"Sensuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with each other to see who should most successfully flatter the King, or, in the King's absence, the Royal Prince. It was intellectually a very stupid Court. Its pleasures were vulgar, its revels coarse, its whole atmosphere heavy and sensuous. Frederick was said, however, to have given some evidence of a more cultivated taste than might have been expected of a Hanoverian Crown Prince. He was said to have some appreciation of letters and music. When he settled in London he very soon began to follow the example ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... love of a good dinner and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas Browne, love to lose himself in an O, altitudo! yet the sky-piercing peaks and ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... evidences of them. Downstream come the scents of the flowers in bloom above. Just a week or two ago the dominant odor among these was the sticky sweetness of the azalea. It is an odor that breathes of laziness. Only the hot, damp breath of the swamp carries it and lulls to languor and to sensuous dreams. Mid-August is near and though here and there a belated azalea bloom still glows white in the dusk of the swamp its odor seems to have no power to ride the wind. Instead a cleaner, finer perfume dances in rhythmic motion down the dell, ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... boy had brought back, in some strange, embarrassing way, a vision of thirty years before, when George was a little boy in buckskin pants and jacket, and was beginning to ride the prairie with him. This boy was like George, yet not like him. The face was George's, the sensuous, luxurious mouth; but the eyes were not those of a Baragar, nor yet those of Aunt Kate's family; and they were not wholly like the mother's. They were full and brimming, while hers were small and whimsical; yet they had her quick, humourous flashes ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... cleansing to mind as well as body, nothing better calculated to put the finest possible edge on such judgment as one may happen to possess. Even Raffles, without an ounce to lose or a nerve to soothe, used to own a sensuous appreciation of the peace of mind and person to be gained in this fashion when all others failed. For me, the fun began before the boots were off one's feet; the muffled footfalls, the thin sound of the fountain, even the spent ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... the time ever come when men no longer study him for sermons in stones, they will nevertheless turn to his pages to enjoy one of the most gorgeous prose styles of the nineteenth century. For a parallel to the sensuous beauties of Ruskin's essays on art, one turns instinctively to poetry; and of all the poets Ruskin is perhaps likest Keats. His sentences, like the poet's, are thick-set with jeweled phrases; they are full of subtle harmonies that respond, like a Stradivarius, to the player's ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... is that the phrase should live, should palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle in expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity in their relations with language, which they would have not merely a passionate and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicately depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer sort of French critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language; that the language which they use is no longer the calm and faultless French of the past. It is true; it is their ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... idea of "the mathematical infinite" into metaphysical speculation, especially by Kant and Hamilton, with the design, it would seem, of transforming the idea of infinity into a sensuous conception, has generated innumerable paralogisms which disfigure the pages of their philosophical writings. This procedure is grounded in the common fallacy of supposing that infinity and quantity are compatible attributes, and susceptible of mathematical ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... his room, and at last made up his mind to give up the point of the blood-stain on the library floor. If the Otis family did not want it, they clearly did not deserve it. They were evidently people on a low, material plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating the symbolic value of sensuous phenomena. The question of phantasmic apparitions, and the development of astral bodies, was of course quite a different matter, and really not under his control. It was his solemn duty to appear in the corridor once a week, and to gibber from ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... son of an Agha or desert chief, whose douar lay far south, in the neighbourhood of El-Aghouat. He was respected by the French authorities and esteemed by the Governor of Algiers. Known to be ambitious, he was anxious to stand well with the ruling power, and among the dissipated, sensuous young Arabs of his class and generation, he was looked upon as an example and a shining light. The only fault found in him by his own people was that he inclined to be too modern, too French in his political opinions; and his French friends found no ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... generally. She wrote on, she acknowledges, at hap-hazard, tempted and led away by the new horizons which the artistic and historical researches her work required kept opening to her view. But the powerful contrast between the two pictures,—of bright, sunshiny, free, sensuous, careless Venetian folk-life, and of the stern gloom of the mediaeval castle, where the more spiritual consolations of existence come into prominence—is singularly effective and original. So also ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... stone; lingering under the bell-tower of the Puerta del Perdon because Pilar "felt as if something would happen there." But nothing did happen; and we went to face the blighting of renewed hopes in the Court of Oranges, whose melancholy charm and sensuous perfume was sad as the song of a ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... It is one of those delightful spots which have a sensuous charm for the eyes. You love it with a physical love. We, whom the country enchants, keep tender memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain pools, certain hills seen very often which have stirred us like joyful events. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... His studious character and his literary talent endowed him with another and a worthier sobriquet "Filosofo," and he carried out the role by dressing as a Greek and living as a sybarite. Devoted to the study of the classics and encouraged by his sensuous tutor, Giovanni Francesco Zeffi, when not engaged in vulgar orgies, he translated Plato and other writers, and even composed a comedy, which ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... like wet green berries Glide across the slick mirror of their own smiles And vanish through lengths of gold and marble drawing rooms. The marble smiles, As sensuous as snow; Hips of ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... the first time I saw how slight and frail she was, saw that about her which baffled and puzzled me, and which I could not analyze. She wore no hat, and the red scarf around her neck was the only touch of color in her otherwise dark dress. The lips of her large, sweet, sensuous mouth were as colorless ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... bird. He threw up his office. Nature, in her indifference, or perhaps her irony, implants in people all sorts of faculties and tendencies utterly inconsistent with their means and their position in society; with her characteristic care and love she had moulded of Tihon, the son of a poor clerk, a sensuous, indolent, soft, impressionable creature—a creature fitted exclusively for enjoyment, gifted with an excessively delicate sense of smell and of taste...she had moulded him, finished him off most carefully, and set her creation to struggle up on sour cabbage ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... sincere idolator than Van Berg, in his worship of beauty, never existed; but it was the beauty of a complete man or a complete woman. Even in his early youth he had not been so sensuous as to be captivated by that opaque fragment of a woman—an attractive form devoid of a mind. Indeed with the exception of a few boyish follies, his art had been his mistress thus far, and it was beginning to absorb both ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... come up to her, she rode to meet him. Her white cap had been taken off and stuffed into the breast of her dress; the hood surrounded her face loosely, but did not hide it; her eyes were sparkling with pleasure—the pure animal pleasure of life and motion, the sensuous pleasure in the beauty and the music of the waves; other pleasures there might be, but these were certain, ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... into the peaceful country, where their rajah, like many another, had been free to carry on a happy lawless existence, cutting throats, selling slaves, committing acts of piracy, and indulging in every vile and sensuous custom, was one not to be lost. Rajah Gantang wanted no peace, or order, or prosperity in the land where he could seize on the wretched people, and make them pay him in gold, tin, rice, poultry, fruit, or any precious commodity, for the right to pass down the river, which he, and a few more of his ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... present rector, the internal appearance being sufficiently in accordance with the proprieties of ecclesiastical architecture to satisfy all but the over-fastidious, and yet not so ornamental as to lead the mind to dwell rather on the earthly and sensuous than on the heavenly and spiritual. Behind the church was the rectory, a quaint old building, with pointed gables, deep bay- windows, and black beams of oak exposed to view. It had been added to, here and there, as modern wants and improvements had made expansion necessary. The garden ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... Tibetan. He had a dark complexion, between brown and tawny; narrow slant eyes, very small and beady-black, with a cunning leer in their oblique corners; a flat nose much broadened at the wings; a cruel, thick, sensuous mouth, and high cheek-bones; the whole surmounted by a comprehensive scowl and an abundant crop of lank black hair, tied up in a knot at the nape of the neck with a yellow ribbon. His face was shifty; his short, stout form looked well ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... lyrical, was thus antagonistic to the drama. So, also, Dr. Chrysander contends, was the Hebrew himself. Not only had he no predilection for plastic creation, his life was not dramatic in the sense illustrated in Greek tragedy. He lived a care-free, sensuous existence, and either fell under righteous condemnation for his transgressions or walked in the way prescribed of the Lord and found rest at last in Abraham's bosom. His life was simple; so were his strivings, his longings, his hopes. ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... times," said Doctor Randall Byrne, "man was nearly related to what we now call the lower animals. In those days he could not surround himself with an artificial protective environment. He depended on the unassisted strength of his body. His muscular and sensuous development, therefore, was far in advance of that of the modern man. For modern man has used his mind at the expense of his body. The very quality of his muscles is altered; and the senses of sight and hearing, for instance, are much blunted. For in the primitive days ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... refers only to the Heavens of Sensuous Pleasure,—not to the Paradise of Amida, nor to those heavens into which one enters by the Apparitional Birth. But even in the highest and most immaterial zones of being,—in the Heavens of Formlessness,—the ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... had splendid shoulders, the finest arms in the world, and a complexion of radiant brilliancy. Her soft black eyes, her full red lips, her framing mass of curled hair, her finely chiselled forehead, and the sinuous grace of her gait gave her an air of abandon and dignity together, a haughty yet sensuous expression which was ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... reaction of their ever-deepening emotions; it will not be long before you find them a crowd of dangerous maniacs. This becomes evident, and abundantly so, after 1789.—Now, consult psychology. The simplest mental operation, a sensuous perception, is an act of memory, the appliance of a name, an ordinary act of judgment is the play of complicated mechanism, the joint and final result of several millions of wheels which, like those of a clock,[3413] turn and propel ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... self-complacency, Nick with her soft, mad eyes and wistful voice, the blundering ruthless Miss Ingate, all seemed intensely absurd to her. Everything seemed absurd except dancing and revelry and coloured lights and strange disguises and sensuous contacts. She had the most careless contempt, stiffened by a slight loathing, for political movements and every melancholy effort to reform the world. The world did not need reforming and did not want ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... why, to see the face of the boy Love, who, with outstretched hands, is leaning towards her from the midst of a rhododendron's crimson blossoms. A rose-garland presses the boy's brown curls, and he is clad in a tunic of oriental colours, and delicately sensuous are his face and his bared limbs. His boyish beauty is of that peculiar type unknown in Northern Europe, but common in the Greek islands, where boys can still be found as beautiful as the Charmides of Plato. Guido's St. Sebastian in the Palazzo Rosso ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... which was scattered profusely to provide the gorgeous spectacles, beloved by the unlearned. He knew that nothing would rob the Florentines so easily of their ancient love of liberty as the experience of sensuous delights, in which all southern races find some satisfaction. He entertained the guests of the Republic with magnificence, that they might be impressed by the security of ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... peak pushed up on the forehead. Face long and narrow, bronzed with a kind of pale burnt-in brownness; a good forehead. A brown moustache, beard rather pointed, blackening about the cheeks; his chin not visible, but from the beard's growth must be big; mouth I should judge sensuous. Nose straight and blunt; eyes grey, with an upward look, not exactly frank, because defiant; two parallel furrows down each cheek, one from the inner corner of the eye, one from the nostril; age perhaps thirty-five. About the face, attitude, movements, something immensely ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... delicious curve of her cheek, and of her arm resting on the saddle. Her poise had an inexplicable suggestion of royal courage, as though she were battling for more than her lips could utter. In her absence he had adored her. Now he forgot all that he had meant to tell her in the sensuous delight of her mere presence. But even that was not enough. He dropped the pony's reins and strode toward her. Louise paled even as he drew near, but he saw nothing but her eyes and her lips, lips that curved wistfully, ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the cause of the terror, I was yet so far possessed by a feeling I could neither account for nor control, that I felt my hair rise upon my head, as if instinct with individual fear of its own—the only instance of the sort in my experience.—In such a condition, the sensuous nerves are so easily operated upon, either from within or from without, that all ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... poet of different calibre is Daumer, whose Hafis (Hamb. 1846) for a long time was regarded as a translation, whereas the poems of the collection are in reality original productions in Hafid's manner, just like Rueckert's Oestliche Rosen.[225] Their sensuous, passionate eroticism, however, is not a genuine Hafid quality, as we before have seen. The same criticism applies even much more forcibly to Schefer's Hafis in Hellas (Hamburg, 1853).[226] Special mention is due to the gifted, but unfortunate, Heinrich Leuthold, whose Ghaselen deserve ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... little person, with a brown face, much shrivelled; which yet possessed two sparkling keen black eyes. There was not a pretty feature in the old woman's face, for the eyes were not beautiful now, in any sensuous meaning of beauty. And yet, as Wych Hazel looked, presently the word 'lovely' was the word that came up to her. That was of course due only to the pervading expression; which was pure, loving and refined far beyond what the ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... the medium of souls like his own, produce another; but all the time his real happiness was in his wanderings by field and hedge and road and lane, by canal side and by river bank, thinking the vague delicious thoughts of sensuous solitude and dreaming over the dumb quiescence of that mute inanimate background of our days into which, with his exasperated human nerves, he longed to ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... in dusky hair and eyes, in the soft, warm contours of youth. Already she was slenderly full, an elemental daughter of Eve, primitive as one of her fur-clad ancestors. No forest fawn could have been more sensuous or ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... the charm of the sensuous world dwells in us, is an emanation from ourselves; it is we who diffuse it, each person for himself according to his power, and we have it back again in the measure of our out-giving. But I did not comprehend early enough the deep meaning ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... seen no woman's face that for a moment rivalled Ida's portrait. Shy and fastidious, he had found no pleasure in ladies' society, and had listened to his classmates' talk of flirtations and conquests with secret contempt. What did they know of love? What had their coarse and sensuous ideas in common with the rare and delicate passion to which his heart was dedicated—a love asking and hoping for no reward, but ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... Their faces are thoughtful, minds intellectual. They live in their ideas, their conceptions of truth, their tastes, and esthetic nature. Some people, again, live in their animal nature, in the lusts of the flesh and eye, the coarse, low atmosphere of a sensuous life, or something worse. Some, again, live in a world of duty. The predominating feature of their life is conscience, and it carries with it a certain shadowy fear that takes away the simple freedom and gladness of life, but there is a rectitude, and uprightness, a strictness ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... our sympathy is invoked and retained. We actually wince before the cruel blows of the wicked queen. And the hot tears of Bidasari move us to living pity. In the poetic justice that punishes the queen and rewards the heroine we take a childish delight. In other words, the oriental poet is simple, sensuous, passionate, thus achieving Milton's ideal of poetic excellence. We hope that no philosopher, philologist, or ethnologist will persist in demonstrating the sun-myth or any other allegory from this beautiful poem. It is a story, a charming tale, to while away an idle hour, and nothing ...
— Malayan Literature • Various Authors
... to Swope's liking, and he was enjoying himself right royally. Aye, I could tell. The words that slid between his full lips were laden with the sensuous delight their utterance gave the speaker. I lay in my retreat waiting for the hail that would draw the beast on deck, and while I waited I listened to him, and observed his manner. Oh, Swope was having a fine time, a happy time. If the lady had not taken the revolver ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of his thoughts the warning she had given him, and let himself go, body and mind, so that, a sway to the sensuous strains of that most sensuous of dances, the girl and the man for a space seemed one with music that throbbed of love and longing, desire and denial, pursuit and ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... had never been asked by him. Locke, who came after him, was the first to ask it, and he endeavored to answer it in his "Essay concerning Human Understanding." The result of his speculations was, that the mind is a tabula rasa, that this tabula rasa becomes gradually filled with sensuous perceptions, and that these sensuous perceptions arrange themselves into classes, and thus give rise to more general ideas or conceptions. This was a step in advance; but there was again one thing taken for granted by ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... unknown to perfumed respectability and condemned of prejudice and error. This is the first great reason, and the second is not unlike unto it. It is that you retard your preparation for any permanent pursuit, as a centre of your sensuous life, by passing two or three years in Europe. With respect to the first reason, not your own feelings, but those of your friends, demand some consideration. In Heaven's court will their sorrow at your departure and intimacy ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... Walden found himself smitten by so strong a sense of the mere simple sensuous joy of living, that he could do no more than stand looking in silent admiration at the pretty group of expectant young creatures gathered round the Maypole, and huddled, as it were, under its cumbrous crown of dewy blossoms, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... music provides for a century too stagnant and listless to act out its own emotions, too reflective to be frankly sensuous, a shadowy pageant of sense and emotion, that serves ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... luminous eyes, his thick shock of wiry grey hair, and a little cape of faded black silk over his shoulders, he looked like an old French abbe. He was buoyant and pleasant as ever; and was busy upon a vindication of Chaucer and Spenser from Cardinal Wiseman, who had attacked them for alleged sensuous and voluptuous qualities. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of the nature, is a vampyrism which is constantly on the alert to see what, and how much it can gobble up for its own delectation. This is the lowest grade. It begins with the selfism of the individual, its manifestations are named lust. It seeks expression through the sensuous nature, but extends to the spirit ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... satisfaction to all such expectations. His portraits, although they are not so individualised as Lotto's, nor such close studies of character as Titian's, always render the man at his best, in glowing health, full of life and determination. They give us the sensuous pleasure we get from jewels, and at the same time they make us look back with amazement to a State where the human plant was in such vigour as to produce old men of the kind represented in most of ...
— The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance - Third Edition • Bernhard Berenson
... mystic things, was subtly conscious of that almost personal—almost feminine appeal of Te-gat-ha. Strong in its beauty as in its battles—it yet retained a sensuous atmosphere that was as the mingling of rose bloom and wild plum blossom, of crushed mint grown in the shadows of the moist places, and clinging feathery clematis, binding by its tendrils green thickets ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... something never seen any more than our own personality. Thus our knowledge of them is not only fragmentary, as has been said; it is imaginative even within its limits. It is, in reality as well as in art, a shadow-world we live in, believing that within its sensuous films a spirit like unto ourselves abides,—the human soul, though never seen face to face. To enter this substantial world behind the phenomena of human life as sensibly shown in imagination, to know the invisible things of ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... well, and such a symbolising of musical sounds must detract, I think, from the high mission of music: which, as I conceive, is neither to be an agent for expressing material things; nor to utter pretty sounds to amuse the ear; nor a sensuous excitant to fire the blood, or a sedative to lull the senses: it is a language, but a language of the intangible, a kind of soul-language. It appeals directly to the Seelenzustaende it springs from, for it is the natural expression of it, rather than, like words, a translation ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... Gone are the sensuous stars, and manifold, Clear sunbeams burst upon the front of night; Ten thousand swords of azure and of gold Give darkness to the dark and welcome light; Across the night of ages strike the gleams, And leading on the gilded host ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... not true that whatsoever is most sensuous in connection with human joy, and at the same time pure, is the very flower of life, and therefore the most consummate revelation of holiness? Nothing in Nature is so intensely solemn as her summer, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... the genius of some of our finest artists is turned to pandering to this base desire for sensuous gratification. The pictures which hang in many of our art galleries that are visited by old and young of both sexes often number in the list views which to those whose thoughts are not well trained to rigid chastity can be only means of evil. A plea may ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... European continent of music swarmed over by Asiatic hordes, Scyths and Mongols and Medes and Persians, all the savage musical tribes. Once more the old arbitrary barrier between the continents is disappearing, and the classic traits of the West are being mingled with those of the subtle, sensuous, spiritual East. It is as if the art of music, with its new scales, its new harmonies, its new coloring, its new rhythmical life, were being revolutionized, as if it were returning to its beginnings. It is as if some of the original impulse to make music were reawakening. And so, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... be a strut, by gad! if he was as short as I am"; also that he "walked like a parade," which, as expounded by Mr. Reeves, meant that his air in walking was that of one conscious always of leading a triumphal procession in his own honour; and again, that one might read in his eyes a keenly sensuous enjoyment in the tones of his own voice; that he coloured these with a certain unction corresponding to the flourishes with which people of a certain obliquity of mind love to ornament their chirography; still again that he, Reeves, was "ready to lay a bet that ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... connection with that person. Marvellous, 'Impossible' you cry in surprise. But it is done. Realise through study and investigation the importance of your thought-life and avoid vitiating it by fear-thoughts, hate-thoughts, sensual and sensuous thoughts and vanity thoughts. Because, mark you, these four giant-weeds poison the roots of the Tree of Life. All humanity suffers pain in diverse ways, on account of these four bad thoughts and their millions ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... overdrawn. But for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London's golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king. Wins his spurs—God forbid! In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to chine. And, after all, it is ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... sharp order to the keepers of the door, which caused them to speed from the scene as fast as their feet would carry them towards the village where they had been commanded to stay until sunrise, leaving the girl, a prey probably to that inexplicably sensuous feeling which the desolation, and beauty, and pity of this place arouses in some, alone with the man who loved her as men ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... and scathing irony of merciless logic, and the tender and subtle discrimination of its judgment, sympathetic with the good faith of the honest thinker. Different again in style, and higher still in poetry, is the glowing description of the Basilica and its sensuous fervour of ceremonial; and higher and greater yet the picture of the double lunar rainbow merging into that of the vision: a piece of imaginative work never perhaps exceeded in spiritual exaltation and concordant splendour of song in the whole work of the poet, though equalled, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... independent fundamental faculties, but for connected modifications of one fundamental power which work together and mutually imply one another. The position that an intellectual function of attention and discrimination is active in sensuous perception, is a view entirely foreign to mediaeval modes of thought; for the Scholastics were accustomed to make sharp divisions between the cognitive faculties, on the principle that particulars are felt through sense and universals thought through the understanding. The idea on which Nicolas ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... nature. Black Mumbo-Jumbo of the woods, and most Indian Wau-waus, one can understand: but this of Procureur Anaxagoras whilom John-Peter Chaumette? We will say only: Man is a born idol-worshipper, sight-worshipper, so sensuous-imaginative is he; and also partakes much of the nature of ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... commence their foul orgies, with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is temperance) as those Virgilian fowl! It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... addeth thereto." A continual repetition of the evidence of confirmation was not necessary in order to give faith in a communication already confirmed and left in a historic age for the faith of the world. It is true of sense that the continual sensuous experience causes the object experienced to lose its controlling power, but the opposite is true of faith. So he who knew best what man's nature required ordained that the just should walk by faith and not by sense. And to this end he confirmed "once" the revelation of himself and his will, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... lowlier way, Pacific Herb, thy sensuous plea The bristling clans of Adam sway At least to fellowship in thee! Before thine altar tribal flags are furled, Fain wouldst thou make one ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... only an appearance, a sensuous image of the pure spiritual life, and the whole of Sense is only a picture swimming before our present knowing faculty like a dream and ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... impressive objects of natural scenery. The elementary grandeur and beauty of external nature came thus to fill up his mind to the exclusion of human interests. To such a result his individual constitution powerfully contributed. The sensuous element was singularly deficient in his nature. He never seems to have passed through that erotic period out of which some poets have never emerged. A soaring, speculative imagination, and an impetuous, resistless self-will, were his distinguishing characteristics. From first to last ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... of careless 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 ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... of the city belonged to the Greeks. There, as in the Florence of the Medici, we find commercial astuteness joined with intense delight in graceful culture. Some of the best work of the greatest Greek sculptors and painters was treasured at Ephesus. A splendid but sensuous worship centred round the gross figure of the goddess Artemis, whose temple was one of the greatest triumphs of ancient art. In the British Museum are preserved some fragments of the old temple built by Croesus, King of Lydia, in ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... the love of woman, the love of neighbor, the love of country, the love of God, have made the positive side of most religions, the burden of their teachings. The priests of Cotytto and Venus, Astarte and Melitta, spoke but a more sensuous version of the sermon of the aged apostle to the Ephesians,—shortest and best of all sermons—"Little children, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... always in the Venus Central State, was warm—a luxurious tropic warmth. And now I felt—as I had seen from above—the languorous, sensuous quality of it all. Music, mingled with the ripple of girlish laughter and cheers, came from the houses as we passed. Soft, fragrant flower-petals deluged us. The very air was laden heavy with exotic perfumes from the flowers which ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... is far from being either platonic or chivalrous. It is love of the sensuous, impulsive, appetitive kind, to which we give the name of Pagan. The finest outbursts of passion are emanations from a potent sexual desire. Meanwhile, nothing indicates the character or moral quality of either man or woman. The student and the girl are always vis-a-vis, ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... sorrow, it at least lifted him above pettiness; if it could not solve the difficulties of life it could arm him to endure them. It was the best gift of the past from which he sprang; but it was blent with another quality, a deep moral curiosity that ennobled his sensuous enjoyment of the outward show of life; and these elements were already tending in him, as in countless youths of his generation, to the formation of a new spirit, the spirit that was to destroy one world without surviving ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... doctrine, recognized in their Jehovah, not simply the greatest of all national deities, but GOD; and since they could, the more readily find Him and indicate Him to others in their sacred writings, inasmuch as He was really in them; and since they manifested as great an aversion for sensuous representations, or at all events, were instructed in these Scriptures, to have an aversion to them as great as the Persians had always felt; what wonder that they found favor in the eyes of Cyrus, with a Divine Worship which he recognized as being, no doubt, far below pure Sabeism, but yet ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... mellow-sounding surf. The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue fires, in the light of which danced the hula dancers to the barbaric love- calls of the singers, who chanted to tinkling ukuleles and rumbling tom- toms. It was a sensuous, tropic night. In the background a volcano crater was silhouetted against the stars. Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon, and the Southern Cross burned low ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... past; for its architectural splendors, amid the bareness and baldness of the New World cities; for the grandeur of its ancient art, amid the poverty of the America of that day; for its impassioned music, in a land almost devoid of musical culture; and she had longed for the beautiful, sensuous, idle life of its people, through all the strain of a strenuous and overworked existence. Her vision had been fair, and at first she was much disappointed. In artistic or architectural magnificence St. Peter's and the Transfiguration could not disappoint ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... among the withered leaves, and the faint blue sheen beneath the beech trunks not far away. There was a vein of artistic daintiness in this man, and the elusive beauty of these things curiously appealed to him. He had seen the riotous, sensuous blaze of flowers kissed by Pacific breezes, and the burnished gold of wheat that rolled in mile-long waves; but it seemed to him that the wild things of the English North were, after all, more wonderful. They matched its deep peacefulness; ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... glistening moonlight. That the time would ever come when her glad laughter would be hushed, when her young heart would beat no more, when the bright, abundant, passionate blood would bound no longer through her veins, when all the vivacious, vivid, sensuous charms of living would be ended for her forever, was a thing that she could no better bring home to her than a bird that sings in the light of the sun could be made to know that the time would come when ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... plastic beauty of Tasso and Iphigenia. The cosmopolitan sees in Goethe the Weltbuerger, the citizen of the world, the incarnation of die Weltweisheit. The patriot acclaims in him the poet who has sung the myths and legends dear to the German race. The sensuous and voluptuous libertine is enchanted by the eroticism of the "Roman Elegies." The domesticated reader is drawn by that chaste idyll, Herman and Dorothea. The Spinozist and Pantheist are attracted ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Cytherea and Mina Raff shared nothing; somehow the latter lacked the magnetism essential to the stirring of his desire. This, perhaps, was inevitable to his age, to the swift passage of that young idealism: after forty, the nebulous became a need for sensuous reality. Certain phases of Mina, as well, were utterly those of a child—she had the eluding sweetness, the flower-like indifference, of Helena, of a temperamental virginity so absolute that it was incapable of understanding or communicating an emotional fever. But, in the degree of ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... as if it were the best joke: "Oh, my! Mother never goes anywhere; you couldn't get her out for love or money." But she was herself overwhelmed with a simple joy at Margaret's politeness, and showed it in a sensuous way, like a child, as if she had been tickled. She came closer to Margaret and seemed about to fawn physically ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... The face was one of singular beauty. The curved lips, the broad brow on which the dusky hair grew low, the oval cheek and rounded chin might well have served for the impersonation of some Spanish beggar-boy or Neapolitan fisher-lad. They were of the subtilely sensuous type, expressive of passion rather than of intellect or will. At present, with the usual rich, ripe colour vanished from cheek and lips, with eyes downcast, and trembling hands dropped to his sides, he was a picture of embodied shame and fear which his cousin and guardian, Richard ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... unerring and unfailing art, an extraordinarily skilful technique. He had it entirely at his command; and he exercised it in a language in which, though it may be singularly artificial and conventional, we can still feel the wonder of its sensuous beauty and the splendour of its expressive power. It is a language that seems alive with eagerness to respond to imagination. Open Homer anywhere, and the casual grandeur of his untranslatable language ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... And into this sensuous strife strode Temple Myrmidons—religious cops sworn to obey orders without question or hesitation—with a pickup order for ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Book of Maccabees, in the agonies of death plucked out his own bowels, and called on the Lord to restore them to him again at the resurrection. Considering the notion of a resurrection of the body as a sensuous burden on the idea of a resurrection of the soul, it may have been a later development originating with the Jews. But it seems to us decidedly more probable that the Magi held it as a part of their creed before they came in contact with the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... slattern, indifferent, lazy, smoldering with passion,—dangerous. The sensuous quality of her beauty had never been more apparent than it was in the soiled cheap mountebank fineries which she had worn for so many performances of the part in Europe. And this beauty, of course, ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... turbulent, treacherous, yet grandly beautiful. Yielding to that mood in which the judgment and the will are suspended, and the passive brain is played upon by every sight and sound, he sat in an easy chair smoking, lost in sensuous languor, like an Asian prince. He was, for the time, possessed by the sensation of being royal. He enjoyed by anticipation the prerogatives of sovereignty, the power, the luxury, the voluptuous pleasure. The objects of his ambition appeared then how easy of ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... the religious sense, beyond any of the Aryan peoples. Their religion had become a part, the main part, of their daily lives. They believed it, not with the languid logic of the Romans, not with the sensuous pleasure of the Greeks, but fiercely, fervidly, with a passion that swept ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... heard. For that spiritual world will be fitted up for nothing but a rational spirit. There will be nothing material, nothing like earth, in its arrangements. Flesh and blood cannot inherit either the kingdom of God or the kingdom of Satan. The enjoyments and occupations of this sensuous and material state will be found neither in heaven nor in hell. Eternity is a spiritual region, and all its objects, and all its provisions, will have reference solely to the original capacities and destination of a spiritual creature. They ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... paper, The Golden Age: "Victoria C. Woodhull stands before us today a grand, brave woman, radical alike in political, religious and social principles. Her face and form indicate the complete triumph in her nature of the spiritual over the sensuous. The processes of her education are little to ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... thee, in some sensuous air, Bewitch the broad wheat-acres everywhere To imitated gold of thy deep hair: The peach, by thy red lips' delicious trouble, Blown into gradual dyes Of crimson; and beheld thy magic double— Dark-blue with fervid influence of thine eyes— ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... for one ending in -ation or - ality. But while fanaticism and enthusiasm are being defined—a work more difficult than is commonly fancied—we will go on to consider another answer. We are told that the strength of Islam lay in the hope of their sensuous Paradise and fear of their sensuous Gehenna. If so, this is the first and last time in the world's history that the strength of any large body of people—perhaps of any single man—lay in such a hope. History gives us innumerable proofs that such ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... Gods' themselves arrive—it yet lingered on; openly, in Folk practice, in Fast and Feast, whereby the well-being of the land might be assured; secretly, in cave or mountain-fastness, or island isolation, where those who craved for a more sensible (not necessarily sensuous) contact with the unseen Spiritual forces of Life than the orthodox development of Christianity afforded, might, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... ambitious dreams could have forecast a more brilliant experience. She had been far too ignorant to imagine such subtle delights of the senses as resulted from the wealth and eminence which she had attained to in marrying Lord Hurdly. And beyond the mere sensuous appeal which was made to her by the wearing of magnificent clothes and jewels, and the being always surrounded with objects of beauty and means of luxury, she had the greater delight of having her feverishly active mind continually supplied with a stimulus, ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... having men make love to her, there really was not much of Victorine. But it is wonderful how far these two qualities can pass in a handsome woman for other and nobler ones. The animal life so keen, intense, sensuous, can seem like cleverness, wit, taste; the passion for receiving homage from men can make a woman graceful, amiable, and alluring. Some of the greatest passions the world has ever seen have been inspired in men by just such women ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... up in despair, but I had fully made up my mind that as soon as I went to the University I would find out what philosophy really was, and what Kant meant by saying that space and time were forms of our sensuous intuition. I see that, accordingly, in the summer of 1841, I attended lectures on Aesthetics by Professor Weisse, on Anthropology by Lotze, and on Psychology by Professor Heinroth, and I slowly learnt to distinguish between what was going on within me, and what I had been ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... gently stimulated blood caressing the flesh through and through with the soft vigors of health; the warm air fanning their faces, flowing over the skin with balmy and tonic touch, permeating them and bathing them, subtly, with faint, sensuous delight; and the beauty of the world, more subtly still, flowing upon them and bathing them in the delight that is of the spirit and is personal and holy, that is inexpressible yet communicable by the flash of an eye and ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... at the water, that lay like a round mirror, and then to the vast shell of the sky above. He, too, had love of beauty—a more sensuous love than Alexander's, but love. This shared perception made one of ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... sumptuous lunch and chatted for a while, the Doctor surprised me again by asking if I would like a game of billiards. (Billiards in Greenland, as well as radishes!) "But first," said he, "let us try this sunny Burgundy. Ah! these red wines are the only truly generous wines. They monopolize all the sensuous glories and associations of the fruit. With these red wines one drinks in the very soul and sentiment of the lands which grow the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... work are all made possible to him because of his thousand man-power, deep subconscious body, his tremendous factory of sensuous machinery. It is as if he had practically a thousand men all working for him, for dear life, down in his basement, and the things that he can get these men to attend to for him give him a start with which none of the rest of us could ever hope to compete. We call him inspired because he is more ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... perform. Its exercise is constantly required by the economist, and in general by the sociologist, to gather into true relations of time, space, and causality those intricately connected phenomena which, though individually amenable to sensuous presentation, are not able to be thus presented as an aggregate in their right ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... inner life of man as depicted to us by these master singers, the story of the soul, even more than the delineation of nature which appeals to man's deepest experience and evokes his finest response. We see it in the art of our times, which, not content to be a mere expression of sensuous beauty or lifeless nature, seeks to be instinct with human sympathy and to become the vehicle of the ideas and aims of man. We see it in modern fiction, which is no longer the narration of a simple tale, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... and of gentle blue-grey, the squirrel-coloured hair of a brighter shade, the sensitive mouth sensuous as well, the little chin pointed. She might have been a few years under thirty; the arrangement of the hair, the cut of the bodice, might have indicated the height of the latest fashion—say, twenty-two or even three years back. Some delicately fine ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... will not seem to be such an intolerable ordeal. I am not pleading that I must succumb to impulse. I do not doubt that a pure celibate life is possible so far as action is concerned. But I cannot discover that friendship with younger men can go on uncolored by a sensuous admixture which fills me with shame and loathing. The gratification of passion—normal or abnormal—is repulsive to esthetic feeling. I am nearly 42 and I have always diverted myself from personal interests that threatened to become dangerous to me. More than a year ago, however, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... symbol. There are indeed sluggish minds so incapable of self-evolved activity, and so dependent on the immediate suggestions of Sense, as to be almost destitute of the power of forming distinct images beyond the immediate circle of sensuous associations; and these are rightly named unimaginative minds; but in all minds of energetic activity, groups and clusters of images, many of them representing remote relations, spontaneously present themselves in conjunction with objects ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... to stroke his vanished beard. His risible lips writhed in a foxy smile; his chin was fuller than you would have expected, round and sensuous with a dimple in the ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... thought this place as good as any other, and so remained. He seemed not to know what to do, to be tired of himself. His face was quite the ordinary American type, clean-cut features, rather thin and cold, with honest grey eyes, but, in his case, a mouth rather sensuous and a general air of curiosity and ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... scholastic theology, the Hades of the ancients, and, strictly speaking, a locality only in a relative sense. It has neither a definite area, nor boundary, but exists within subjective space, i.e., is beyond our sensuous perceptions. Still it exists, and it is there that the astral eidolons of all the beings that have lived, animals included, await their second death. For the animals it comes with the disintegration and the entire fading out of their astral particles to the last. For the human eidolon ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... French music differs from German primarily in taking itself less seriously. Everything tends to be shorter; there is a more fanciful and capricious use of passing tones and by-tones of every sort, and its general complexion is that of daintiness and sensuous sweetness, rather than of deep thought. The French school is therefore well adapted for imparting refinement to the style of ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... the starved soul of the child was filled with summer softness, as she slowly returned along the route she had recently come, thinking of the beautiful young lady and the sensuous odor of the flowers which had penetrated to the innermost recesses ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... were falling their fastest, a band of about 150 Dervish horsemen formed near the Khalifa's dark-green standard in the centre and rushed across the fire zone, determined to snatch at triumph or gain the sensuous joys of the Moslem paradise. ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the deceased. Now he felt quite agitated, confused, humiliated, at the idea of finding himself—the son—in the presence of this woman who had been his father's mistress. All the morality which lies buried in our breasts, heaped up at the bottom of our sensuous emotions by centuries of hereditary instruction, all that he had been taught, since he had learned his catechism, about creatures of evil life, the instinctive contempt which every man entertains for them, even though he may marry one of ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... according to which that nation whose sense of life is fullest and keenest, drifts most readily toward a mathematical rigidity of theory. Matter and form are the eternal oppositions, and the mathematical intellects are often attracted by the facts of life, just as the sensuous minds are often drawn toward the study of abstract law. Thus strangely enough, what we think we are is just what we are not: what we desire to be is what suits us least; our theories condemn us, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to the Mystery, Whom she knew through all her senses, she glanced with strange, mystic superstitions that never found expression in the English language, never mounted to thought in English. But so she lived, within a potent, sensuous belief that included her family and contained ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... changes—pagan. I put it crudely for the sake of putting it shortly, for this is not the place to trouble the readers of a few paragraphs of "Gossip" with a dissertation in support of the assertion. The innate paganism of these people, born of the beauty of the climate and of all external Nature, and of the sensuous proclivity to live and breathe and have their being in the present and the visible which results therefrom, first forcibly shaped their early Christianity into moulds which assimilated it to pagan observances and modes of thought, and still remains ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... welcomes with pathetic joy all who can bring some new fancy or trick to their castle-building, rejecting all other without remorse. To this World of Fashion Iola had offered herself, giving freely her great voice and her superb body, now developed into the full splendour of its rich and sensuous beauty. And how they gathered about her and gave her unstinted their flatteries and homage, taking toll the while of the very soul-stuff in her. Devoutly they worshipped at the shrine of that heavenlike and heaven-given instrument wherewith she could tickle ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... important to consider well this gradation of punishment (which, starting with sensuous physical pain, passes through the external teleology of temporary isolation up to the idealism of the sense of honor), both in relation to the different ages at which they are appropriate and to the training which they bring ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... service, as you may know, and I had been taught to love it and thrill to it as a little child, and we never forget those things. Peace and propriety are its keynotes; order and dignity, combined with sensuous charm. Everyone knows his part, and it moves along like a beautiful machine. I knelt and prayed, and then sat and listened, and then stood and sang—over and over for perhaps three-quarters of an hour. We came to the hymn ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... smell, and touch give me, I should be obliged to take my conception of the universe wholly from others. I should lack the alchemy by which I now infuse into my world light, colour, and the Protean spark. The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the gropings of my imagination would be shattered. The solid earth would melt from under my feet and disperse itself in space. The objects dear to my hands would become formless, dead things, and I should walk among them ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... often finds itself in opposition and contrast to that which is not spirit. The highest being in this second order is man, who in inward essence is made in the image and likeness of God, but binds together in one personal life both sensuous elements and divine and spiritual elements which are always in collision and warfare with each other. Man has full freedom of choice and can swing his will over to either side—he can live upward toward the divine goodness, or he can live downward toward the poor, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... burden of its prophecy,—I do not believe that the vast deeps of space above us would have been tinted with tender azure, hiding their awfulness; I do not believe that storms would break away into rainbows, and that the clouds of sunset would display the whole gamut of sensuous splendor; I do not believe that the ocean would wear such joy for the eye over its awful abysses; I do not believe that the mountains would crown the complete, the general loveliness of ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... began our estrangement, because for the first time we came into more than sensuous contact and our minds ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... round elbows on the table, and her warm cheeks on her hands, as a child gravely listens to a fairy story. But the sumptuous picture, and the sensuous phrase he had ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... sentinels (as we are told was done by an angel to the gaolers of Peter's prison), rolled back the triple gates of bronze, strewed the sweet moghra-flowers thickly beneath his horse's feet to muffle every sound, and he was free. Free? Yes—to resign every earthly comfort, every sensuous enjoyment, the sweets of royal power, the homage of a Court, the delights of domestic life: gems, the glitter of gold: rich stuffs, rich food, soft beds: the songs of trained musicians, and of birds ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... necessity. His feeling for nature, especially for her minutest and seemingly most insignificant phenomena, is closely akin to religion; there is an infinite charm in his description of the mysterious life of apparently lifeless objects; he renders all the sensuous impressions so masterfully that the reader often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary talent, he had dreamed of being a landscape painter. Hebbel's epigram, "Know ye why ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... and devotion. One is naturally reminded of his similar extravagant expressions with reference to the undying worth of Richardson's novels. Sterne's life philosophy fitted in with Wieland's second literary period, the frivolous, sensuous, epicurean, even as the moral meanderings of Richardson agreed with his former serious, religious attitude. Probably soon after or while reading Shandy, Wieland conceived the idea of translating ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... had been preoccupied with thoughts of love—and by love I mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ever immersed in ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... and do"—the other "gives out." Now in Dr. Chalmers, the great ingredient was the {ho thymos} as indicating vis animae et vitae,—and in close fellowship with it, and ready for its service, was a large, capacious {ho nous}, and an energetic, sensuous, rapid {to pneuma}. Hence his energy, his contagious enthusiasm—this it was which gave the peculiar character to his religion, to his politics, to his personnel; everything he did was done heartily—if he desired heavenly blessings he "panted" for them—"his soul broke ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... entering Queen Charlotte Sound. It is rather jolly to think of these things, and to realize that we were in more or less danger; though the shores are as silent as the grave, the sea sleeps like a mill-pond, and the sun sinks to rest with great dignity and precision, nightly bathing the lonely North in sensuous splendor. ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... damnation of all flesh, and which not only allows to the spirit power over the flesh, but will also kill this to glorify the spirit. I speak of that religion by whose unnatural requisitions sin and hypocrisy really came into the world, in that by the condemnation of the flesh the most innocent sensuous pleasures became sins, and because the impossibility of a man's becoming altogether spiritual naturally created hypocrisy. I speak of that religion which, by teaching the doctrine of the casting away of all earthly goods and of cultivating a dog-like, abject ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... of religion had been set up in many of the churches. The services were sensuous to a degree, and were a strange mixture of Romanism, Spiritism (demonology,) Theosophy, Materialism, and other kindred cults. Almost every week some new ode or hymn was produced, every sentiment of which was ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... laid its warmest homage at the feet of the artist. Here came, too, in dazzling crowds, the rich nobles and the beautiful women of Europe to find the pleasure, the freedom, the joyous unrestraint, with which Paris offers its banquet of sensuous and intellectual delights to the hungry epicure. Then as now the queen of the art-world, Paris absorbed and assimilated to herself the most brilliant influences ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... from a bit of lace Moved lightly by a passing woman's hand; And on the common street, a sensuous grace Shone suddenly from some lost ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... progress and positive good, and condemn half the human race to perpetual childhood. There was a time when we Anglo-Saxons built cathedrals and worshipped the king. Look at Salisbury and Lincoln and Ely; read the history of the growth of parliaments. There is nothing more beautifully sensuous than the religious spirit that presided over those master works of English Gothic; there is nothing in life more abject than the relics of the English love and fear of princes. But the steady growth of centuries ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... at all events for a time. But he had as yet no audience, and had not begun to exercise his creative imagination. Moreover, to a nature like Hugh's, naturally temperate and ardent, and with no gross or sensuous fibre of any kind, there was a real craving for the bareness and cleanness of self-discipline and asceticism. There is a high and noble pleasure in some natures towards the reduction and disregard of all material claims and limitations, by which a freedom and expansiveness ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... reader finds me less lively than he had—shall I say uncharitably?—hoped for, let him take into account that, to quote the splendid but sensuous phrase of Swinburne, I have always been stupidly prone to prefer "the lilies and languors of virtue" to "the roses and ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... amount of undeveloped capability. Since his arrival in Paris he had watched attentively the new musical phenomena that came there within his ken, and the "Puritani" proves that he had not done so without profit. This sweet singer from sensuous Italy was not insensible even to the depth and grandeur of German music. After hearing Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, for instance, he said to Hiller, his eyes glistening as if he had himself done a great deed: "E bel comme la nature!" [Footnote: I give the words literally as ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... for story and song; for romantic life and fine insight into nature; for keen wit and gentler humor. The love of nature, the passion for visible beauty, and chiefly the visible beauty of our land, will here show itself clearly,—a sense of nature not merely sensuous, but thrilling with hidden and mystic life. We shall find such perfection in this more emotional and poetic side of Irish character as will leave little for coming ages to add. In these two early epochs we shall see the perfecting of the natural man; the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... one that, however defective, has a beauty which must have been too fair. Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, originally regarded as emanations of the ideal, became concrete. Consorts were found for them. From infinity they were lodged in idols. A worship sensuous when not grotesque ensued, from which the ideal ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... But, alas! The spirit that essays in master flights To sip the honey from Parnassus' heights, That daily doth his Pegasus bestride And keeps the War from spoiling on the side, Fails to be fostered by the sensuous sprout Or with horse carrots blow its waistcoat out. So, though I loathe thee, butcher, I must buy The tokens of thy heartless usury. Yet oft I dream that in some life to come, Where no sharp pangs assail the poet's tum, Athwart high sunburnt plains I drive my plough, Untouched by earth's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... creator, materialism still conceals within itself in an ingenuous manner the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, the sensuous poetic glamour in which matter is bathed entices the whole personality of man. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... does Tragedy select subjects so awfully repugnant to the wishes and the wants of our sensuous nature? This question has often been asked, and seldom satisfactorily answered. Some have said that the pleasure of such representations arises from the comparison we make between the calmness and tranquillity of our own situation, and the storms and perplexities to which the victims of passion ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... "Probably no poet ever surpassed Sappho as an interpreter of passion in exquisitely subtle harmonies of form and sound." Anacreon, an Ionian, resembled in his style the Aeolian lyrists. He was most often referred to by the ancients as the poet of sensuous feeling of every sort. The Dorian lyric poetry was mostly choral and historic in its topics. Greek lyric poetry reaches the climax in Simonides and Pindar. The latter was a Boeotian, but of Dorian descent. Simonides was tender and polished; Pindar, fervid ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... coffee and noted her lover's increasing uneasiness, she gave no sign of her resentment, part of which was due to the unwillingness of a sensuous nature to leave a warm corner by the fire on a winter night. Her awakened sense of power made her for the first time rebellious of being hustled out of sight and kept in the dark. The struggle between her and Emmet was on in earnest, and her heart beat fast with a resolve ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... precautions should be taken against German music. Suppose a person loves the South as I love it—as a great school of recovery for the most spiritual and the most sensuous ills, as a boundless solar profusion and effulgence which o'erspreads a sovereign existence believing in itself—well, such a person will learn to be somewhat on his guard against German music, because, in injuring his taste anew, it will also injure his health ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... a fault, it was that he regarded all modern philosophy as sensuous naturalism; and if reason sometimes seemed to him suspicious, it was because he often confounded it with sophistry, which reasons indeed, but ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... backed in and took their places about the drummers. As Swimming Wolf stepped forward the drum-beats died to a muffled softness. The dancing sticks beat the floor in a low, sensuous syncopation that stirred the blood. The long-fringed blanket lent a wild grace to the Indian's swaying, stamping figure. His crouched steps seemed part of ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... opened the door he pointed to the table where Raoul Rigault was seated writing (seemingly very absorbed). He appeared to me to be a man of about thirty-five or forty years old, short, thick-set, with a full, round face, a bushy black beard, a sensuous mouth, and a cynical smile. He wore tortoise-shell eyeglasses; but these could not hide the wicked expression ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... prominent in the stocks in which there has been an infusion of Slavic elements. In Upper Germany, accordingly, a sharp line is to be drawn between the Bavaro-Austrian and the Alemannic group. In Austria the capacity for sensuous enjoyment and a certain indolence are combined with a tendency toward sanguine but short-lived enthusiasms. A soft, southern air blows about the heights of Styria as well as over Vienna and its environs, and in the works of the writers of these regions (Wilhelm ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... among all the European countries, remained the freest from this change. But to a romantic people, whom a warm and lovely sky, a luxurious, ever young and ever smiling nature, and the multifarious witcheries of art, rendered keenly susceptible of sensuous enjoyment, that form of religion must naturally have been better adapted, which by its splendid pomp captivates the senses, by its mysterious enigmas opens an unbounded range to the fancy; and which, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... malice—sin the great offence, Changing thy light to darkness, knowing God, Yet honouring God no more; that time may come When, rich as Carthage, great in arms as Rome, Keen-eyed as Greece, this isle, to sensuous gaze A sun all gold, to angels may present Aspect no nobler than a desert waste, Some blind and blinding waste of sun-scorched sands, Trod by a race of pigmies not of men, Pigmies by passions ruled!' ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... this place! I must write her a letter of passionate thanks. Never before, it seems to me, have I known pure coast-scenery. Never before have I relished the beauties of wave, rock, and cloud. I am filled with a sensuous ecstasy at the unparalleled life, light, and transparency of the air. I am stricken mute with reverent admiration at the stupendous resources possessed by the ocean in the way of color and sound; and as yet, I suppose, I have not seen half of them. I came ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various |
