"Prurient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where Mike had loved many solicitors' wives, and then on the impurity of the society girl and the prurient purity of ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... not forgotten it, the thing her daughter called "society"; the little, cruel, careless, prurient world she had left far behind her and thought well lost. To Jemima it meant balls and beaux and gaiety. To her it meant the faces of women, life-long friends, turned upon her blank and frozen as she walked down a church aisle ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... than ludicrous; and they can and will correct themselves. But the frightful results of Comstockery, as applied to life and to real purity, cannot be so lightly passed over. And let it not be forgotten that an indictment of Comstockery is an indictment of ourselves, for the prurient, hypocritical, degrading thing can exist not one instant after we have ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... third-floor-back of my skull I feel a light, airy, prurient, menacing tickling, Dainty as the pattering toes of nautch girls On a polished cabaret floor. Suddenly, With a crescendo like an approaching express train, The fury bursts upon me.... My brain explodes. Pinwheels of violet fire Whirl and spin before my bloodshot eyes— Violet, puce, ochre, nacre, ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... eligible situation, carrying away with them all the tattle they can pick up, and some left-off suit of finery. The same proneness to adulation which made them lick the dust before one idol makes them bow as low to the rising Sun; they are as lavish of detraction as they were prurient with praise; and the protege and admirer of the editor of the ——- figures in Blackwood's train. The man is a lackey, and it is of little consequence whose livery ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... it is only necessary to mention, without going into detail, that the women are freely offered to strangers by way of hospitality, showing a decided preference for white men, whom they believe to beget better offspring than their own men. In this regard one is soon convinced that salacious and prurient tastes are not the exclusive privilege of people living outside of the Arctic Circle; and observation favors the belief in the existence of pederasty among Eskimo, if one may be allowed to judge from circumstances, which it is not necessary to particularize, and from a word ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... who sang and played lots, For Washington, Wesley and good Dr. Watts; His prurient plots pained Wesley and Watts, But Washington said he "enjoyed ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... reptile who is responsible for the slimy life of that prurient sheet, the Coyote, paid us a sneaking visit Saturday. If he had given us notice of his intentions, we would have prepared ourselves and torn his leprous hide from his dehauched and whiskey- poisoned frame, and polluted our fence with it, but he did not. True to his low, ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... My lectures have been gravely discussed. My plays have been solemnly criticised by the amusing failures in literature who love to call themselves 'the gentlemen of the press.' My poems have been boycotted by prurient publishers; and my novel, 'The Soul of Bertie Brown,' has ruined the reputation of a magazine that had been successful in shocking the impious for centuries. Bishops have declared that I am a monster, and monsters have ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... had been fanaticised by the secret societies as well as by Garibaldi himself, that infuriated enthusiast, who could not write four lines nor utter four words without enshrining therein the treasons of the black race, that prurient sore of Italy; or the venom of the Vatican, that nest of vipers; or the lies of Pius IX., that pest, that monster, twice accursed, as priest and as king. So when these people were made prisoners, they expected nothing better than the hardest treatment ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... intense, noble, and manly as his intellect is profound and subtle, and therefore original. I would especially insist on its manliness, because our present literature abounds in so-called passion which is but half-sincere or wholly insincere sentimentalism, if it be not thinly disguised prurient lust, and in so-called pathos which is maudlin to nauseousness. The great unappreciated poet last cited {George Meredith} has defined passion as 'noble strength on fire'; and this is the true passion of great natures ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... joke, but not unhealthy or prurient. Prototype probably Agesilaus and the younger Cyrus at the supper-table, with ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... Itch. A contagious prurient eruption. There are two kinds of itch, that which appears between the fingers, and under the joints of the knees and elbows; and that which seldom is seen in these places, but all over the other parts of the body. The latter is seldom thought to be the itch, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of these lines, first, get a correct mental attitude toward what is about to be said. Banish all prurient curiosity, put aside all thought of shame or shock, (these two will be hardest for young women to overcome, because of their training in false modesty and prudishness) and endeavor to approach the subject in a reverent, open-eyed, ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... read it through; and I sought up others of a similar character, and in seeking for them I met books also of adventure, but by no means of a harmless description, lives of wicked and lawless men, Murray and Latroon—books of singular power, but of coarse and prurient imagination—books at one time highly in vogue; now deservedly forgotten, and most ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... it is free from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous nor odious. He is very often dull: or rather utterly commonplace. It is the fashion with the present generation to ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... his "ambition," seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his "fame," the mere good opinion of neighbors that knew him, had been sufficient hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurient heat of his life all burnt out, and peace growing to be the chief thing this world could give him, did he start on the "career of ambition"; and, belying all his past character and existence, set-up as a wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could now no ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... Despite prurient opposition it is making rapid headway. It is entering very largely into the instructive and the entertaining departments of the world's curriculum. Millions of dollars are annually expended in the production of films. ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... the coroner were in an endless wrangle as to law, that was Hebrew to the listeners, and gave the roomful of spectators ample time to imbibe the false impression that was meant to be conveyed, and to pass it to the prurient crowd outside. After a half hour of reading from authorities to prove that the answer was inadmissible as evidence, and another half hour rattling off counter authorities at such a rate the listeners ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... of which it had even consecrated virtues; and, on the other hand, an other of a which promised nothing but delights of a spiritual order; a paradise which, whatever material or imaginative adjuncts it might have, certainly disclosed none; which presented no one thing to gratify the prurient curiosity of man's fancy, or the eager passions of his sensual nature; which must, in fact, have been about as inviting to the soul of a Heathen as the promise of an eternal Lent to an epicure! Surely these were resistless seductions. Yet ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Lucy's horrified shriek brought him more fully to his senses, and the screams of the children who scattered in every direction, crying as they ran on, only to creep back after a moment drawn by that prurient curiosity which is the one natural tie left between the buzzard ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... interest and value, despite serious defects due to its time generally and to its place in the history of fiction in particular. Its obscenity, on which even Sir Walter Scott, the least censorious or prudish-prurient of men, and with Southey, the great witness against false squeamishness, has been severe,[81] is unfortunately undeniable. But it is to be doubted whether Sir Walter knew much of the fabliaux; if he had he would have seen first, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... drawn from D'Holbach,—a man performing so long an experiment on these two souls, with the terrible curiosity of a surgeon engaged in vivisection.[54] It was, however, much less difficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept so unwholesome and prurient a situation. They forgot all the evil that was in it, in the charm of the account of Wolmar's active, peaceful, frugal, sunny household. The influence of this was immense.[55] It may be that the overstrained scene where Saint Preux waits for Julie in her room, suggested the far ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... strong stimulants to rouse a flagging imagination. What is exquisitely fanciful and airy in Hawthorne is too often replaced in his rival by an attempt to overpower us by dabblings in the charnel-house and prurient appeals to our fears of the horribly revolting. After reading some of Poe's stories one feels a kind of shock to one's modesty. We require some kind of spiritual ablution to cleanse our minds of his disgusting images; whereas Hawthorne's pure and delightful fancies, though at times ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... because to look might seem to imply a doubt of what the tumblebug has decreed. Besides, as long as the tumblebug has reasons which he declines to reveal, his reasons stay unanswerable, and you are plainly a prurient rascal who are making ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... encyclopaedic Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften. The eminence of the writers of these books and the mental calibre needed to read them suffice to show that we are not concerned, as a careless observer might suppose, with a matter of supply and demand in prurient literature, but with the serious and widespread appreciation of serious investigations. This same appreciation is shown not only by several bio-sociological periodicals of high scientific quality, but by the existence of a journal like Sexual-Probleme, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... feast. Their natures appear to undergo a temporary change. Sons and daughters revile their parents in gross language, and parents their children; men and women become almost like animals in the indulgence of their amorous propensities. They enact all that was ever portrayed by prurient artists in a bacchanalian festival or pandean orgy; and as the light of the sun they adore and the presence of numerous spectators seem to be no restraint on their indulgence, it cannot be expected that chastity is preserved when the shades of night ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... terrible moral in Dorian Gray—a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.—I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... King discoursed acridly to Prout of boys with prurient minds, who perverted their few and baleful talents to sap discipline and corrupt their equals, to deal in foul ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... been suspected until Beza became a Protestant, and it was desirable to find means to sully his reputation. The discovery of the hidden depths of iniquity in the reformer's youthful productions it was reserved for the same prurient imaginations to make that afterward fancied that they had detected obscene allusions in the most innocent lines of the Huguenot psalter. At the age of forty-two years, Beza, after having successively discharged with great ability the functions of professor of Greek in the Academie of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... virtuous and venomous opinion the undersigned begs to differ. The play is simply superb, in spite of the faults of the translation. It is shocking only to the most prurient of prudes; and in point of morality is infinitely better than Frou-Frou. And then it is played as it ought to be. Miss MORANT is magnificent, Mr. LEWIS is immensely funny, and Messrs. CLARKE and HASKINS are equal to whatever is required of them. If Frou-Frou ran a hundred nights, Fernande ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... take for his hero an educated gentleman who expresses contempt for the licence and indecencies of modern life, it is ten to one that the critics, who confess themselves on other occasions as sick of prurient tales, will pronounce this hero to be a prig. In like manner, let a politician evince concern for the moral character of the nation and it is ten to one his colleagues in the House of Commons and his critics in the Press, and everywhere ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie |
