"Sensualism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Christ's soldier should drink, mainly that he may be re- invigorated for conflict. There are others whose conception of life is a scene of enjoyment, for which work is unfortunately a necessary but disagreeable preliminary. One does not often see such a character in its pure perfection of sensualism; but plenty of approximations to it are visible, and ugly sights they are. The roots of it are in us all; and it cannot be too strongly insisted on that, unless it be subdued, we cannot enlist in Christ's army, and shall never be counted worthy ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... individual and consider him apart, he may be said to attain goodness by the due ordering and control of his sensuous and passional nature by rational or spiritual ends. The result may be described, negatively, as the suppression of sensualism. But the positive description remains imperfect until we can say what the rational or spiritual principle is which is to weld all man's 'particular ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... epicurean in his physics, an empiricist, though an inconsistent one, in philosophy, chose the Latin language as the vehicle for his ideas. A group of writers whose tendencies were towards sensualism or scepticism, viewed him as their master. Chapelle in verse, La Mothe le Vayer in prose, may serve as representatives of art surrendering itself to vulgar pleasures, and thought doubting even its doubts, and ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the foot first fell, if expended here, would have gained for them and their progeny a country as near the Garden of Eden as any on earth. But perhaps the balmy breezes, the warming sun, the coaxing sensualism of Nature herself would have wheedled them away from their stern principles and turned them into a nation of dreamers. If so, what dreamers we should have had! We might have had a dozen more Keatses, perhaps another Shakespeare. For this is a poet's ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... the writings of men whose reading, if not their knowledge, should have taught them better, will be found intimations that "Fourierism" was a system of life based on a plane hardly worthy of being rated higher than mere sensualism. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... did John Maltravers. Like so many decepti deceptores of the Neo-Platonic school, he did not practise the abnegation enjoined by the very cult he professed to follow. Though his nature was far too refined, I believe, ever to sink into the sensualism revealed in Temple's diaries, yet it was through the gratification of corporeal tastes that he endeavoured to achieve the divine extasis; and there were constantly lavish and sumptuous entertainments at the villa, at which ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... scepticism and unreality that too much grubbing in the abstract roots of things will breed. This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of the over-studious career. Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. But to the diseases which reflection breeds, still further reflection can oppose effective remedies; and it is of the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... intoxicated, the heart panting as in youth's earliest affection, the mind broad, and deep, and calm, a Pacific in the sunshine, the body lapped in downy rest, with every nerve ministering to its comfort; what more can one, merely and professedly of this world of sensualism—an opium-eater for instance—conceive of bliss? Such imaginative flights as these, with its pungent final interrogatory, suggestive to man's selfishness of joys as yet untried, might tempt to tamper with the dear delight; whereas the plain ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... life are becoming less important than the broad, deep, genuine manifestations of the common mind, we may hope for a bolder and more courageous literature: we may hope to see the drama free itself from sensualism and frivolity, and rise to the Shaksperian dignity of true passion; while the romance will learn better its true ground, and will create, rather than portray—delineate, rather than dissect ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... of old, born of the blood-drops which oozed from the wounded foot of the queen of love—blushing crimson to the very heart; yet there is not, to my knowledge, in the whole range of English literature, so large a collection of amatory songs in which sensualism and voluptuousness find no voice. These lays can bring to the cheek of purity no blush, save that of pleasure—the mother may sing them to her child, the bride to ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... neuern Zeit verfehlten wir nicht den lichen Inflows anzuerkennen, den ihre Philosophie auf die Sinnesaenderung der Franzosen ausuebte, um sie von dem starren Sensualism zu einer geschmeidigern Denkart auf dem Wege des gemeinen Menschenverstandes hinzuleiten. Wir verdankten ihnen gar manche gruendliche Einsicht in die wichtigsten Faecher ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... there has been a large preponderance of sensualism, expediency, and selfishness in the ethical systems that have had the most extensive currency. There was a great deal of elaborate ethical speculation and theory among the French philosophers of the last century; but among them we cannot recall a single writer who maintained a higher ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... BIRAN.—Maine de Biran was a renovator. He attached himself to Descartes linking the chain anew that had for so long been interrupted. He devoted his attention to the notion of ego. In full reaction from the "sensualism" of Condillac, he restored a due activity to the ego; he made it a force not restricted to the reception of sensations, which transform themselves, but one which seized upon, elaborated, linked together, and combined them. For him then, as for Descartes, ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... best that we can give, as distinguished from a pleasure arranged for ourselves and got as cheap as possible. Herein lies the impassable gulf between the church and theatre, considered aesthetically; for it is only in the basest times, of formalism in art as in religion, of superstition and sensualism, that we find the church imitating the theatre in its paper glories and plaster painted like marble. The real, living religious spirit insists on bringing, as in St Mark's, a gift of precious material, of delicate ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee |
