"Voluptuary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... betrothed to the sister of Charles V., his passion for Dyveke did not pass away. He erected a palace at Opslo, and lived there with his mistress until recalled to Copenhagen, when he took her with him. The most singular feature in this whole intrigue is that the royal voluptuary was from the outset under the absolute sway, not of the fair Dyveke, but of her mother, Sigbrit, a low, cunning, intriguing woman of Dutch origin, who followed the couple to the royal palace at Opslo, and afterwards accompanied them to Stockholm, the complete ruler ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments,—nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They record with just pride ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... wealth and power even when they were within our reach? Were not these the two great sources of depravity? What security had he, that in this change of place and condition, he should not degenerate into a tyrant and voluptuary? Power and riches were chiefly to be dreaded on account of their tendency to deprave the possessor. He held them in abhorrence, not only as instruments of misery to others, but to him on whom they were conferred. Besides, riches were ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... exactions. But there is some excuse in the fact that Bishop John had been censured by Rome for his neglect in collecting the dues of Rome or Peter's Pence as greatly as Bishop Adam was blamed by the people of Caithness for his greediness. There is no need to brand Bishop Adam as a voluptuary for ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... and mountains we find always the free-men: in soft and luxurious countries we find the slaves. It is not the free-born Touarick who is the slave-dealer, or the stimulator of the slave-traffic, but the Moorish merchant, and the voluptuary on the coast who sends him. All that the Saharan tribes do, is to escort the merchants over The Desert; and they would still escort them over The Desert did they not deal in slaves, carrying on only ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... cast the whole System of Platonick Philosophy, so far as it relates to the Soul of Man, in beautiful Allegories, in the sixth Book of his AEneid gives us the Punishment of a Voluptuary after Death, not unlike that which we ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Ahasuerus for his fair bride seems to have soon declined. The fickle voluptuary sought new pleasures, and the bride so lately exalted to a throne was no longer an object of envy. Many bitter tears have been shed by the victims of family pride or state policy, when thus allied to greatness and splendour. The sacred rite has often been prostituted ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... that hast not half read thy villain lesson! Thou shouldst have known that the very cat, thou thoughtest me, will turn and rend the huntsman if he dare rob her of her portion! I tell you, Lucius Catiline, you thought me a mere wanton! a mere sensual thing! a soulless animal voluptuary! Fool! I say, double fool! Look into thine own heart; remember what blood runs in these female veins! Man! Father! Vitiator! My spirit is not female! my blood, my passions, my contempt of peril, my will indomitable and immutable, are, like my mortal body, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... bibines; the most celebrated are the Saucepan and The Slaughter-House. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis, mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers, caravanseries of the caliphs, I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I eat at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to roll naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... The writer whom he did say was better than Shakespeare was not himself, but Bunyan. And he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw nothing but profligate pessimism, the vanitas vanitatum of a disappointed voluptuary. According to this view Shakespeare was always saying, "Out, out, brief candle," because his was only a ballroom candle; while Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle as by God's grace should ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... and a flash of anger like the lightning of a sudden storm blazed over her face; but she controlled herself and held up her compressed lips to the voluptuary, who rudely smacked them and then took from her hand the pipkin she had brought, returning it in a few minutes filled ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... Richelieu under Louis XIII., or Fouche, had the ambition seized him to go to the Convention; but, instead of all that, Rigou had the common sense to remain a Lucullus without ostentation, in other words, a parsimonious voluptuary. To occupy his mind he indulged a hatred manufactured out of the whole cloth. He harassed the Comte de Montcornet. He worked the peasants like puppets by hidden wires, the handling of which amused him as though it were a game of chess where the pawns ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... is well known: his ardent cheerful temper, his sanguine enthusiastic mind, his love of pleasure, his love of women; and true it is, that through all his glowing pictures, we trace the voluptuary. His Virgins are rather "des jeunes epouses de la veille"—far too like his Venuses and his mistresses: they are all luxuriant human beauty; with that peculiar air of blandishment which he has thrown into all his female ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... such vice, to which his position, and the fashion of the day introduced him, a far better heart than any of his contemporaries, and in some respects a kind of simplicity which was endearing. He was neither knave nor fool. He was not a voluptuary, like his friend the duke; nor a continued drunkard, like many other 'fine gentlemen' with whom he mixed; nor a cheat, though a gambler; nor a sceptic, like his friend Walpole; nor a blasphemer, like ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... to himself, to have a back to his chair, and to eat off china again. Kentucky's a voluptuary! I'll have to drag him away by main force; and the Boy allowed Father Richmond to help him yet more abundantly to the potatoes and cabbage grown last ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... his own way. The epicures in boiling of potatoes are innumerable. The perfection of all enjoyment depends on the perfection of the faculties of the mind and body; therefore, the temperate man is the greatest epicure, and the only true voluptuary. ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... that occurred oftener than a new epic, might engage the monarch and his privy council. These were not the men to be touched by the compressed reflections and the ideal virtues personified in this poem. In the court of the laughing voluptuary the manners as well as the morals of these satellites of pleasure were so little heroic, that those of the highest rank, both in birth and wit, never mentioned each other but with the vulgar familiarity of nicknames, or the coarse appellatives of Dick, Will, and Jack! ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... drop back into the old ruts when they find that the bank is too steep to climb. The springs of pride which lie in a great man's secret soul had been slackened in Victurnien. With such guardians as he had, such company as he kept, such a life as he led, he had suddenly became an enervated voluptuary at that turning-point in his life when a man most stands in need of the harsh discipline of misfortune and adversity which formed a Prince Eugene, a Frederick II., a Napoleon. Chesnel saw that Victurnien ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... what you mean. I know nothing about the Standing Committee of the Spec., did not know that such a body existed, and even if it doth exist, must sadly repudiate all association with such "goodly fellowship." I am a "Rural Voluptuary" at present. That is what is the matter with me. The Spec. may go whistle. As for "C. Baxter, Esq.," who is he? "One Baxter, or Bagster, a secretary," I say to mine acquaintance, "is at present disquieting my leisure with certain illegal, uncharitable, unchristian, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... combine in sympathy. It is the effect of a great and active literature of belles-lettres, which is practically current throughout the civilized world, to multiply these sects of sentimental philosophy, with the fads and poses which correspond, and to provide them with appropriate cant. The cant of the voluptuary, the cynical egoist, the friend of humanity, and all the rest is just as distinct as that of the religious sectarian. Each of the little groups operates its own selection, but each is small. They interfere with and neutralize each other, but ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... poet of this period that we shall notice was Anacreon, a native of Teos, in Ionia, who flourished about 530 B.C. He was a voluptuary, who sang beautifully of love, and wine, and nature, and who has been called the courtier and laureate of tyrants, in whose society, and especially in that of Polyc'rates and Hippar'chus, his days were spent. The poet AKENSIDE ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... the resignation of Lord Liverpool in 1827, and though he consented with reluctance to Canning's tenure of the foreign office, he did not attempt to interfere with the change in foreign policy consequent upon it. He was, in fact, sinking more and more into an apathetic voluptuary; but he could rouse himself, and exhibit some proofs of ability, under the impulse of his brothers, the honest Duke of York and the arch-intriguer, the ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... confined to the flower boats, and their floral appellation comes from the reputed attractiveness of the sirens dwelling upon them. The boats are moored side by side in long rows, with planks leading from one to another. Prices on the boats are always high, and the native voluptuary pays extravagantly and the foreigner ruinously whenever he devotes an evening to the floral fleet. By night the boats are gorgeous with their mirrors and myriad lamps alight, and blackwood tables and stools inlaid with mother-of-pearl; but by the light ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... desire to look on women with a magpie thievish eye and no concern for their souls. Considering the part that most of them played in life it was unwarrantable of them to have souls. The dinner that one eats does not presume to have a soul. But the happy freedom of the voluptuary was not for him; against his will there lived in him something sombre and kind that was sensitive to spiritual things and despondent but powerfully vigilant about the happiness of other people. He said ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... base-minded voluptuary, who, aided by rich gifts of mind and wide knowledge, had shunned no means of ingratiating himself with Antony, the most lavish of patrons. The repulse which this man, accustomed to success, had received from Barine had been hard ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was a regular advocate in the courts of civil and canon law, he did not love his profession, nor, indeed, any kind of business which interrupted his voluptuary dreams or forced him to rouse from that indulgence in which only he could find delight. His reputation as a civilian was yet maintained by his judgments in the Courts of Delegates, and raised very high by the address and knowledge which he discovered in 1700, when he defended the Earl of ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... the Paris Constitutionnel, is a transcendent specimen of the voluptuary. He is a large, fleshy, sensual, though by no means coarse-looking man, with the marks of high living and animal enjoyment on all his features. He first made a fortune by selling a quack medicine, after which he became proprietor of the Constitutionnel. His paper is conducted on the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... I had read for ten minutes, I offered a bet of seven to one (no takers) that the author's name began with H. Not out of any love for that amphibious letter; on the contrary, being myself what Professor Wilson calls a hedonist, or philosophical voluptuary, and murmuring, with good reason, if a rose leaf lies doubled below me, naturally I murmur at a letter that puts one to the expense of an aspiration, forcing into the lungs an extra charge of raw air on frosty mornings. But truth is truth, in spite of frosty ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... diplomatic business as sufficed to show that he wanted nothing but inclination to rival Danby and Sunderland, and turned away to pursuits which pleased him better. Like many other men who, with great natural abilities, are constitutionally and habitually indolent, he became an intellectual voluptuary, and a master of all those pleasing branches of knowledge which can be acquired without severe application. He was allowed to be the best judge of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, of acting, that the court could show. On questions of polite learning his decisions were regarded ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... forget his involuntary exile, and his residence in this country, where he lived for many years as Duke of Orleans. A worse man than his father it would be difficult to imagine. He was a vain, ambitious, and cowardly voluptuary, who gratified his personal passions at the expense of his sovereign and his country; but his son was reared in a different school, and to that accident, conjoined with a better nature, he probably owes the high position which he now occupies as a European monarch. Misfortune is a stern teacher, ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... seems the foregoing strain of sentiment. Who could suppose it a prelude to detailed reminiscence on the author's part of sensual pleasures—the basest—enjoyed in the past? The venerable voluptuary keeps himself in countenance for his lascivious vein, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... sometimes ordered, by way of experiment, but never taken,) till I looked yesterday at the worst parts of the Monk. These descriptions ought to have been written by Tiberius at Caprea—they are forced—the philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary. It is to me inconceivable how they could have been composed by a man of only twenty—his age when he wrote them. They have no nature—all the sour cream of cantharides. I should have suspected Buffon of writing them on ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... various forms is, in fact, an attitude of suspicion and hostility. He does not regard a work of art as merely inert and stupid; he regards it as, in some indefinable way, positively offensive. He sees the artist as a professional voluptuary and scoundrel, and would no more trust him in his household than he would trust a coloured clergyman in his hen-yard. It was men, and not women, who invented such sordid and literal faiths as those ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... understood, was "the worst he ever saw;" but Mrs. Cowden Clarke declared it "a fine embodiment of rich, unctuous raciness, no caricature, rolling greasiness and grossness, no exaggerated vulgarisation of Shakespeare's immortal 'fat knight,' but a florid, rotund, self-indulgent voluptuary—thoroughly at his ease, thoroughly prepared to take advantage of all gratification that might come in his way, and thoroughly preserving the manners of a gentleman accustomed to the companionship of a prince. John Leech's Master Slender," she continues, "was picturesquely ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... an outline of a comic grimace; and, if proved a voluptuary in torturing, he could instance half a dozen points for extenuation: her charm of person, withheld from him, and to be embraced; her innocent naughtiness; compensation coming to her in excess for a transient infliction of pain. 'Your anxiety ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... handkerchiefs waved like a snow-storm. The King bowed right and left in acknowledgment of the plaudits, and the performance of the evening was kept long in waiting. The line of Bavarian kings has perhaps little title to our respect. The Ludwig of fifty years ago was a voluptuary, vacillating, like another Louis Quinze, between debauchery and a weak pietism. He probably merited the cuts of the relentless scourge of Heine than which no instrument of chastisement was ever more unsparing, and which in his case was put to its most merciless ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... already suffered the usual fate of those who direct public attention to the profits of the sweater or the pleasures of the voluptuary. He was morally lynched side by side with me. Months elapsed before the decision of the courts vindicated him; and even then, since his vindication implied the condemnation of the press, which was by that time sober again, and ashamed of its orgy, his triumph received ...
— How He Lied to Her Husband • George Bernard Shaw
... Vincent's nature which drew us closer together. I recognized in the man, who as yet was only playing a part, a resemblance to myself, while he, perhaps, saw at times that I was somewhat better than the voluptuary, and somewhat wiser than the coxcomb, which were all that at present it suited ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that passed through the mind of the disgusting old voluptuary, while his lying tongue gave utterance to ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... enjoyment too often drives from the mind of the possessor, the bare remembrance of the means of acquisition: luxury forgets the innumerable ingenuities that minister to its cravings, and wealth, once obtained, unfits the mind for future self-exertion or sympathy for others. Many an upstart voluptuary surveys the elegancies of his well-furnished mansion in comparative ignorance of the means employed for their perfection; and, as regards his stock of knowledge conducive to happiness, he is in a more "parlous state" than the poor shepherd who had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... had now become burdened with a public responsibility which exacted great military talents, and imposed a perpetual and personal activity. Formerly, if the emperor knew himself to be surrounded with assassins, he might at least make his throne, so long as he enjoyed it, the couch of a voluptuary. The "ave imperator!" was then the summons, if to the supremacy in passive danger, so also to the supremacy in power, and honor, and enjoyment. But now it was a summons to never-ending tumults and alarms; ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... temper of Xantippe herself, if she be but the decent mother of one's children, might work less havoc with a life than this embroidered cestus. But "the German Apelles" was no Greek voluptuary, ambitious in heathen vices, such as that other Apelles whose painting of Venus was said to be his masterpiece. And when Holbein inscribed his second portrait of Dorothea with the words LAIS CORINTHIACA, the midsummer ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... wisdom, must be ready to practise any austerities, to use the birch-rod unhesitatingly against himself, in order to gain his end. It becomes evident to any one who regards the subject seriously, that only a man who has the potentialities in him both of the voluptuary and the stoic has any chance of entering the Golden Gates. He must be capable of testing and valuing to its most delicate fraction every joy existence has to give; and he must be capable of denying himself all pleasure, and that without suffering from the denial. ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... spirit for female intrigue, destructive of his own and others' happiness, or a passion for whores, destructive of his health, and in both cases, learns to consider fidelity to the marriage bed as an ungentlemanly practice, and inconsistent with happiness; he recollects the voluptuary dress and arts of the European women, and pities and despises the chaste affections and simplicity of those of his own country; he retains, through life, a fond recollection, and a hankering after those places, which were the scenes of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Ostensibly to carry out Vanderbilt's plans he persuaded that magnate to allow him to bring in as directors two men whose pliancy, he said, could be depended upon. These were Jay Gould, demure and ingratiating, and James Fisk, Jr., a portly, tawdry, pompous voluptuary. In early life Fisk had been a peddler in Vermont, and afterwards had managed an itinerant circus. Then he had become a Wall street broker. Keen and suspicious as old Vanderbilt was, and innately distrustful of both of them, he nevertheless, for some inexplicable reason, ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... moment he abandoned himself to the enchanting witchery with the dreamful enjoyment of the voluptuary inhaling the odors ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... political careers. Whatever a democratic man may be, Prothero and he had decided that an aristocratic man is a public man. He is made and protected in what he is by laws and the state and his honour goes out to the state. The aristocrat has no right to be a voluptuary or a mere artist or a respectable nonentity, or any such purely personal things. Responsibility for the aim and ordering of the world is demanded from him as ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... and its duties might have their agreeable side. "It is probably good for you", he tells us, "to have, say, not less than two glasses of wine after dinner. Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but as to three or four, they are neither one way nor the other." If the voluptuary was condemned, it was for the commonplace reason which a hedonist, too, might invoke, that a life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant. Bradley's objection to pleasure was merely speculative: he found it too "abstract". To call a pleasure when actually ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... defy and nullify the laws made for the timorous and unimaginative. But the intent of the author never really gets into his picture. His Cowperwood in this first stage is hard, commonplace, unimaginative. In "The Titan" he flowers out as a blend of revolutionist and voluptuary, a highly civilized Lorenzo the Magnificent, an immoralist who would not hesitate two minutes about seducing a saint, but would turn sick at the thought of harming a child. But in "The Financier" he is still in the larval ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... abilities, indeed, no person who had talked with him, or corresponded with him, could doubt. But the easy Epicurean life which he had led, his love of good cookery and good wine, of music, of conversation, of light literature, led many to regard him as a sensual and intellectual voluptuary. His habit of canting about moderation, peace, liberty, and the happiness which a good mind derives from the happiness of others, had imposed on some who should have known better. Those who thought ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for the purpose of providing that pleasure which is to be got from literature (and this, like one or two other chapters here, is partly an effort in literary hedonism) Wilson stands very high, indeed so high that he can be ranked only below the highest. He who will enjoy him must be an intelligent voluptuary, and especially well versed in the art of skipping. When Wilson begins to talk fine, when he begins to wax pathetic, and when he gets into many others of his numerous altitudes, it will behove the reader, according to his own tastes, to skip with discretion and ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... great generals have necessarily some qualities in common; even Vendome, an indolent and beastly glutton and voluptuary, was capable of prodigious exertions and of activity not to be surpassed. There is a great deal in the character of Hannibal (as drawn by Livy) which would apply to the Duke of Wellington; only, instead of being ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... and none but poets of the second rank were now remaining. Bacchus misses Euripides, and determines to bring him back from the infernal world. In this he imitates Hercules, but although furnished with that hero's lion- skin and club, in sentiments he is very unlike him, and as a dastardly voluptuary affords us much matter for laughter. Here we have a characteristic specimen of the audacity of Aristophanes: he does not even spare the patron of his own art, in whose honour this very play was exhibited. It was thought that the gods understood a joke as well, if not better, than men. Bacchus ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... vouchsafed none of it to me, that this cold and stolid politician possesses to a great degree the art of ingratiation, and can be all things to all men. Hence there has probably sprung up the idle legend that in private life he is a gross romping voluptuary. Nothing, at least, can well be more surprising than the terms of his connection with the Princess. Older than her husband, certainly uglier, and, according to the feeble ideas common among women, in every particular ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... male voluptuary of feeble intellect and unattractive individuality, who depends for the gratification of his sexual instincts, not on his power of winning and retaining the personal affection and admiration of woman, but on her purchaseable condition, either in the blatantly barbarous ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... adversity, to console—no! the Man needed not consolation,—to kindle, to animate, to rejoice! If there is a being in the world worthy of our envy, after we have grown wise philosophers of the fireside, it is not the palled voluptuary, nor the careworn statesman, nor even the great prince of arts and letters, already crowned with the laurel, whose leaves are as fit for poison as for garlands; it is the young child of adventure and hope. Ay, and the emptier his ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The Voluptuary. You will resemble a wolf in the mountains! a savage beast devoid of all human feeling! Regardless in every way of the obligations of days gone by, your sole pleasure will be in the indulgence of haughtiness, extravagance, licentiousness and dissolute habits! ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... minister gave a still more splendid dinner to the husband whose vices he had professed to abhor, whose meanness of spirit he had declared the object of his contempt. "However," writes Lord Campbell, with much satiric humor, describing this alliance between the selfish voluptuary and the equally selfish lawyer, "he was much comforted by having the honor, at the prorogation, of entertaining at dinner his Royal Highness the Regent, with whom he was now a special favorite, and ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... you this spectacle: Germany's greatest poetical genius forgets the sad reality of his broken, dispirited and disrupted country and leaves her to her wretched fate; passing his time as a sentimental voluptuary in the splendor of the Weimar court, where he concerns himself with such works as "Elective Affinities," ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Ctesias could scarcely have ventured to depict to his countrymen the great Asshur-bani-pal, the vanquisher of Tirhakah, the subduer of the tribes beyond the Taurus, the powerful and warlike monarch whose friendship was courted by the rich and prosperous Gyges, king of Lydia, as a mere voluptuary, who never put his foot outside the palace gates, but dwelt in the seraglio, doing woman's work, and often dressed as a woman. The character of Asshur-bani-pal stands really in the strongest contrast to the description—be it a portrait, or be it a mere sketch from ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... conversant with the world, and accustomed to the splendour of courts. Quite a contrast to the plain rigidity of Benedict, he was courteous and munificent, but withal a voluptuary; and his luxury and profusion gave rise to extortions, to rapine, and to boundless simony. His artful and arrogant mistress, the Countess of Turenne, ruled him so absolutely, that all places in his gift, which had escaped the grasp of his relations, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... than in any part of the European world, and I attribute it, in a great measure, to the social intercourse which has long subsisted between the sexes. It is true, I utter my sentiments with freedom, that in France the very essence of sensuality has been extracted to regale the voluptuary, and a kind of sentimental lust has prevailed, which, together with the system of duplicity that the whole tenor of their political and civil government taught, have given a sinister sort of sagacity ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... which had once looked the insolent Buchan into his inherent insignificance, now emboldened the audacity of this enemy of the house of Carrick; and, supported by Athol on the one side, and Soulis on the other, the base voluptuary seized a pause in the conversation (that he might draw the attention of all present to the disgrace of the chief), and said, with affected carelessness, "My Lord of Carrick, to-day you dine with clean hands; the last time, ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... drawn, compelling as were her stature and her basilisk stare. They quickly turned from her, with a motion of contempt, to feast on the vision by her side—that of a girl on the threshold of young womanhood and of a beauty that dazzled the eyes of the old voluptuary. How had she come there and in such company, this ravishing girl on whom Nature had lavished the last touch of virginal loveliness, this maiden with her figure of such supple grace, the proud little oval face with its complexion of cream and roses, the dainty head from which twin ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... all expenses of respectability and even decency; and frankly accepting squalor and disrepute as the price of anarchic self-indulgence. The conflict between Malvolio and Sir Toby, between the marquis and the bourgeois, the cavalier and the puritan, the ascetic and the voluptuary, goes on continually, and goes on not only between class and class and individual and individual, but in the selfsame breast in a series of reactions and revulsions in which the irresistible becomes ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... ghastly light in which night and day were drawing near to each other to be tall and slim of waist. Her head was thrown back, as if she were drinking in the breeze that heralded the dawn—drinking it in like a voluptuary. ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... founders of schools. Some only partially adopted his method, and each differed from the other. Nor can it be said that all of them advanced science. Aristippus, the founder of the Cyreniac school, was a sort of philosophic voluptuary, teaching that pleasure is the end of life. Antisthenes, the founder of the Cynics, was both virtuous and arrogant, placing the supreme good in virtue, but despising speculative science, and maintaining that no man can refute the opinions of another. He made ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... the power and temptation to gratify his inclinations, he has no personal vices of the baser sort. He is moderate in the satisfaction of his appetites, whether for food or wine. He is no debauchee, no voluptuary, no gambler. He is faithful to old friends and comrades. He has high ideals, and is not ashamed of them. He is neither indolent nor fussy; neither a cynic, nor an intriguer, nor a fool; he is neither wrong-headed nor stubborn; he is honest and sincere to a degree that does him honour ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... also an ardent voluptuary of the most pronounced type, and proposed that Frank should try if he could mesmerize his sister, a charming girl of about fifteen, who was staying with him for a few days, awaiting the arrival of her father. Frank's friend proposed ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... the oak leaves carpeted the ford, and the little trout darted like a beam of light, and the old fish-hawk sat on the hanging limb of the dead beech-tree with his shoulders to his ears and his beak drooping, like some worn-out voluptuary brooding on ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... sleeves and bodices and "sweet chemisettes" in distant England. In hands sensual and vulgar the allusions might have been coarse, the dilatings unseemly; but the "taste which is the feminine of genius," the self-respecting gentleman-like instinct, innocent at once and playful, keeps the voluptuary out of sight, teaches, as Imogen taught Iachimo, "the wide difference 'twixt amorous and villainous." Add to all these elements of fascination the unbroken luxuriance of style; the easy flow of casual epigram or negligent simile;—Greek holy days not kept holy but "kept stupid"; the mule who "forgot ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... sloth and incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of despair against English freedom, was no weak and indolent voluptuary but the ablest and most ruthless ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... "enchanting queen." From this point to its culmination in overwhelming disaster and the tragic death of this celebrated pair of lovers, the romantic drama of Cleopatra's conquests becomes even more important in literature than in history. This extraordinary voluptuary, whose beauty and witcheries have interested mankind for almost twenty centuries, has been the subject of some thirty tragedies in various languages; and in Antony and Cleopatra—one of his greatest plays—Shakespeare, closely following ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... stomachs, which it does not. A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose, and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. But the rascal of a painter, poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is not content with his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he also wants an advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day spent in the studio or library than in the field; or as if he needed more food ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... learned physician gave them to understand, that though this was reckoned a luxurious fish in the zenith of the Roman taste, it was by no means comparable, in point of expense, to some preparations in vogue about the time of that absurd voluptuary Heliogabalus, who ordered the brains of six hundred ostriches to be compounded ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Warwickshire peasant stumbled into immortality." Referring to those purists who regard words more than things in their strictures on licentiousness, he calls them persons "whose morality seems to be all in their ears." Speaking of Hume, "an exquisite voluptuary among political and metaphysical abstractions," he puts him in a class of men who "study art as they study nature, only in the process of dissection—a process which, of course, scares away the very life which makes her nature; so that they get, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... as before stated, consider biche de mer a very great luxury, believing that it wonderfully strengthens and nourishes the system, and renews the exhausted system of the immoderate voluptuary. The first quality commands a high price in Canton, being worth ninety dollars a picul; the second quality, seventy-five dollars; the third, fifty dollars; the fourth, thirty dollars; the fifth, twenty dollars; the sixth, twelve dollars; the seventh, eight dollars; and the eighth, four dollars; ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Roman Catholic priests from Tartufe at the theatre, had very incorrect conceptions regarding them. Bressant was the cold, elegant hypocrite, Lafontaine the base, coarse, but powerful cleric, Leroux the full-blooded, red-faced, voluptuary with fat cheeks and shaking hands, whose expression was now angry, now sickly sweet. Northern Protestants were very apt to classify the black-coated men whom they saw in the streets and in the churches, as belonging to one of these three types. But my ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... "The infidel and voluptuary may ridicule the idea of the Almighty Creator of the universe, being pleased, or displeased, with a man for having a full or an empty stomach; but whatever tends directly or remotely, to subdue rebellious passions, and subject a creature like man to the restraints of reason and religion, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... mob and the contemptuous pity of the worldly wise and prudent; and when at last the horizon of Time shuts down between him and ourselves, and the places which have known him know him no more forever, we are almost ready to say with the regal voluptuary of old, This also is vanity and a great evil; "for what hath a man of all his labor and of the vexation of his heart wherein he hath labored under the sun?" But is this the end? Has God's universe no wider limits than the circle of the blue wall which shuts in our nestling-place? ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... had grown up in the midst of the last expiring splendours of the Bourbon court of Naples, understood life on a large scale, was profoundly initiated into all the arts of the voluptuary, combined with a certain Byronic leaning towards fantastic romanticism. His marriage had occurred under quasi tragic circumstances, the finale of a mad passion; then, after disturbing and undermining the conjugal peace in every possible fashion, he had separated from ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... recompense of his services. This new dignity, by giving him frequent and easy access to the emperor, created an intimacy between them, which was increased to friendship and esteem on the side of Nero, by the elegant entertainments often given him by Petronius. In a short time, this gay voluptuary became so much a favourite at court, that nothing was agreeable but what was approved by Petronius and the authority which he acquired, by being umpire in whatever related to the economy of gay dissipation, procured him the title of Arbiter elegantiarum. Things continued in this ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... the reader to trace some of the causes why the beauties of nature are not forcibly felt, when civilization, or rather luxury, has made considerable advances—those calm sensations are not sufficiently lively to serve as a relaxation to the voluptuary, or even to the moderate pursuer of artificial pleasures. In the present state of society, the understanding must bring back the feelings to nature, or the sensibility must have such native strength, as rather to be whetted than destroyed by ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... have given me a different idea of this little feathered voluptuary, which I will venture to impart, for the benefit of my school-boy readers, who may regard him with the same unqualified envy and admiration which I once indulged. I have shown him only as I saw ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... the child viciously. Only, the cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must be for the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury to the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly "I beat you because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrive an excuse for it." But to represent this detestable lust to the child as Divine wrath, and the cruelty as ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... Missiaglia, Venetian bookseller Mistress, 'cannot be a friend Mitchell, T., esq., his translation of Aristophanes 'Mobility' Modern gardening, Pope the chief inventor of Moira, Earl of (afterwards Marquis of Hastings) Moliere Moncada, Marquis 'Monk,' Lewis's, 'The philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary' Mont Blanc Montague, Edward Wortley ——, Lady Mary Wortley, proposed Italian translation of her letters and new life of three pretty notes by her Pope's lines on her Montbovon 'Monthly Literary ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... lxxiii. p. 1235. Hist. August. p. 61. I have endeavored to blend into one consistent story the seeming contradictions of the two writers. * Note: The contradiction as M. Guizot observed, is irreconcilable. He quotes both passages: in one Julianus is represented as a miser, in the other as a voluptuary. In the one he refuses to eat till the body of Pertinax has been buried; in the other he gluts himself with every luxury almost in the sight of his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... undoubted truth, but ascertainable without laboratory experiments by a simple enquiry addressed to the nearest policeman, or, failing him, to any sane person in Europe. The Italian is diagnosed as a cruel voluptuary: the dog-starver is passed over as such a hopeless fool that it is impossible to take any interest in him. Why not test the diagnosis scientifically? Why not perform a careful series of experiments on persons under the influence of voluptuous ecstasy, so as to ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... matter of course, whenever the election takes place. In consequence, as matters of course are usually matters of indifference, he has left all thoughts of securing his interest upon, this material occasion to thee and to me, while the foolish voluptuary hath himself run mad—for what think you? Something between man and woman,—female in her lineaments, her limbs, and a part at least of her garments; but, so help me St. George, most masculine in the rest of her attire, in her propensities, and in ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Mentula a worn-out voluptuary. Mentula is a cant term which Catullus frequently uses for a libidinous person, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... rarely matters of cold scientific observation, but are colored both by their own sexual emotions and by their own moral attitude toward the sexual impulse. The ascetic who is unsuccessfully warring with his own carnal impulses may (like the voluptuary) see nothing in women but incarnations of sexual impulse; the ascetic who has subdued his own carnal impulses may see no elements of sex in women at all. Thus the opinions regarding this matter are not only tinged by elements of primitive culture, but by elements of individual disposition. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... cultivation. Her passions were consequently ungovernable, and she accustomed herself to yield to them without scruple, treating female honor and delicacy as vulgar prejudices. She was therefore a voluptuary and sensualist, without that refinement for which she seemed to contend on other subjects. Her history, indeed, forms entirely a warning, and in no part an example. Singular she was, it must be allowed, for it is not easily to be ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... so much boast are the least of those which true tenderness has to give, and this in the opinion of a voluptuary. ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... exclusive adornment of those secluded arbors which the spade and the plough have never profaned. Here flowers grow which are too holy for culture, and birds sing whose voices were never heard in the cage of the voluptuary, and whose tones inspire us with a sense of freedom known only to those who often retire from the world, to live in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... execrable crime. The elder brother, Ching-hsiu, seeing the case put in the hands of the upright Pao Lao-yeh, and knowing his brother to be guilty of homicide, advised him to put the woman to death, in order to cut off all sources of information and so to prevent further proceedings. The young voluptuary thereupon caused the woman to be thrown down a deep well, but the star T'ai-po Chin-hsing, in the form of an old man, drew her out again. While making her escape, she met on the road an official procession which she mistook for ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... frontiers of Arabia, a famous robber, named Arbogad, seized me and sold me to some merchants, who brought me to this castle, where Lord Ogul resides. He bought me without knowing who I was. He is a voluptuary, ambitious of nothing but good living, and thinks that God sent him into the world for no other purpose than to sit at table. He is so extremely corpulent that he is always in danger of suffocation. His physician, who has ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... never saw upon Whitman's features any trace of mean or evil passions. The man was thoroughly wholesome. Even his occasionally free utterances on sexuality are only sins against decorum. They do not violate nature. He never spoke on this subject with the slobbery grin of the voluptuary, or the leer of prurience. He was at such moments simply unreticent. Meaning no harm, he suspected none. In this respect he belonged to a less self-conscious antiquity, when nothing pertaining to man was common or unclean, and even the worship of the powers of generation ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... very miasma of poisonous influence may rise from the apparently innocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised in neither way—neither as a good nor as a bad man, neither as an acute thinker nor as a deliberate voluptuary. He is simply sensuous. On his own ground he is even very fresh and healthy: his delineation of youthful maternity, for example, is as true as it is beautiful; and his sympathy with the gleefulness of children is devoid of affectation. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... referreth. The good of man's body is of four kinds—health, beauty, strength, and pleasure: so the knowledges are medicine, or art of cure; art of decoration, which is called cosmetic; art of activity, which is called athletic; and art voluptuary, which Tacitus truly calleth eruditus luxus. This subject of man's body is, of all other things in nature, most susceptible of remedy; but then that remedy is most susceptible of error; for the same subtlety ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... cases of scandal not unfrequently arose. Still, they were generally such as those mentioned by Burke, where frailty was deprived of half its guilt, by being purified from all its grossness. In Louis XI's practice, it was far otherwise. He was a low voluptuary, seeking pleasure without sentiment, and despising the sex from whom he desired to obtain it.... By selecting his favourites and ministers from among the dregs of the people, Louis showed the slight regard which he paid to eminent station and high birth; and although this might be not only ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... liquors) be committed by the pilgrim, from the time of his assuming the pilgrim's habit to that of his putting it off; and this is construed by the stricter professors to take effect from the actual formation of the intent to make the pilgrimage. Haroun er Reshid, though a voluptuary, was (at all events, from time to time) a ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... summer such as broods O'er enchanted solitudes, Where the hand of Fancy leads us through voluptuary moods, And with lavish love out-pours All the wealth of out-of-doors, And woos our feet o'er ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... the throne was in every respect the opposite of Cromwell. Charles II had no love of country, no sense of duty, no belief in man, no respect for woman. Evil circumstances and evil companions had made him "a good-humored lad but hard-hearted voluptuary." For twelve years he had been a wanderer, and at times almost a beggar. Now the sole aim of his life was enjoyment. He desired to be King because he would then be able to ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... bearable. If our pecuniary resources be exiguous, let our resolution, Dick, supply the deficiencies of Fortune. The muffin we desire to-day would little benefit us to-morrow. Poor and hungry as we are, are we less happy, Dick, than yon listless voluptuary who banquets on ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as the princely disquietude which stalks through splendid drawing-rooms, brooding over the slights and offences of high life. The bitterness of trouble seems not so unfitting, when drunk out of a pewter mug, as when it pours from the chased lips of a golden chalice. In the sharp crack of the voluptuary's pistol, putting an end to his earthly misery, I hear the confirmation that in a hollow, fastidious life there is ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... hours before we parted, but he retained all his other faculties in perfection; and as he gave vent to every whimsical idea as it rose, I was really astonished at the brilliancy of his thoughts, and the force of his expression. Quin is a real voluptuary in the articles of eating and drinking; and so confirmed an epicure, in the common acceptation of the term, that he cannot put up with ordinary fare. This is a point of such importance with him, that he always takes upon ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... of European civilization, into the heart of London or Paris, and gauge the moral knowledge of the sensualist by the moral character of the sensualist? Why does he not tell us that because this civilized man acts no better, therefore he knows no better? Why does he not maintain that because this voluptuary breaks all the commandments in the decalogue, therefore he must be ignorant of all the commandments in the decalogue? that because he neither fears nor loves the one only God, therefore he does not know that ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... in Prosperity contented with his state and persisting in evil, a fit subject for reproof. A voluptuary and a miser, magnificently attired, is clasping to his heart a purse full of money and a bunch ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... misuse of man's higher powers on behalf of falsehood and impurity. These parents are the wine-god Bacchus and the sorceress Circe. The former, mated with Love, is the father of Mirth (see L'Allegro); but, mated with the cunning Circe, his offspring is a voluptuary whose gay exterior and flattering speech hide his dangerously seductive and magical powers. He bears no resemblance, therefore, to Comus as represented in Ben Jonson's Pleasure reconciled to Virtue, in which ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... and man being admittedly a creature of his environment, can we still pretend to horror at this Roderigo and at the fact that being the man he was—prelate though he might be—handsome, brilliant, courted, in the full vigour of youth, and a voluptuary by nature, he should have succumbed to the temptations by which ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... of his heart, there can be no doubt. But the circle he moved in, and his volatile, mischievous, beauty-idolising nature played havoc with his good intentions, though not to the extent implied by some critics who have pictured him as a reckless voluptuary. But just herein is the final proof of Constanze's devotion and her understanding of him, for, while there never was a breath of slander against herself, she found heart to forgive Mozart's ficklenesses. He actually made her the confessional ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... at some very silly remark of mine the joyous widow pressed some half-dozen rapid kisses on the cheek that was glowing so near her own. Either this act emboldened Riprapton, or he egregiously mistook her character, and judged that a mere voluptuary stood before him, for he immediately went on the vacant side and endeavoured to possess himself ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... central portion of Palestine, the country of dates, where they encountered the five godless kings, Bera, the villain, king of Sodom; Birsha, the sinner, king of Gomorrah; Shinab, the father-hater, king of Admah; Shemeber, the voluptuary, king of Zeboiim; and the king of Bela, the city that devours its inhabitants. The five were routed in the fruitful Vale of Siddim, the canals of which later formed the Dead Sea. They that remained of the rank and file fled to the mountains, but the kings fell into the slime pits and stuck ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... courtier who kneels there before the carving of his patron saint slaying the dragon. The square head, the deep brows, the heavy jaw and firm mouth, are not beautiful, but they are impressive, and they show a character as far removed from the peasant as it was from the voluptuary, as near akin to the administrator of Normandy as to the Cardinal of the Holy Church. I have little doubt that this was the handiwork of the Rouland Leroux who must have often seen him in the Cathedral, and ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... the Cardinal was no ascetic. His hermitage contained other appliances save those for study and devotion. His retired life was, in fact, that of a voluptuary. His brother, Chantonnay, reproached him with the sumptuousness and disorder of his establishment. He lived in "good and joyous cheer." He professed to be thoroughly satisfied with the course things had taken, knowing ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ways; to please him he affected malicious raillery and atheism, in his company criticised persons before whom in other places he would slavishly grovel. When at supper they talked of love and women, he pretended to be a subtle and perverse voluptuary. As a rule, one may say, Petersburg rakes are fond of talking of their abnormal tastes. Some young actual civil councillor is perfectly satisfied with the embraces of his cook or of some unhappy street-walker on the Nevsky ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... than his title by many a century—downright sacrilege! And the property being entailed, too—actual robbery of the heir! But I understand anybody may do anything with Lord Ravenel—a mere selfish, cynical, idle voluptuary!" ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... fled in indignation to their friendly monarch; but the voluptuary of nature only shrugged his shoulders and smiled. He kissed away their tears, and their frowns vanished as he crowned ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... During the whole of this period they were two of the most flourishing cities in all Hellas. Sybaris in particular attained to an extraordinary degree of wealth, and its inhabitants were so notorious for their luxury, effeminacy, and debauchery, that their name has become proverbial for a voluptuary in ancient and modern times. Croton was the chief seat of the Pythagorean philosophy. Pythagroras was a native of Samos, but emigrated to Croton, where he met with the most wonderful success in the propagation of his views. He established ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... will fold it over, and perforate it with his punching machine and return it to you. By the time you reach your destination nothing will be left but the cover; but do not cast this carelessly aside; retain it until you are filing out of the terminal, when it will be taken up by a haughty voluptuary with whiskers. If you have not got it you cannot escape. You will have to go back and live on the train, which is, indeed, a frightful ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... Elmer Gantry, hypocrite and voluptuary, is painted against a background of church members and professing Christians scarcely less hypocritical than he. In this book Sinclair Lewis adds a violent stroke to his growing picture ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... works, in which are to be found such admirable and varied types of women characters, that they even surpass in beauty those of Shakspeare (Angiolina, Myrrha, Anna): they said that Faliero wanted interest, that Sardanapalus was a voluptuary; that Satan in "Cain" did not speak as a theologian (how could he?), that there were irreverent tendencies in his sacred ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... selfish gratification. I have no relish, indeed, for sensual indulgences. It is the intellectual taste that calls for such banquets as imagination and science can furnish; but, though less sordid than the epicure, the voluptuary, or the sportsman, the principle that governs them and me is the same; equally limited to self; equally void of any basis in morals ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... of these, Father Anselmo, was a corpulent fellow, with an easy swing of gait, heavy animal features, and an eye of shrewd and stealthy cunning: the whole air of the man expressed the cautious, careful voluptuary. The other, Father Johannes, was thin, wiry, and elastic, with hands like birds' claws, and an eye that reminded one of the crafty cunning of a serpent. His smile was a curious blending of shrewdness and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... years back, the finest gentlemen and ladies of Europe did the like. Belinda ate with her knife; and Saccharissa had only that weapon, or a two-pronged fork, or a spoon, for her pease. Have you ever looked at Gilray's print of the Prince of Wales, a languid voluptuary, retiring after his meal, and noted the toothpick which he uses? . . . You are right, madam; I own that the subject is revolting and terrible. I will not pursue it. Only—allow that a gentleman, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mirrors, a bookcase, itself a rare work of art, containing the best works of the best authors, all in the richest of bindings—nothing here that the most refined and cultivated taste could disapprove, and yet everything bespoke the sybarite, the voluptuary. A place wherein to forget that the world held aught save beauty; a place for luxurious revelry, and repose filled ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... rank of "Knight," sitting in theatre and circus below men whom his own hand had raised to station higher than his own. Absorbed in unsleeping political toil, he wore the outward garb of a careless, trifling voluptuary. It was difficult to believe that this apparently effeminate lounger, foppish in dress, with curled and scented hair, luxuriating in the novel refinement of the warm bath, an epicure in food and drink, patronizing actors, lolling in his litter amid a train of parasites, ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... sense is merely an indication of the superior permanency of social compared with personal impressions. Morality, if we take his explanation as complete and final, is reduced to tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; an etiquette which, perhaps, a sceptical voluptuary, wishing to remove the obstacles to a life of enjoyment, might think himself not unreasonable in treating as an illusion. This, so far as appears, is the explanation offered of moral life, with all its beauty, its tenderness, its heroism, its self- sacrifice; to say nothing of spiritual life ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... practised my profession in the capital city of a state ruled over by a maharajah, who, although he had been a brave and honourable man in his prime, had degenerated into a mere voluptuary, spending his days in the companionship of nautch girls and disreputable men, indulging constantly in immoderate potations of strong wine, and given at times to the use of bhang, which does more than anything else to dull the faculties and deaden the conscience of the unfortunate ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... duration; and sensuality is but a distemper of the mind, which ought to be cured by remembrance, if it were not perpetually inflamed by hope. The chase is not more surely terminated by the death of the game, than the joys of the voluptuary by the means of completing his debauch. As a band of society, as a matter of distant pursuit, the objects of sense make an important part in the system of human life. They lead us to fulfil the purposes ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest. Nay, I am in great doubt whether any man could be found, who would earn a life of the most perfect satisfaction at the price of ending it in the torments which justice inflicted in a few hours on the late unfortunate regicide in France" (Sublime and Beautiful, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... pity as you may think, Madam. 'Carpe diem' is my motto. 'Tis likewise the motto of that finished voluptuary, Horace, but I only take it because it suits me. The pleasure which follows desires is the best, for ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... before him like the embodiment of enthusiasm. She was the genius of motion, the divinity of the dance; she was Terpsichore in the grace of her movements, Euterpe in the ravishing sweetness of her voice. A thrill of admiration suffused with a deeper tint even the abhorred cheek of the voluptuary. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... of satisfaction in certain things, such as dinners and good sound sleep, and good inn-keeping—yes, and in spring flowers, and in autumn leaves and winter sunsets. Zilda Chaplot was formed for pleasure, yet there is no tendency latent in her which could have made her a voluptuary. There are some natures which have so nice a proportion of faculties that they are a law of moderation to themselves. They take such keen delight in small pleasures that to them a little ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... some such mood, and perhaps under one of those very trees before me, which threw their broad shades over the grassy banks and quivering waters of the Avon, that the poet's fancy may have sallied forth into that little song which breathes the very soul of a rural voluptuary ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... he is, or as he was, in almost every variety of situation, action, and feeling. Lord Byron makes man after his own image, woman after his own heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave; he gives us the misanthrope and the voluptuary by turns; and with these two characters, burning or melting in their own fires, he makes out everlasting centos of himself. He hangs the cloud, the film of his existence over all outward things—sits in the centre ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the vision of that Lost Paradise is granted; to every man and woman who know and feel the truth of the divine passion is vouchsafed a flashing gleam of glory from that Heaven which gives them to each other. For the voluptuary—for the animal man,—who like his four-footed kindred is only conscious of instinctive desire, this pure expansion of the heart and ennobling of the thought is as a sealed book,—a never-to-be- divulged mystery of joy, which, because he ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... seems to have been sincere. From being a cruel voluptuary and assassin, he was changed to a merciful ruler who could not bear to inflict capital punishment. He was faithful to his Greek wife Anna. On the spot where he had once erected Perun, and where the two Scandinavians were martyred at his command, he built the church of St. Basil; and he is now ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... inspires so extravagant, that it is impossible not to see that the revolt against conventional respectability has transfigured a commonplace rascal into a sort of Anarchist Saviour. As to the respectable voluptuary, who joins Omar Khayyam clubs and vibrates to Swinburne's invocation of Dolores to "come down and redeem us from virtue," he is to be ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw |
