled linen to loaning it money was a change so sudden and radical that the rise made him dizzy; he was apt, therefore, to be a little erratic, his manner varying during a single conversation from the cold austerity of a bloodless capitalist to the free and easy democracy of the days when he had stood in the doorway of his laundry in his ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... person was as liable to be charged with heresy if better than the crowd as if worse. "In fact, amid the license of the Middle Ages ascetic virtue was apt to be regarded as a sign of heresy. About 1220 a clerk of Spire, whose austerity subsequently led him to join the Franciscans, was only saved by the interposition of Conrad, afterwards Bishop of Hildesheim, from being burned as a heretic, because his preaching led certain women to lay aside their vanities of apparel and behave ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... cannot agree with the severe and ascetic minds who think that true morality has nothing to do with art, or even that everything moral should be destitute of art. These people are completely deceived and unwittingly promote pornography, by repelling humanity with their austerity and driving it to the opposite extreme. The aesthetic and moral sentiments should be harmoniously combined with intelligence and will, each of these departments of the mind participating by its special energies in ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... on its side, it becomes proud, and parades reason in all its splendour. When austerity or stern choice has not arrived at the true good, and must needs return to follow nature, it becomes proud by ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... pity for their powerlessness, the feeling of the democratic leader who has the spirit of the multitude quick within him, reveal themselves at every instant in his acts and sayings. He had no external affection, and made no display of austerity. He did not shun pleasure; but went willingly to marriage feasts. His gentle gaiety found constant expression in amiable pleasantries. Thus he journeyed through Galilee in the midst of continual festivities. When he entered a house, it was considered a joy ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... he described himself with a smile, an ex-sinner, he had none of the asperities of austerity, and he professed, with a good deal of distinctness, and without the frown of the ferociously virtuous, a doctrine which may ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... point: "illam ipsam quam jactant sanitatem non firmitate sed jejunio consequuntur." That is why they so unanimously hate every firmitas, because it bears testimony to a kind of health quite different from theirs; hence their one wish to throw suspicion upon all austerity and terseness, upon all fiery and energetic movement, and upon every full and delicate play of muscles. They have conspired to twist nature and the names of things completely round, and for the future ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche |
