Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'



Celibate   /sˈɛlɪbət/   Listen
Celibate

adjective
1.
Abstaining from sexual intercourse.  Synonym: continent.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Celibate" Quotes from Famous Books



... electorate and electorate the same as population. On both bases the distribution of the constituencies would be the same. There is, for instance, no part of this country which is more married, or more celibate, or more prolific than any other part. It is only in the Transvaal, this country of afflicting dualities and of curious contradictions, where everything is twisted, disturbed, and abnormal, that there is a ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... his look when I accosted him on the threshold of the big new ballroom. With celibate egoism I had rather fancied he would be gratified by my departure from custom; but one glance showed me my mistake. He smiled warmly, indeed, and threw into his hand-clasp an artificial energy of welcome—"You of all people—my dear fellow! Have you seen Daisy?"—but the look behind the smile ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... Judson was entertained by the wife, who questioned her eagerly, and asked if she knew how to dance in the English way; but was satisfied on hearing that the wives of priests did not dance. As Buddhist priests are celibate, Mrs. Judson must have been rather a puzzle to the good lady; and all this time the real work of the mission had not commenced, for the preliminary operation of acquiring the language had not been completed, and Judson was warned not to attempt preaching till he was familiar with ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... matrimony. Socially, industrially and morally he is unstable. It is these conditions of his life which so contrast him with that species of criminality which the "Jukes" family presents. And it is these same conditions which support the statement of Fere and Ellis, that he is generally a celibate and non-productive. Concerning the progeny of the female criminal there is little to say except that the causes which chiefly account for the male criminal operate to produce the prostitute among women, and therefore criminal women are in a very small minority. ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll

... the improvement of the race, and it became more and more doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all! Splendid and beautiful and courageous people must come together and have children, women with their fine senses and glorious devotion must be freed from the net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to be childless and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men whom need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of circumstances have forced upon them. We all know that, and so few dare even to whisper it for fear that ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... of the social evil is the postponement or abandonment of marriage by many young people, the celibate life imposed upon students and soldiers, the declaration of some physicians that continence is injurious, and lax opinion, especially ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... make only one blood relative a cardinal, and that certain other benefices of the Church should not be given to any one related to him. The people called him Nocens (the Guilty One, or the Harmful One) instead of Innocent, and immortalized the prolific paternity of this saintly celibate in the following epigram: ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... spouse, benedict. Antonyms: bachelor, celibate. Associated Words: marital, monandry, polyandry cuckold, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... receded into the unknown before the advent of Sarah and Hilda, but with whom George Cannon must have had many interviews. No doubt the room was an epitome of the character of Mrs. Granville, presumably a fussy and precise celibate, with a place for everything and everything in its place, and an indiscriminating ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... one day, and Father Payne came in, in an excited mood, with a letter in his hand. "Here's a bit of nonsense," he said. "Here's my old friend Davenport giving me what he calls a piece of his mind—he can't have much left—about my 'celibate brotherhood,' as he calls it. It's all the other way! I am rather relieved when I hear that any of you people are happily engaged to be married. Celibacy is the danger of my experiment, not ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... a celibate who has been subject to a diet consisting of the herb hanea, of cucumbers, of purslane and the applications of leeches to his ears, as recommended by Sterne, would be able to carry by storm the honor of your wife? Suppose that a diplomat had been clever ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac

... usually masculines; and objects of love and desire feminines. We may thus find light thrown upon the honours paid to such goddesses as Astarte and Aphrodite: which will also help us to understand the deification by a celibate priesthood of the Virgin Mary. We may, moreover, account partly for the fact that to the sailor his ship is always she; to the swain the flowers which resemble his idol, as the lily and the rose, are always feminine, and used ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... as it was supposed hoping to expiate by a life given up to prayer the crimes, as she deemed them, of her brother. Meantime, appalled by the shadow of their father's memory, George and Antoine decided to remain celibate, a pair marked out ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... he had no ambition; this judge, who thoroughly knew the law of nations, political law, civil and criminal law, and who could find in these a weapon against every anxiety, against every mistake; this profound legislator, this serious writer, this pious celibate whose life sufficiently proved that he was open to no reproach? A criminal could not have been more hardly punished by God than was my master; sorrow had robbed him of half his slumbers; he never slept more than four hours. ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac

... returned from the dead that Louis Fores entered the Five Towns Hotel on Easter Saturday afternoon, for in his celibate prime he had been a habitue of the place. He had a thrill; and he knew that he would be noticed, were it only as the hero and victim of a street accident; a few remaining plasters still drew attention to his recent history. At the same time, the thrill which affected him was not ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett

... metaphor doesn't matter so long as it conveys a sense of an unlooked-for phenomenon. True, in relation to cosmic forces, it was but a trumpery bolt or a squib-like bomb; but it startled us all the same. The admirable Mrs. Considine got married. A retired warrior, a recent widower, but a celibate of twenty years standing owing to the fact that his late wife and himself had occupied separate continents (on avait fait continent a part, as the French might say) during that period, a Major-General fresh from India, an old flame and constant ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... cherishing the young they bring into the moon; periods of foolish indulgence alternate with moods of aggressive violence, and as soon as possible the little creatures, who are quite soft and flabby and pale coloured, are transferred to the charge of celibate females, women 'workers' as it were, who in some cases possess brains ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... Bayle rejects the history for a curious reason, venery being colder in summer than in winter, and quotes the proverb "Aux mods qui n'ont pas d' R, peu embrasser et bien boire." But in the case of a celibate priesthood such scandals are inevitable: witness the famous Jesuit epitaph ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... moreover . . . oh, thinking, if you like, How utterly dissociated was I A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife Of Guido . . . . . . I had a whole store of strengths Eating into my heart, which craved employ, And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help— And yet there was no way in the wide ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... could easily result from quite a few sexual unions. For the rest the couple should be celibate. Any intercourse not having procreation as its intention is 'sexual union as an end in itself,' and therefore by inference condemned by the ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... temperance and harmonious adjustment between husband and wife. This post-nuptial problem is far more difficult to solve, for the intimacy of married life, especially in the earlier years, is sure to offer stimuli that are likely to make sexual instincts more insistent than those that come from celibate repression. However, self-control and temperance in marriage is no new and unattainable ideal, and harmonious adjustment of men and women in marriage is far more common than the pessimists ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow

... lurking disposition to believe, even among those who lead the normal type of life, that the abstinent and chastely celibate are exceptionally healthy, energetic, immune. The wildest claims are made. But indeed it is true for all who can see the facts of life simply and plainly, that man is an omnivorous, versatile, various creature and can draw his strength from a hundred ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... you like. I merely suspect that you are not so sure of your vocation as you were in the Clergy House. Even a deacon is human, I suppose; and if life is alluring, he can't help feeling it. Are you still sure that the clergy should be celibate, ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates

... that between Scriptural or unconscious, and Popish or conscious, purity: in a word, between innocence and prudery; next, of the struggle between healthy human affection, and the Manichean contempt with which a celibate clergy would have all men regard the names of husband, wife, and parent. To exhibit this latter falsehood in its miserable consequences, when received into a heart of insight and determination sufficient to follow out all belief to its ultimate practice, is the main ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley

... all ages by a few artists, propagandists and revolutionists in order that their minds may be single to the work which has claimed their lives and all the forces of their beings may be bent in one direction. Sometimes, too, such persons have remained celibate to avoid the burden of caring for ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger

... to observe, has long since decided to call herself The Island of Saints, an assertion akin to the national challenge of trailing the coat-tails, and believers in hereditary might, perhaps, be justified in assuming a strictly celibate sainthood. Be that as it may, Irish people have ever been prone to extremes, and, in spite of the proverb, there are some extremes that never touch, and chief among them are those that concern religion. Religion, or rather, difference of religion, is a factor in every-day Irish life of infinitely ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... celibacy of the monk and the estrangement of the knight from his family, doing this by means of the inner life of the family; for it substituted, in the place of the negative emptiness of the duty of holiness of the celibate, the positive morality of marriage and the family; while, instead of the abstract poverty and the idleness of the monkish piety and of knighthood, it asserted that property was the object of labor, i.e. it asserted the self-governed ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... and general: 'The editor of the New York Albion has had the good fortune to obtain as contributor to his poetical columns the name of Susanna Moodie, better known among the admirers of elegiac poetry, in her days of celibate life, as Susanna Strickland. From the specimen with which she has furnished Dr. Bartlett of her poetic ardour, we are happy to find that neither the Canadian atmosphere nor the circumstances attendant upon ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot

... time they must have with the Married Men, the Celibate, the Paralytic, and Carnaby! I'm glad my ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Beatriz good enough for the Admiral-elect of the Ocean Seas; perhaps (and more probably) Beatriz was already married and deserted, for she bore the surname of Enriquez; and in that case, there being no such thing as a divorce in the Catholic Church, she must either sin or be celibate. But however that may be, there was an uncanonical alliance between them which evidently did not in the least scandalise her brothers and which resulted in the birth of Ferdinand Columbus in the following year. Christopher, so communicative and discursive upon some of his affairs, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... deficiency of candour, of humour, and of common sense, the missionaries are the best and the most useful whites in the Pacific. This is a subject which will follow us throughout; but there is one part of it that may conveniently be treated here. The married and the celibate missionary, each has his particular advantage and defect. The married missionary, taking him at the best, may offer to the native what he is much in want of—a higher picture of domestic life; but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... be celibate is mine own desire," broke in Queen Elizabeth. "Shall every curly fool's-pate of a girl be turning after an anointed bishop? I will have this thing ended, certes! and that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... 'Supporting a non-celibate clergy, and an intermingled aristocracy? Your endeavours, my good young man, will lessen like those of the man who employed a spade to uproot a rock. It wants blasting. Your married clergy and merchandized aristocracy are coils: they are the ivy about ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... to speak in detail. But it may suitably be stated that sixteenth-century standards in these matters were not so high as those of the present day. 'If gold ruste, what shal iren do?' The highest ecclesiastical authorities were unable to check a nominally celibate priesthood from maintaining women-housekeepers who bore them families of children and were in many cases decent and respectable wives to them in all but name; indeed in Friesland the laity for obvious reasons insisted upon this violation of ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... beyond—cattle. Cattle was the sum and substance of his celibate life. He was an old type of ranchman whose waking hours were devoted to a physical labor which left no room for anything else. But Jeff knew that for all his roughness of manner and speech, a roughness ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum

... lifetime in the Val d'Ema, subsisting precariously upon entirely vegetable food—roots, herbs, and the like; another is the superior part of a convict, hung in Arezzo for numerous offences; a third is that of a very old man who lived a celibate from his youth up, and by his abstinence and goodness exercised an almost priestly influence upon the borghesa. When, by this miscellaneous lecture, he has both amused and edified his hearers, he ingeniously turns the discourse upon his own life, and finally introduces ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum

... to another friar's daughter, and a daughter who was the wife of a foreigner. In short, bastards of the friars are to be found everywhere in the Islands. Regarding this merely as the natural outcome of the celibate rule, I do not criticize it, but simply wish to show that the pretended sanctity of the regular clergy in the Philippines was an absurdity, and that the monks were in no degree less ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman



Words linked to "Celibate" :   religious person, chaste



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com