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Sensual   Listen
adjective
Sensual  adj.  
1.
Pertaining to, consisting in, or affecting, the sense, or bodily organs of perception; relating to, or concerning, the body, in distinction from the spirit. "Pleasing and sensual rites and ceremonies." "Far as creation's ample range extends, The scale of sensual, mental powers ascends."
2.
Hence, not spiritual or intellectual; carnal; fleshly; pertaining to, or consisting in, the gratification of the senses, or the indulgence of appetites; wordly. "These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit." "The greatest part of men are such as prefer... that good which is sensual before whatsoever is most divine."
3.
Devoted to the pleasures of sense and appetite; luxurious; voluptuous; lewd; libidinous. "No small part of virtue consists in abstaining from that wherein sensual men place their felicity."
4.
Pertaining or peculiar to the philosophical doctrine of sensualism.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sensual" Quotes from Famous Books



... from insensibility. The pleasure or pain generated in the system is not sufficient to promote the usual activity either of the sensual ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... smote the Persian's power. For, had the Persian triumphed, then the spring Of knowledge from that living source had ceased; All would have fallen before the barbarous king— Art, Science, Freedom: the despotic East, Setting her mark upon the race subdued, Had stamped them in the mould of sensual servitude." ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... the god. The body, though at rest, is instinct with life and activity, in spite of its grace. In short, the form of the god has the superb perfection, as the face has the dignity, which was attributed to Pheidias. Nevertheless, the Hermes illustrates sensual loveliness of the later school. The freedom with which the god is conceived belongs to an age when the chains of religious belief sat lightly upon the artist. The gds of Praxiteles are the gods of human experience, and in his treatment ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... starving home? This is an instance of base selfishness, for which no name is as yet invented, and except by another poet[2], with some variation of circumstances, was perhaps never practiced by the most sensual epicure. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber

... their sermonizing on liberty and equality, their despotic instincts, their craving for command, for leadership, even as subordinates; and, in addition to this, with most of them, the appetite for money or for sensual pleasures. The difference between the delegate of the Committee of Public Safety and the minister, prefect, or subprefect under the Empire is small; it is the same person in two costumes: at first in the carmagnole, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... you have in Rome!" Caesar went on. "What a variety of noses and expressions! Jesuits with the aspect of savants and plotters; Carmelites with the appearance of highway men; Dominicans, some with a sensual air, others with a professorial air. Astuteness, intrigue, brutality, intelligence, mystic stupor.... And as for priests, what a museum! Decorative priests, tall, with white shocks of hair and big cassocks; short priests, swarthy and ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja

... illuminatrix, but at any rate she directed the illumination. Their style is of the same type as that of the Apocalypse just spoken of, somewhat monumental as figures of the Liberal Arts, allegorical figures of the virtues and vices, and the syrens as symbols of sensual temptation. There was a figure of the Church riding upon a beast with the four heads of the evangel-symbols—the sun and moon in chariots as in the classical mythology, and scenes of warfare, marriage festivities, banquets, ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... was a taste for liquor, of which he was perfectly sure he had the upper hand. He drank but very little, he thought, and only, in a social way, among friends; never to excess. Another weakness lay in his sensual nature; but here again he believed that he was the master. If he chose to have irregular relations with women, he was capable of deciding where the danger point lay. If men were only guided by a sense of the brevity inherent in all ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... of the emotional life that what is at first sought as a means may become an end and be desired for itself. A very sensual passion may at length undergo a sort of idealization; people study a science at first because it is useful, and later because of its fascination; and we may desire money in order to spend it, and later in order to hoard it. Here it is the same: ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... the Semitic nations, in opposition to the effort to elevate God above nature as lord and governor, returned to the old nature-religion with its grossly sensual worship of the divine, and others got no farther than to the conception of a deity, who, like a consuming fire, stood opposed to nature, and was to be appeased and propitiated by human sacrifices, there ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten

... rhythmic impassioned chants, which show to his entranced vision the radiant smiles of intoxicating houris. In the shadow of the lofty forests, broken by the gleam of the moonlight, they evoke the burning and sensual energies of the eternally young and beautiful companions who are calling him, opening their arms to receive him. Thus prepared, the juramentado is ready for everything. Nothing can stop him, nothing can make ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis

... people pretend to more delicacy in the mode of dress, more respect for women, not even mentioning the names or existence of their wives. My late Marabout camel-driver, when speaking of his wife and family, merely said saghar ("little children"). And, notwithstanding all this, no people are more sensual and impure, and esteem women less, than the Moors of towns. In swearing and oaths, the epithets "With God!" "By God!" "God!" "The Lord!" or "My Lord (Rubbee)!" "God, the Most High!" and, "The Most Sacred Majesty of God (Subkhanah Allah)!" are the ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... constantly used in description of the Satanic system, has a much larger meaning in the Scripture than its present popular use, where it refers only to that which is sensual. In these passages quoted, it refers to the whole Satan-inspired ambition of humanity, and includes their principle of self-help, and their struggle for all that, to them, is highest and best. It is unlawful, in that it disregards the truth of God; and it is related ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer

... delicacy,—I should even say, archness—of Macedo, nor the sentimental preciosity of Taunay, nor the subtle irony of Machado de Assis. His phrase is brittle, lacking lyricism, tenderness, dreaminess, but it is dynamic, energetic, expressive, and, at times, sensual to the ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

... that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yet recorded {1} of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at length accomplished what I never yet heard attributed ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey

... chair. In the quick time of that music, in the varied, piercing clamour of the strings, in the movements of the bare arms, in the low dresses, the coarse faces, the stony eyes of the executants, there was a suggestion of brutality—something cruel, sensual and repulsive. ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... ultra-exclusive or of the sporting type. She had made her attempts here and there among them, but with no more success. And once or twice, when she had pushed her attack to close quarters, she had been suddenly conscious of an underlying insolence in her opponent—a quick glance of bold or sensual eyes which seemed to relegate the mere woman ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the corrupting effect upon practice and morals of a religious system which embraced within it so many sensual and degrading elements. Where impurity is made an essential part of religion, there the very fountain of life is poisoned, and that which should have been "a savour of life unto life"—a cleansing and regenerating influence—becomes "a savour of death unto death"—an ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... to look more closely at the ethics of love at the time of the Renaissance, we are struck by a remarkable Contrast. The novelists and comic poets give us to understand that love consists only in sensual enjoyment, and that to win this, all means, tragic or comic, are not only permitted, but are interesting in proportion to their audacity and unscrupulousness. But if we turn to the best of the lyric poets and writers of dialogues, we find in them a deep and spiritual passion of the noblest kind, ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... none whose hearts were not as much affected by the words as their senses were by the music. The sight of so many little innocents joining in the most sublime harmony made me almost think myself already amongst the heavenly choir, and it was a great mortification to me to be brought back to this sensual world by so gross an attraction as a call to supper, which put an end to our concert, and carried us to another room, where we found a repast more ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott

... may need some explanation. The Euthumist is one who assumes moral pleasure as a sufficient reason why virtue should be sought; the Eudaimonist believes we should be virtuous for the sake of affectional, intellectual, and sensual pleasure; if he means the pleasure of all mankind, he is a Public Eudaimonist; but if he means the pleasure of the individual, he is a Private Eudaimonist. Democritus is reckoned the first among Euthumists; and in England this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... much eloquence he said in brief, "There is no such thing as sin. The doctrine of vicarious atonement is ridiculous. There was nothing sublime in Calvary. Many an unknown miner has done all that Calvary suggests in giving life to save others. Those whom we term sinful, sensual or criminal are simply young souls which have not evoluted far enough. When they have passed through the seven or more incarnations they will have attained beauty and ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen

... directed to the good alone, wherefore Augustine says (De Lib. Arb. ii, 19) that "no man makes bad use of the virtues." Much more therefore are the gifts of the Holy Ghost directed to the good alone. But wisdom is directed to evil also, for it is written (James 3:15) that a certain wisdom is "earthly, sensual, devilish." Therefore wisdom should not be reckoned among the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity, there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an, affront, an undervaluing done to Nature, who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in a ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... craving for things that may be smelt, tasted, touched, for things in memory recalled. These are the things in this world that are dear, that are pleasant. There does craving take its rise, there does it dwell [Footnote ref 4]." Pre-occupation and deliberation of sensual gratification giving rise to craving is the reason why sorrow comes. And this is the first arya satya ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... favored region of the universe, also sent here for punishment; and that each was compelled to enter and inhabit a human body, for the lifetime of that body; and to suffer by partaking of all of its wretched, sensual, and degrading vicissitudes; and that whenever the soul is sufficiently punished, the body dies and permits it ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle

... now," said the counsellor, "and I may therefore speak more from my heart to such old friends. It is true, this sensual enjoyment gives me pleasure, and will console me at times for the want of much: but I am not the frivolous person you take me for, perhaps never was so. Almost everybody has a mask; and this is mine. I move about in it lightly and with ease, and so most people take it for my real character. ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck

... there, generals who murder without fear, for an insignificant motive, creatures whose members are being mutilated, or their flesh cut in slices and afterwards roasted and given them to eat; there, officers braining a girl who has refused to accede to their sensual wishes, the lifeless body of the victim, pierced with shots, after having been made use of, is thrown into the river. It is not unusual to witness officers burying people alive in a tomb prepared by the victim, by order of the murderer; it is not unusual to see a Puisne-Judge pointing a revolver ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... the bottom of the matter, I asked whether, as the result of this, children would be born in heaven. They replied that nothing had been revealed concerning that, but that probably children would not be born. They were, therefore, only anticipating sensual gratification. ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin

... prone to extremes; The wish of his heart (it has always been such) Is, give me by all means of all things too much! In pleasures and honours, in meats, and in drinks, He craves for the most that his coveting thinks; To wallow in sensual Lucullus's sty, Or stand like the starving Stylites on high, To be free from all churches and worship alone, Or chain'd to the feet of a priest on a throne, To be rich as a Rothschild, and dozens beside, Or poor ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... his worldly ambition was aiding by sly insinuations and comparisons the deadly work already begun by the destruction of his dreams, Henri Gerard was nigh being an atheist. But the nature of the man was too finely sensual for this phase to be lasting, and when at length he found himself so far successful in his worldly aspirations as to be tolerably sure of their complete fulfilment; when at length he found time to examine spiritual matters apart from ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... romantic, Christmas-tree affair, full of pretty amenity, and tender ballads, and bon-bons. But some day, the truth will avenge itself, and without the least air of burlesque show us that often narrow and sordid existence, abounding in sensual appetites, coarse or childish pleasures, and paltry aims, and varnished with a weak and extravagant sentimentality,—that social order still so feudally aristocratic and feudally plebeian, in which the poor are little better than vassals, and their women toil ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various

... suicide. My whole philosophy—which is very real—teaches acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet—for any spiritualist—in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue. I have sometimes fancied I was to catch sympathetic activity from contact with noble persons; that you would come and see me; that I should form stricter habits of love ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... pride. He saw the dainty head, the cloud of gold under the hat, the pretty gait, the girlish waist, all the points of delicacy or charm he had worshipped through his pain these many weeks. To think of them in the mere neighbourhood of that coarse and sensual lad had always been profanation. And now who would not be free to talk, to spatter her girlish name? The sheer unseemliness of such ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... suddenly, and we looked into an underground hall, where a dozen men were carousing—Duke Casimir's Hussars of Death, black-browed, evil-faced, slack-jowled villains every man of them, cruel and sensual. A blast of ribald oaths came sulphurously up, as if the mouth of hell ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... somewhat small, and the lower part of the face too massive, though both chin and jaw were clearly marked. A long, thick, brown moustache partly concealed the mouth; the lower lip could just be seen, a little heavy, and sensual; the upper one was certainly flexile and suasive. A good-looking man of thirty, who must have been handsome when he was twenty, though even then, probably, too much drawn by the pleasures of the senses to have had that distinction of person which seems to be ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris

... and heartlessness more terribly apparent. Women, with bold and haggard eyes, with brazen brows, and cheeks from which the roses of virgin shame had been plucked to bloom no more forever—mostly young girls, scourging their youth into old age, and gathering poison at once for soul and body—with sensual indolence reclined upon the rich ottomans, or with fantastic grace whirled through lewd waltzes over the velvet carpets. There was laughter without joy—there was frivolity without merriment—there was the surface of enjoyment and the substance of woe, for beneath those painted cheeks ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood

... Protestant, and rail at the Pope in public meetings, while he justifies greediness and tyranny by glib words about the necessities of business and the laws of trade, and by philosophy falsely so called, which cometh not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. Such a man loves and makes a lie, and the Lord of truth will surely send him to ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... between the food, and in which, therefore, the evil, the bad food, is felt as an evil. If the good and the evil be understood in a physical sense, then, in harmony with chap. viii. 4, we must think of the period of about one year. Moral consciousness develops much later than sensual liking and disliking.—The construction of [Hebrew: mas] and [Hebrew: bHr] with [Hebrew: b] points to the affection which accompanies the action.—[Hebrew: ki] in ver. 16 suits very well, according to the view which we have taken, in its ordinary signification, "for." The full enjoyment ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... Margery drop her eyes in an instant. It was a very curious face. The upper part—the eyes and forehead—was finely-formed, and showed at least an average amount of intellect; but from the nose downward the form and expression of the features were suggestive only of the animal,—a brutal, sensual, repelling look. Margery, who had looked for the great man from London with girlish curiosity, suddenly felt an unconquerable and causeless dislike to him swell up in her heart, a something which she could neither define nor account for, that made her wish to avoid sitting near him, ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt

... the indulgence of a gross sensual propensity, as I said before, we must first convince the mind: the reform must commence there. Merely withdrawing the means of gratification, and treating a rational being like a child, will never ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... truffle or salami sandwiches, and drink Marsala. So one after the other he ate little truffle rolls, and drank a few glasses of Marsala. And then he did not know what to do. He did not want to eat any more, he had had what he wanted. His hunger had been more nervous than sensual. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... History.] He knew Peyrade, and received from Lenoir's old pupil the significant sobriquet of "Philosopher." Being agent for Fouche during the period of the Empire, he abandoned himself in the most sensual way to his passions, and lived a life of irregularity and vice. During the time of the Restoration Louchard had him employed by Nucingen at the time of the latter's amours with Esther van Gobseck. In the service of this noted banker, Contenson (with Peyrade and Corentin) ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... winters, harsh springs, however favorable to the heroism of the stomach, the lungs, and the spirits, are not found conducive to longevity. In like manner, monotony, seclusion, lack of variety and of social stimulus lower the tone of humanity, drive to sensual pleasures and secret vices, and nourish a miserable pack of mean and degrading immoralities, of which scandal, gossip, backbiting, tale-bearing are the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... defeat. The handful of men before him stood in his eyes for the united armies of Germany, and he was going to destroy them at his leisure. All his long, lean form, all his thin, bony face, where the huge nose curved down upon the self-willed, sensual mouth, exhaled a laughing, vain-glorious satisfaction, the joy of the conquering trooper who goes through the world with his sweetheart on his arm and a bottle of good ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... were Buddha and Christ, by suppressing the sensual fires for forty days and nights in the wilderness of trial and temptation. They number a few, and are never disappointed, while the ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... to believe in the devil," she said; "I wish I did. If it would be of any use I would pray three hours night and morning on my bare knees, 'God, let me believe in Satan.' He is so useful to those people who do. They may be as selfish and as sensual as they please, and, between God's will and the devil's action, always have some one to throw their sin on. But we, wretched unbelievers, we bear our own burdens: we must say, 'I myself did it, I. Not God, not Satan; I myself!' That ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner

... of the age tend less to this result than its political circumstances. Fanaticism is an evil, but it is not the greatest of evils. It is good that a people should be roused by any means from a state of utter torpor;—that their minds should be diverted from objects merely sensual, to meditations, however erroneous, on the mysteries of the moral and intellectual world; and from interests which are immediately selfish to those which relate to the past, the future, and the remote. These effects have sometimes ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... malignity? Hence it has arisen, that the appetites deriving new strength, and the powers of reason and conscience being weakened, the latter have feebly and impotently pleaded against those forbidden indulgences which the former have solicited. Sensual gratifications and illicit affections have debased our nobler powers, and indisposed our hearts to the discovery of God, and to the consideration of his perfections; to a constant willing submission to his authority, and obedience to his laws. By a repetition ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... soldier who embarked; and the proselyte was adopted into the family of his spiritual parents, [114] Belisarius and Antonina. Before they touched the shores of Africa, this holy kindred degenerated into sensual love: and as Antonina soon overleaped the bounds of modesty and caution, the Roman general was alone ignorant of his own dishonor. During their residence at Carthage, he surprised the two lovers in a subterraneous ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... round her, anomalous citizens of Bohemia, vague hangers-on of the theatrical cosmos; all that strange melange of the happy-go-lucky, the eccentric, the ill-balanced, the blackguardly, the unprincipled, the hapless, the shiftless, the unclassed, the sensual and the besotted that shoulder and hustle one another in the world of the theatre; all the riff-raff recruited from the greater world without by the ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... is a weighty subject of inquiry for minds of almost the highest order. With us, the stage is considered as a harmless pastime, wholesome because it occupies the man by occupying his mental, not his sensual faculties; one of the many departments of fictitious representation; perhaps the most exciting, but also the most transitory; sometimes hurtful, generally beneficial, just as the rest are; entitled to no peculiar regard, and far inferior in its effect to many others which ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... Nature! by impassioned hearts alone Thy genuine charms are felt. The vulgar mind Sees but the shadow of a power unknown; Thy loftier beauties beam not to the blind And sensual throng, to grovelling hopes resigned: But they whom high and holy thoughts inspire Adore thee, in celestial glory shrined In that diviner fane where Love's pure fire Burns bright, and Genius tunes his loud ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various

... result in time in preventing the entry of the cursed doctrine of Mahoma, which has already infected almost all the other realms, and its establishment there, which would be an easy thing, as the Chinese are so sensual and full of vices; and if it once enter that country, the conversion of souls will be extremely difficult, and the conquest of the land almost impossible, for this wicked belief renders men obstinate in its retention, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair

... apostleship, in converting nations to the faith. He is recorded by St. Clement of Alexandria,[8] to have been remarkable for inculcating the necessity of the mortification of the flesh with regard to all {455} its sensual and irregular desires, an important lesson he had received from Christ, and which he practised assiduously on his own flesh. The tradition of the Greeks in their menologies tells us that St: Matthias ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... of its due object; if it does not meet with the supreme term of its repose, its indefinite aspirations attach themselves to objects which cannot satisfy them, and thence arise stupendous aberrations. With some, it is the pursuit of sensual gratifications; they rush with a kind of fury into the passions of their lower nature. With others it is the ardent pursuit of riches, power, fame,—feelings which are always crying more: More! and never: ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville

... he rushes upon it as he would upon a man. When his wife tells him he needs repose, there is something really childish in the way he looks about the room, and, seeing nothing, with an expression of almost sensual relief, plucks up heart enough to go to bed. And what is the upshot of the visitation? It is written in Shakespeare, but should be read with the commentary of Salvini's voice and expression:- 'O! siam ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... through the entire centuries, saying as in the beginning, "Believe in me, and I will make you as gods;" that is, I will give you a separate mind from God (good), named evil; and this so-called mind shall open your eyes and make you know evil, and thus become [10] material, sensual, evil. But bear in mind that a serpent said that; therefore that saying came not from Mind, good, or Truth. God was not the author of it; hence the words of our Master: "He is a liar, and the father of it;" also, the character ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... tongue, and a palate, and jaws, and without the help of lungs and sides, and without some shape or figure; for they could see nothing by their mind alone—they referred all to their eyes. To withdraw the mind from sensual objects, and abstract our thoughts from what we are accustomed to, is an attribute of great genius. I am persuaded, indeed, that there were many such men in former ages; but Pherecydes[8] the Syrian is the first on record who said that the souls of men were ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... cotton manufacture, and had thus attained the chief object of his ambition—the object which had engaged his talent for order and persevering application. For his easy leisure caused him much ennui. He was abstemious, and had none of those temptations to sensual excess which fill up a man's time first with indulgence and then with the process of getting well from its effects. He had not, indeed, exhausted the sources of knowledge, but here again his notions ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... Trianon, with its gardens, parks, and fountains, a temple of pleasure dedicated to lawless passion. The king had totally neglected the interests of his majestic empire, consecrating every moment of time to his own sensual gratification. The revenues of the realm were squandered in the profligacy and carousings of his court. The people were regarded merely as servants who were to toil to minister to the voluptuous indulgence of their masters. They lived in penury, that kings, and queens, and courtiers ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... shorter, more thick-set than his father, had, however, much the same strong energetic head, crowned with coarse black hair, and the same frank but somewhat stern eyes set in a face of clear complexion, barred by thick moustaches. But his mouth differed—a sensual, voracious mouth it was, with wolfish teeth—a mouth of prey made for nights of rapine, when the only question is to bite, and tear, and devour others. And for this reason, when some praised the frankness in his eyes, another would retort: "Yes, but I don't like his mouth." His ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... burly man, about forty years of age; his brown hair was long and uncombed, his face was coarse and hot, and the perspiration was even now running down it, though drinking and smoking was at present his hardest work; his lips were thick and sensual, and his face was surrounded by huge whiskers, which made him look uncouth and savage; his cravat was thrown off, and his shirt was open at the neck, so as to show his brown throat and brawny chest; a huge horse pistol lay before him close ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope

... enough, the group was beautiful. Mr. Beebe, who loved the art of the past, was reminded of a favourite theme, the Santa Conversazione, in which people who care for one another are painted chatting together about noble things—a theme neither sensual nor sensational, and therefore ignored by the art of to-day. Why should Lucy want either to marry or to travel when she had ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster

... us with a kind of wonder and a kind of mockery in her dark eyes. And when she spoke to us her voice was marvellously soft with a rich softness that made me, being then of a very sensual disposition, think instantly of old wine and ripe fruit, and darkened alcoves, and the wayward complaining of lutes. Indeed, wherever Monna Vittoria went she seemed to carry with her an atmosphere of subtle seclusion, of a cloistered lusciousness, of dim, green, guarded gardens, where ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... Spirit. For communion and intercourse with God they looked not to faith, which, as Luther taught, accepts submissively what the Word of God reveals to the conscience and the heart, but to a mystic process of self-abstraction from everything external, sensual, and finite, until the soul becomes immovably centred in the one Divine Being. This spirit, seemingly so elevated and pure, broke out nevertheless into fanaticism of the wildest kind, by proclaiming and demanding a general revolution, in which ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... explanation of the emblematical import of the medlar-tree, the goldfinch, and the nightingale. "But," he says, "as the fruit of the medlar, to use Chaucer's own expression (see Prologue to the Reeve's Tale), is rotten before it is ripe, it may be the emblem of sensual pleasure, which palls before it confers real enjoyment. The goldfinch is remarkable for the beauty of its plumage, the sprightliness of its movements, and its gay, tinkling song, and may be supposed to represent the showy and unsubstantial character of frivolous pleasures. The nightingale's ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... and could talk with a simple directness and a quiet humour that was inimitable. I never saw so naturally pastoral a man. He carried good-temper about with him, and yet he could rebuke with a sharpness which surprised me, if there was need. He was curiously tolerant, I used to think, of sensual sins, but in the presence of cruelty or meanness or deliberate deceit he used to explode into the most violent language. I remember a scene which it is almost a terror to me now to recollect, when I was walking with him, and we met a tipsy farmer of a neighbouring village flogging his horse along ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... fill the fife! To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... post-traumatic deliriums. Chapter IV, under the general heading, "Psychic states and Diverse Post-Traumatic Neuroses": (a) Post-traumatic epilepsy; (b) Traumatic aphasia; (c) Alcoholism, traumatism and hallucinatory conditions; (d) Post-traumatic sensual perversions; (e) Pains, vertigos, deafness, etc., following trauma; (f) Distant post-traumatic psychic disorders with cerebral lesions; (g) Unclassifiable observations. To this comprehensive material is added an appendix on the topic of psychic and neurotic disturbances as ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... inactivity and selfish enjoyment of vice." Professor L. H. Gause writes: "The intellect becomes duller and duller, until at last it is painful to make any intellectual effort, and we sink into a sensuous or sensual animal. Any one who would retain a clear mind, sound lungs, undisturbed heart, or healthy stomach, must not smoke or chew the poisonous plant." It is commonly known that in a number of American and foreign colleges, by actual testing, the non-user of tobacco is superior ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... a Chartist, a Communist, all that is commonly called wild and visionary. Ay! but being visionary is something. It shows a soul, a being not altogether sensual; a creature who looks forward for ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... those, which make thee beat thy wings below For statues one, and one for aphorisms Was hunting; this the priesthood follow'd, that By force or sophistry aspir'd to rule; To rob another, and another sought By civil business wealth; one moiling lay Tangled in net of sensual delight, And one to witless indolence resign'd; What time from all these empty things escap'd, With Beatrice, I thus gloriously Was rais'd aloft, and made the guest of heav'n. They of the circle to that point, each one. Where ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... through the repast, which the young priest had not yet touched, hungering only for Imperia, near whom he was already seated, but speaking that sweet language which the ladies so well understand, that has neither stops, commas, accents, letters, figures, characters, notes, nor images. The fat bishop, sensual and careful enough of the sleek, ecclesiastical garment of skin for which he was indebted to his late mother, allowed himself to be plentifully served with hippocras by the delicate hand of Madame, and it was just ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... none of the ladies of his own harem with him. Indeed, since the violent death of Calanthe the harem had been maintained at Constantinople rather as an appendage of high rank than as a source of sensual enjoyment. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... the habit of attending the theatres when favourite plays are acted, that they know almost every word of the principal scenes by heart. All their favourite amusements are in some measure of a refined kind. It is not in drinking clubs, or in sensual gratifications alone, that men of these ranks seek for relaxation, as its too often the case with us; but it is in the society of women, in conversation, in music and dancing, in theatres and operas, and caffes ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... madness is allied, the same may be said of eccentricity, and certainly Wenceslas, Emperor of Germany and King of Bohemia, had an eccentricity that approached the vagaries of the insane. The oldest son of Charles IV., he was brought up in pomp and luxury, and was so addicted to sensual gratification that he left the empire largely to take care of itself, while he gave his time to the pleasures of the bottle and the chase. Born to the throne, he was crowned King of Bohemia when but three years of age, was elected King of the Romans at fifteen, and two years ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris

... love that wallows in luxury and wine and sensual pleasure," he said within himself. "I have lived more with ideas than with realities. You must pass through all experience if you mean to render all experience. This will be my first great supper, my first orgy in a new and strange world; ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac

... to Whitelees and was received by Mrs. Halliday in her drawing-room, which always annoyed him. He felt he wanted to clear out Janet's room and furnish it on another plan. Bernard hated sensual prettiness and liked bold, clean lines and subdued color. Besides, his gout was rather bad, the fragile chair was uncomfortable, and he could not rest his foot. When the pain gripped him he frowned, and Mrs. Halliday remarked that ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss

... appreciation of beauty in many forms. I cannot believe that such an organisation is given me fortuitously, and that I am merely meant to suppress it. Of course the same argument could be used sophistically by a man with strong sensual passions and appetites, who could similarly urge that he must be intended to gratify them. But such gratification leads both to personal disaster and to the increase of unhappiness in the race. Such instincts as I recognise in myself ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the ordinary sense of the term, he certainly is, but it is of the earlier type. Cyrenaic would be a juster epithet, the "carpe diem" doctrine of the poem is too gross and sensual to have commended itself to the real Epicurus. Intense fatalism, side by side with complete agnosticism, this is the keynote of the poem. Theoretically incompatible, these two "isms" are in ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... disappears nobody knows where, leaving his bride in sorrow and anguish. He falls into the hands of Venus, who holds court in the Hoerselberg near Eisenach, and Tannhaeuser, at the opening of the first scene, has already passed a whole year with her. At length he has grown tired of sensual love and pleasure, and notwithstanding Venus' allurements he leaves her, vowing never to return to the goddess, but to expiate his sins by a holy life. He returns to the charming vale behind the Wartburg, he hears again the singing of the birds, the shepherds playing on the flute, ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley

... that you have a seat among the cardinals, with the Pope, as advisors of the Holy See. We leave it to you whether it is becoming to your dignity to court young women, and to send those whom you love fruits and wine, and during the whole day to give no thought to anything but sensual pleasures. People blame us on your account, and the memory of your blessed uncle, Calixtus, likewise suffers, and many say he did wrong in heaping honors upon you. If you try to excuse yourself on the ground of your youth, I say to you: you are no longer so young as not to see what duties ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... Miserable dishonesty! Nobody was ever less Victorian than Swinburne. And then when these critics have to skate over the "Poems and Ballads" episode—thin, cracking ice!—how they repeat delicately the word "sensuous," "sensuous." Out with it, tailorish and craven minds, and say "sensual"! For sensual the book is. It is fine in sensuality, and no talking will ever get you away from that. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam once wrote an essay on "Le Sadisme anglais," and supported it with a translation of a large part of "Anactoria." And even Paris was startled. A rare trick for ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett

... possessed themselves of these isles (South America), found them peopled with Indians, a barbarous people, sensual and brutish, hating all labour, and only inclined to killing and making war against their neighbours; not out of ambition, but only because they agreed not with themselves in some common terms of language; and ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse

... might say that, in forming him, Nature had taken so much pains with the building up of the body, that she had forgotten the mind, so that he had no more spiritual matter in him than sufficed to keep his blood hot, and enable his sensual organs to work out their own selfish gratifications; or, to perpetrate a metaphor, he was all the polished mahogany of a piano, without any more musical springs than might respond to one keynote of selfishness. And surely Anabella had approved herself to the fop to some purpose; for ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various

... who presided over the pure sentiment of love, in distinction from Aphrodite, who presided over the sensual passion. ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child

... retirement with which I have lived in this kingdom ever since my arrival here from Manila, sustaining the soldiers and other men whom I brought in my ship at my own expense, keeping them in a state of discipline and honor, and never allowing them to abandon themselves to sensual pleasures; although I had no credentials for this, for Gallinato had those which the governor was to give me. I shall not discuss the why and wherefore of most of the Chinese matters, because Fray Alonso Ximenez and Fray Diego [97] witnessed ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga

... to celibate austerity found zealous followers; the "new woman" declared her independence in short hair and bloomers; people sought social salvation in new health codes, in vegetarian boarding-houses, and in physical culture clubs; and some pursued the way to perfection through sensual religious exercises. ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... criminals, has committed the deadly error of letting her mind dwell too long on the mise-en-scene of her crime. And her pen—that tell-tale pen that all her life she has taken a delight almost sensual in letting run on from unwieldy sentence to pious formless sentence, has at last betrayed her completely. There is genuine tragedy in store for Mrs. Ellicott—Nancy in spite of being modern, is Nancy and will ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet

... decapitated, naked as a mast;—petty frail growths of banana- trees or of bamboo slowly taking the place of century-old forest giants destroyed to make charcoal. But beauty enough remains to tell what the sensual paradise of the old days must have been, when sugar was selling ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... a mental condition, the mental experience of fatigue. The fatigue sensation, which is possibly the result of toxic processes, works on that lower sleep center, just as the appetizing impression or the sensual images work on the centers of the other two instincts. On the other hand this protective blood-vessel contraction creates again as in the other cases a characteristic organic sensation, the sensation of rest which arises when the threshold ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... word, without a sign. A half-run race—a story cut off in the middle; for he was a young man still; his hair, all dusty, draggled, and bloodstained, had no streak of gray; his hands were smooth and youthful. There was a vague suspicion of sensual softness about his body, as if this might have been a man who loved comfort and ease, who had always chosen the primrose path, had never learned the salutary lesson of self-denial. The incipient stoutness ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... celebrated for her gallantries as for her beauty. The grave simplicity of the philosopher was ill calculated to engage her wanton levity, or to fix that unbounded passion for variety, which often discovered personal merit in the meanest of mankind. [2] The Cupid of the ancients was, in general, a very sensual deity; and the amours of an empress, as they exact on her side the plainest advances, are seldom susceptible of much sentimental delicacy. Marcus was the only man in the empire who seemed ignorant or insensible of the irregularities of Faustina; which, according ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... a last impression of his sensual, good-humoured face, his high cravat, and his broad leather thighs. Again we passed the strange rooms, the gilded monsters, and the gorgeous footmen, and it was with relief that I found myself out in the open air once more, with the broad blue sea ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... greater or lesser violence of your sensual passion, you have perhaps discerned some of those twenty-two pleasures which in other times created in Greece twenty-two kinds of courtesans, devoted especially to these delicate branches of the same art. Ignorant and simple, curious and ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... valley, over sea and desert, called on all earth to witness their death. The magnificence of the contempt of humanity posed before him superbly satanesque, grand as thunder among the crags and it was not a sensual cry that summoned him from his pedlar labours, pack on back along the level road, to live and breathe deep, gloriously mated: Renee kindled his romantic spirit, and could strike the feeling into him that to be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... end that is reserved for persons that are virtuous and good.[579] Even that householder who observes the duties of his mode of life by following the practice of picking up fallen grains of corn from the cracks of fields and who abandons sensual pleasure and attachment to action, does not find ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... wood where she had walked on her wedding-day with him whose companion she was henceforth to be, where she had received his first kiss, and had caught her first glimpse of that sensual love which was not fully revealed to her till that day in the valley of Ota when she had drunk her husband's kisses ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... created by divine power, and all human beings are figures placed in it, not to shew the free-will of man, but as a revelation and visible sign, by divine will, of God's invisible wisdom. But as one who only glances at an open book sees marks on it, but does not read the letters, so the wicked and sensual man, in whom the spirit of God is not, sees only the outer surface of visible beings ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... hands and neat finger-nails, the carefully trimmed hair, were sufficient indications of a kind of luxury. The animalism of the man, however, had developed so early in life that it had obliterated all strong markings of character. The flaccid, rather fleshy features were those of the sensual, prodigal young American, who haunts hotels. Clean shaven and well dressed, the fellow would be indistinguishable from the thousands of overfed and overdrunk young business men, to be seen every day in the vulgar luxury of Pullman cars, hotel ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... we have to do with in this world. We may loathe the character of the sensualist; no language is too strong for us when we speak of him: but if we, in point of fact, respond to appeals made to the flesh rather than appeals made to the spirit, we are becoming sensual. We may loathe and despise the character of the avaricious worldly man; we may see its littleness, and pettiness, and greed, and selfishness: but do our own hearts go out in response to any offer of gain more eagerly than they go out to Christian work or to the interests of ...
— How to become like Christ • Marcus Dods

... but a pretext or entering wedge by which to open Pandora's box and let loose upon society a pestilential brood to destroy all that is pure and beautiful in human nature, and all that has been achieved by organized associations in religion, morality and refinement; that the whole plan is coarse, sensual and agrarian, the worst phase of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... of several of the South American islands. They found them peopled with Indians, and those of a sensual, brutish, and barbarous class—continually making war with their neighbours, indulging in an irreconcilable hatred of the Spaniards, and determined to expel and destroy them. In self-defence, they were driven to some means of averting ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... man. In a daze, he stared at her and heard her clumsy compliments, her vulgar protestations of love, things which the ripe beauty of her youth might have condoned, but now were nauseating. He saw her heavy jowls and sensual lips, the thick nose and all the revenges of time upon a once beautiful body that had clothed an ugly soul. He looked at his own rusty clothing, stiff and hard and creased in a thousand wrinkles, and into the mildewed nest where the mould from the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... one admits of only one substance, matter; the other of two, matter and mind. He prefers to call the former monism rather than materialism, because the latter term often includes the idea of moral materialism, i. e. the doctrine that sensual pleasure is the end of life; a doctrine, he says, much more frequently held by princely church-men than by men of science. He maintains, however, that "all knowable nature is one; that the same eternal, immutable (ehernen, brazen) laws are active in the ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... corner slept a heap of half-clothed blacks. Going on the underground railroad to Canada. Stolid, sensual wretches, with here and there a broad, melancholy brow and desperate jaws. One little pickaninny rubbed its sleepy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various

... though in another degree, you have within you something more. There is in your breast a heart beating—an organ so wonderful in its sensitiveness, so perfect in its consciousness of good, that the least throb and thrill of pleasure that it feels is worth years and ages of mere sensual life enjoyment. The body having tasted of all happiness whereof it is capable, and having found that it is good, is saturated with its own ease and enjoys less keenly. But the heart is the border-land between body and soul. The heart can love and the body ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford

... his letter to the Galatians, shows the striking contrast between the fruit of man's fleshly, sensual or animal nature and that of his spiritual or renewed nature. The first he calls THE FLESH; the last, THE SPIRIT. Man's spirit is what is born again. In one place he designates the new birth as "being renewed in the spirit of the mind." In another ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... the first time, apparently, on his stage: the alternately cringing and familiar slave or valet of comedy, in his Xanthias and Karion; and in Dicaeopolis, Strepsiades, Demos, Trygaeus, and Dionysus, the sensual, jovial, shrewd, yet naive and credulous middle-aged bourgeois gentilhomme or 'Sganarelle,' who is not ashamed to avow his poltroonery, and yet can, on occasion, maintain his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... appearance among diverse tribes of men dressed as women and yielding themselves to indescribable vices.[149-1] There was at first nothing of a religious nature in such exhibitions. Lascivious priests chose at times to invest them with some such meaning for their own sensual gratification, just as in Brazil they still claim the jus primae noctis.[149-2] The pretended phallic worship of the Natchez and of Culhuacan, cited by the Abbe Brasseur, rests on no good authority, and if true, is like that of the Huastecas ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... resting-place by the introduction of that orange hue which seemed to reflect certain fierce lights within his nature, walked hand-in-hand with the shrewd money-maker, the determined pleasure-seeker, the sensual dreamer, the acute diplomatist. The combination was piquant, though not very unusual in the countries of the sun. It appealed to Mrs. Armine's wayward love of novelty, it made her feel that despite her wide experience of life in relation to men there still remained terra ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... days in pleasure spends, Heedless of duty and of friends, Nor dost thou mark, though fondly true, The evil path his steps pursue. He cares not for affairs of state, Nor us forlorn and desolate, But sits a mere spectator still, A sensual slave to pleasure's will. Four months were fixed, the time agreed When he should help us in our need: But, bound in toils of pleasure fast, He sees not that the months are past. Where beats the heart which draughts of wine To virtue or to gain incline? Hast thou not heard those draughts destroy ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... concentration, a quintessence of Protestant feeling," answered Vincent; "I consider myself a good Protestant; but the pleasure you have in hunting these men is quite sensual, Fusby." ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman

... herself in the arrangement to exterminate all that hated race. For though the prime minister probably would not have lifted his hand against the queen; and though her connexion with his master, who married her from affection as great as we can imagine a sensual and despotic prince capable of cherishing, seemed to promise security; yet there could be no absolute dependence, and the favourite of to-day might be discarded to-morrow. He added to this other and weighty considerations—"If thou altogether boldest thy peace at ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox

... the gross, sensual lips, the mandril-like jaw, the misshapen ear, I see not merely a lifelike portrait of a Hun but a composite photograph of all Huns, something which should hang in every house in the kingdom until the terms of such ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... Robina did not play. It was not the discords introduced into it by Alice, though Robina had been a thing of discords. It was that something in him, obscurely but intimately associated with Robina, responded to that sensual and infernal tremor that Alice was wringing out of the Polonaise. So that, without clearly knowing why it was abominable, Mr. Cartaret said to himself that the tune Alice was playing was an abominable tune and ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair

... hate their friends. True love must needs be true concern for the true welfare of the beloved. How can that be sin? It is not love which will help man to sin! that love cometh of Sathanas, and is 'earthly, sensual, devilish.' But the love which would fain keep man from sin,—this is God's love to man, and man cannot err in bestowing it on ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt

... glib unwisdom and coarse mockery, between violence and a pretence of moral austerity, he understands only the sorriest motives; thinks the whole thing feigned, and fancies the stranger, so effeminate, so attractive of women with whom he remains day and night, but a poor sensual creature, and the real motive of the Bacchic women the indulgence of their lust; his ridiculous old grandfather he is ready to renounce, and accuses Teiresias of having in view only some fresh source of professional profit to himself ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... thinking of a City office, of a man she hated and feared, a man with bold eyes and thick, sensual lips. And then her thoughts drifted away to another man, and she seemed to hear again the last word he had spoken to her—"Ungenerous." And suddenly she shivered a little ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper

... who was not beyond converse yet, though Rupert saw he had been some time drinking. His face was flushed a little, his eyes dull, his features overspread with that inane stupidity which comes from long-continued and purely sensual indulgence of any kind, especially under the fumes of wine. To the side of this man, Rupert saw Dolly go. She went in, as I said, with a light, quick step, looked at nobody else, made straight to her father, ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner

... part she was now playing was even more difficult and distasteful than that which she had abandoned. But she was resolute. To go back now would be worse than death. While she felt a thrill of repugnance as she saw the fair, sensual face of John Arthur's wife reflected in her mirror, she ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch

... and enrichment of personality. So that the total result of this change, this steady growth of your transcendental self, is not an impoverishment of the sense-life in the supposed interests of the super-sensual, but the addition to it of another life—a huge widening and deepening of the field over which your attention can play. Sometimes the mature contemplative consciousness narrows to an intense point of feeling, in which it seems indeed "alone ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... "democratical man" of that valley, even if he came remotely from such oligarchical sires as Socrates gives immediately to all democratical men, reached his motto of "Liberty and Equality" through no such sensual definition of life. ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him Who, we know, loves us. Now, true love and lasting friendship require certain dispositions: those of our Lord, we know, are absolutely perfect; ours, vicious, sensual, and thankless; and you cannot therefore, bring yourselves to love Him as He loves you, because you have not the disposition to do so; and if you do not love Him, yet, seeing how much it concerns you to have His friendship, and how great is His love for you, rise above ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila

... which to rest his felicity. But those who are least disposed to moralize, observe, that happiness is not connected with fortune, although fortune includes at once all the means of subsistence, and the means of sensual indulgence. The circumstances that require abstinence, courage, and conduct, expose us to hazard, and are in description of the painful kind; yet the able, the brave, and the ardent, seem most to enjoy themselves when placed in the midst of difficulties, and obliged to employ ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... as the means of judging are left us, seem to have been right; but his life was, it seems, irregular, negligent, and sensual. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... of naturalness as respects all the bodily tastes and tempers, and the endeavour should be to keep him in that key, to let no stimulation of excess or delicacy disturb the simplicity of nature, and no sensual pleasure in the name of food become a want or expectation of his appetite. Any artificial appetite begun is the beginning of distemper, disease, and a general disturbance of natural proportion. Nine tenths of the intemperate drinking begins, ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... Chemical Society of London," in 1845. It is stated, by Dr. Martin, that, like the gunjah, which the East Indians prepare, from the Cannabis Indica, the leaves and flowers of the matico have been long employed by the sensual Indians of the interior of Peru to prepare a drink which they administer to produce a state of aphrodisia. The leaves and flowering tops of the plant are the parts imported and introduced to notice as a styptic, which property ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... me once to ask Oscar in later years whether the boarding school life of a great, public school was not responsible for a good deal of sensual viciousness. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... obtains at home as well as abroad. We are told that "astrologers ascribe the most powerful influence to the moon on every person, both for success and health, according to her zodiacal and mundane position at birth, and her aspects to other planets. The sensual faculties depend almost entirely on the moon, and as she is aspected so are the moral or immoral tendencies. She has great influence always upon every person's constitution." [362] This is the doctrine of a book published not thirty ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... left her. I was said to be the image of what she was when she rivalled Madame de Hautefort in the affections of the late King. You must consider, sweetheart, that he was the most moral of men, and that with him love meant a passion as free from sensual taint as the preferences of a sylph. I think my good grandmother loved me all the better for this fancied resemblance. She would arrange her jewels about my hair and bosom, as she had worn them when Buckingham came wooing for his master; and then she ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... into archaeology—it is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait. Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... respect by a sense of his own dignity as an artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the "Annali di Mantova," says that the want of nobility and purity in his style, and his "gallant inventions, were conformable to his own sensual life, and that he did not disdain to prostitute himself to ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... subserved purposes of public utility. Philosophy with them ceased to be speculative, and applied itself to the ethics of conduct. Their religious conceptions—in so far as these were not adopted together with general culture from the Greeks, or together with sensual mysticism from the East—were practical abstractions. The Latin ideal was to give form to the state by legislation, and to mould the citizen by moral discipline. The Greek ideal was contained in the poetry of Homer, the sculpture of Pheidias, the heroism of Harmodius, the philosophy ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... florid color, the naked, bronzed, burning limbs of the seamen, the last of the old Venetian race, who yet keep the right Giorgione color on their brows and bosoms, in strange contrast with the sallow sensual degradation of the creatures that live in the cafes of the Piazza, he would not be merciful to ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... II.—a moderately high forehead, a large, well-formed aquiline nose, a well-shaped mouth with lips not over full, and a delicately rounded chin. The other is comparatively coarse—forehead low, nose depressed and short, lower part of the face prognathous and sensual-looking, chin heavy, jaw large, lips thick and projecting. The two types of face are not, however, accompanied by much difference of frame. The Egyptian is always slight in figure, wanting in muscle, flat in foot, with limbs that are too long, too thin, too lady-like. Something ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson

... girl whose love was as strong as fire and as pure—for a girl who had not a weak or sensual fibre in her nature—yes, it was a sacrifice the like of which men do not understand; especially Edgar, loose-lipped, amorous Edgar, with his easy loves, his wide experience, his consequent loss of sensitive perception, and his holding all women as pretty much alike—creatures rather than ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... and cadaverous of face, but otherwise a fair physical match for the master-mechanic; a dark man with gloomy eyes and a permanent frown. Jovial good-nature went with the master-mechanic's gray eyes twinkling easily to a genial smile, but it stopped rather abruptly at the straight-lined, sensual mouth, and found a second negation in the brutal jaw which was only thinly masked by the neatly trimmed beard. Hallock's smile was bitter, and if he had a social side no one in Angels had ever discovered it. In a region where fellowship in some sort, if it were only that of the ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde

... of Plays (both published by Messrs. Mathews and Lane) have each a conspicuously clever frontispiece. But the illustrator of A Random Itinerary has chosen as his subject the very poem which I have mentioned as out of harmony with the book; and I must protest that the vilely sensual faces in Mr. Beardsley's frontispiece to these Plays are hopelessly out of keeping with the sunny paganism of Scaramouch in Naxos. There is nothing Greek about Mr. Beardsley's figures: their only relationship with the Olympians is ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... fervor. While we converse with the world, we must tremble at the sight of its snares, and be upon our guard that we never be seduced so far as to be in love with it, or to learn its spirit. To love the world, is to follow its passions; to be proud, covetous, and sensual, as the world is. The height of its miseries and dangers, is that blindness by which none who are infected with its spirit, see their misfortune, or are sensible of their disease. Happy are they who can imitate this holy queen in entirely ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... dealings with than the same class of people of any other country," he says, and with these favorable comments we reach the legation and send up my letter. After waiting what we both consider an unnecessarily long time in the vestibule, a full-faced, sensual-looking, or, in other words, well-to-do Persian-looking individual, in the full costume of a Persian nobleman, comes out, bearing my letter unopened in his hand. Bestowing upon us a barely perceptible nod, he walks straight on past, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... But in the lower and average characters, it is not so respectable; it is apt to pass into mere toying pastime and frivolous love of pleasure: it astonishes us often by the readiness with which it displays an affinity for the sensual and impure, the corrupting and debasing sides of the relations between the sexes. But however it appears, it is throughout a very great affair, not merely with certain persons, or under certain circumstances, but with every one: it ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... one, what hath been done by thee today in secret, without, having waited for me—viz., intercourse with a man—hath not been destructive of thy virtue. Indeed, union according to the Gandharva form, of a wishful woman with a man of sensual desire, without mantras of any kind, it is said, is the best for Kshatriyas. That best of men, Dushmanta, is also high-souled and virtuous. Thou hast, O Sakuntala, accepted him for thy husband. The son that shall be born of thee shall be mighty and illustrious ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... crash; and the whole tonal battery, reenforced by the throbbing of Arpad Vihary's dulcimer, swept through the suite of rooms from ceiling to sanded floor. It was no longer enchanting music, but sheer madness of the blood; sensual and warlike, it gripped the imagination as these tunes of old Egypt, filtered through savage centuries, reached the ears. Lora trembled in the gale that blew across the Puzta. She imagined a determined ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... royal prisoner, the King of Benin. He is not an agreeable king like His Majesty of the Cameroons, but a grossly fat, sensual-looking young man, who, a few years ago, when he was at war with the English, made "ju ju" against them by sacrificing three hundred maidens, his idea being that the ju ju would drive the English out of Benin. It ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis

... which fell in knotted ends over his knees. Around his open neck was hung a string of black ebony beads, hooked on to a heavy gold cross, which rested on his capacious breast, and which the wearer was continually feeling, and occasionally pressing to his lips. His face was dark and sensual—thick, unctuous lips, a flat nose, and large black eyes—while a glossy fringe of raven hair went like a thick curtain all around his head, only leaving a bluish-white round patch on the shaved crown. This individual was the Padre Ricardo, who, for ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... who do their best to countermine the ascetic idea inherent in Christianity, are not ashamed of the sensual appetite; but rather the reverse. I have heard in Persia of a Religious, highly esteemed for learning and saintly life who, when lodged by a disciple at Shiraz, came out of his sleeping room and aroused his host with the words "Shahwat dram!" equivalent to our "I want a woman." He was ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... form which charges the pictures with sophisticated charm. The large breasts, the sweeping dip in the back, the proud curve of the haunches, the agitated jutting-out of the skirts, all these convey an air of vivid sensual charm. That Radha and Krishna should be portrayed in so civilized a manner is evidence of the power which the Krishna story had come to exercise on courtly minds. Krishna is portrayed not as God but as the most elegant of lovers, Radha and the cowgirls ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer

... of his voice the doctor's keen intelligence caught the ring of his savage metal and felt the shock of his powerful personality—a personality which had thrown to the winds every mask, whose sole aim of life was sensual, whose only fears were of physical pain and death, who could worship a snake ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon

... those who had been present at the examination) of our calamity. There was little indeed either to excite or to gratify any interest or curiosity separate from the personal interest inevitably connected with a case to which there were two such parties as a brutal, sensual, degraded ruffian, on one side in character of accuser, and on the other as defendant, a meek angel of a woman, timid and fainting from the horrors of her situation, and under the licentious gaze of the crowd—yet, at the same time, bold in conscious innocence, and in the very teeth of the ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... his tightly knit athletic figure, his small firmly set head and full-blooded dark face—the only faults of which were that the eyes were too closely set together and shuttered with lids that would not open more than half way, and that he possessed the sensual mouth of a man who has never willingly submitted to a restraint. Agnew Greatorix could not compete with his companions, but he cut them out as a squire of dames, and came home with a dangerous and fascinating reputation, the best-hated man ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... never had been, nor was he now, in any degree self-indulgent or a sentimentalist. The appeal of the present somewhat enchanted hour was to the intellect and the spirit, rather than sensuous, still less sensual. Nevertheless, an almost passionate desire of earthly beauty took him—of the beauty of things seen, of things plastic, beauty of the human form; beauty of far-distant lands and the varied pageant of their aspect and history; ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... the notes to which Hazlitt's voice responds—the pithy epigram of the Characteristics, the Chesterfieldian grace in his advice "On the Conduct of Life," the palpitating movement with which he gives expression to his keen enjoyment of his sensual or intellectual existence, and the subdued solemnity of his reveries which sometimes remind us that he was writing in an age which had rediscovered Sir Thomas Browne. The following sentence proves how accurately he could catch the rhythm of the seventeenth ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... some way departed widely from the condition of health; they were scrofulous, or predisposed to affections of the brain, and insanity, or had intermarried with blood-relations, or had been intemperate, or guilty of sensual excesses. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... dispositions, and his proneness to all the arts of self-indulgence, and the imposing graciousness of his carriage, to keep the favor of the people, and at the same time sink them, without suspicion on their part, lower and lower toward the sensual superstitions, from which, through so much suffering and by so many labors, they have but just escaped, and accomplish an adulterous and fatal union between Christianity and Paganism; by which indeed Paganism may be to some extent purified and exalted, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... youth who takes up the mallet and smites the chisel with careless, thoughtless blows. His mind is filled with images of low, sensual pleasures; the passing enjoyment of the hour is everything to him; his work, the future, nothing. He carries in his heart, perhaps, the bestial motto of the glutton, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die;" or the flippant maxim of the gay worldling, "A short ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... you were slipping away. Not that I doubted for a moment you would marry me, but that your innermost inscrutable self had withdrawn, and that you accepted what must have appeared to be my own attitude—that we were merely two vital beings, who saw in each other a prospect of a superior sort of sensual delight——" ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... Mistrust, suspicion, discord; and shook sore Their inward state of mind, calm region once And full of peace, now tost and turbulent: For Understanding ruled not, and the Will Heard not her lore; both in subjection now To sensual Appetite, who from beneath Usurping over sovran Reason claimed Superiour sway: From thus distempered breast, Adam, estranged in look and altered style, Speech intermitted thus to Eve renewed. Would thou hadst hearkened to my words, and staid With me, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... elements still exist in the world, and are numerous and formidable; but man, by nobleness of life and word, by patience and self-mastery, can master them, bring them into subjection, and make them tend to eventual good. Caliban, the gross, sensual, earthly element—though somewhat raised—would run riot, and is therefore compelled to menial service. The brute force of Stephano and Trinculo is vanquished by mental superiority. Even the supermundane spirits, now no longer thirsting for the destruction of ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding



Words linked to "Sensual" :   animal, sultry, sensualness, sensuality, fleshly, physical, carnal



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