"Immodesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... talents. Of his poetry we have only six elegies, written, in the person of an old man, on the subject of old age, but which, there is reason to think, were composed at an earlier part of the author's life. Except the fifth elegy, which is tainted with immodesty, the others, particularly the first, are highly beautiful, and may be placed in competition with any other productions of the elegiac kind. Gallus was, for some time, in great favour with Augustus, who appointed him governor of Egypt. ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... natural that the over-draping of our bodies, the supposed symbol of our modesty, but in reality an evidence of our lust, should form part of his thesis. But M. Anatole France has already pointed out brilliantly in "Penguin Island" how immodesty originated ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... the part of adults may demur at the idea of placing similar responsibility upon children. Are not children normally uncritical and imitative or passive? they say. And if we teach them to judge and criticise freely, are they not very likely to develop priggishness that will result in immodesty and disrespect for others? "Memory," says John Henry Newman, "is one of the first developed of the mental faculties; a boy's business, when he goes to school, is to learn, that is, to store up things in his memory. For some years his intellect is little more than ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... heart, and bound by his sacred profession to devote those powers to the service of religion and virtue, he every where discovers a studious solicitude to excite indecent ideas. We turn away our eyes with disgust from open immodesty: but even this is less mischievous than that more measured style, which excites impure images, without shocking us by the grossnesses of the language. Never was delicate sensibility proved to be more distinct ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... he observed, throwing the naked ear into the bin and reaching for another. "Why, when I was young thar warn't nothin' in the way of meanness that a good woman wouldn't put up with. They'd shut thar eyes to Hagars, white or black, rather than lose the respect of men by seemin' to be aware of any immodesty." ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... matter-of-fact manner. This is a feature of the people we cannot understand, but they themselves consider it no impropriety. A writer on Japan, speaking of this says:—"We cannot, with justice, tax with immodesty the individual who, in his own country, wounds none of the social proprieties in the midst of which he has been brought up." These bath-houses are perfectly open to the public gaze, no one evincing the slightest curiosity to look within, except, perhaps, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... told stories which would now be venal if told by vulgar men in some tavern of ill-repute. That Boccaccio should have reported these tales as emanating from such a company is proof positive of the immodesty of those days, whose story is rehearsed in the "Decameron." Rousseau's "Confessions" is another book showing the absence of current morality in his age. Notwithstanding George Eliot's panegyric, these memoirs are the production of unlimited conceit, of a practical absence of any moral sensitiveness; ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... I behold Inspir'd with purple, pearl and gold, I think no other, but I see In them a glorious leprosy That does infect and make the rent More mortal in the vestiment. As flowery vestures do descry The wearer's rich immodesty: So plain and simple clothes do show Where virtue walks, not ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... invoked; but Richard was passive in his mother's hands, and listened complacently while in stronger, plainer language than he had used she repeated in substance all he had said about the impropriety of Ethelyn's mingling with the gay throng at Washington. Immodesty, Mrs. Markham called it, with sundry reflections upon the time when she was young, and what young married women did then. And while she talked poor Ethelyn lay upon the lounge writhing with pain and passion, wishing that ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... minor personage in the story. In this case again, analysis of character is precluded; but the narrator may delineate the leading actor directly, through descriptive and expository comment. In stories where the hero is an extraordinary person, and could not without immodesty descant upon his own unusual capabilities, it is of obvious advantage to represent him from the point of view of an admiring friend. Thus when Poe invented the detective story, he wisely decided to exhibit the extraordinary ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... I says, 'is the last thing your sex wants. Skirts is the final refuge of immodesty, to which women will cling like grim death. They will do any possible thing to a skirt—slit it, thin it, shorten it, hike it up one side—people are setting up nights right now thinking up some new thing to do to it—but women won't give it up and dress ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... during the season of bridal-tours, may be said to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costly jewel of a precious ring. The place is, in fact, almost abandoned to bridal couples, and any one out of his honey-moon is in some degree an alien there, and must discern a certain immodesty in him intrusion. Is it for his profane eyes to look upon all that blushing and trembling joy? A man of any sensibility must desire to veil his face, and, bowing his excuses to the collective rapture, take the first train for the wicked outside world to which he belongs. Everywhere, he sees ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... or brilliant minds. Quite the contrary. The basic test of a successful colonist was endurance—the endurance of hardship, privation, the stoic indifference to conditions of discomfort, monotony, pain, uncleanliness, immodesty—conditions which would send a more imaginative or sensitive temperament into a downward-spiraling syndrome of failure. They were the kind of men and women who, on Earth in an earlier time, had been able to endure ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... increase of wealth manifested itself in every form of senseless luxury. Of refinement there was little; pleasures were coarse, indulgence was beastly. "Preachers, economists, and satirists," says Dr. Lindsay, "denounce the luxury and immodesty of the dress both of men and women, the gluttony and the drinking habits of the rich burghers and of the nobility of Germany. We learn from Hans von Schweinichen that noblemen prided themselves on having men among their retainers who could ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... occasion, was very elaborate, in which the females as well as the men took an active part. Two girls, of remarkably graceful form, and whose symmetric limbs were but slightly veiled, were brought, evidently without any intentional immodesty, into such affectionate contact with M. Chevalier, as greatly ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... and beruffled displays, that left one confounded as to what manner of creature dwelt therein, to the other extreme of mere gaudily ornamented nudity. I smiled as I recalled the world-old argument on the relative modesty of much or little clothing, for here immodesty was competing side by side in both extremes, ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... but the consciousness of energy, of beauty, and of a social state full of danger and opportunity. And for this reason we find, side by side with the most measured and polished social forms, something our age would call immodesty, forgetting that by which it was corrected and counter- balanced— the powerful characters of the women who were exposed ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... passages beneath the theatre, Hugh led the way, while with greater poignancy than ever before the young playwright sensed the vulgarity, the immodesty, and the dirt of the world behind and below the scenes. It was all familiar enough to him, for he had several friends among the actors, but the thought of one so sovereign as Helen in the midst of a region so squalid stung ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "an immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... became so hideously bald, the ready servant of the vilest vices; in youth a stage dancer limp and nerveless enough in all conscience, but, they tell me, clumsy and inartistic in his very effeminacy. Except for his immodesty he is said not to have possessed a single quality that should distinguish ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... speaker belonged to that section of the British public in which puritanism is even yet deeply ingrained, with the dreary consequence that beauty, whether of person or in art, is suspect. To admit its existence trenches on immodesty; to speak of it openly is to skirt the ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... this, that the benevolent atheist stands alone upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard, trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral strength. A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs like a precipice above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs beneath his feet. He has not really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. He is ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... requires such intimate knowledge that one can hardly pass it upon any but one's self. One cannot tear off all coverings from the hearts and minds of others, whereas one could strip one's own moral deformities naked, and that species of self-accusation does seem to me a kind of immodesty. One naturally shrinks, too, from speaking of deep and awful things, and then there is the all but insuperable difficulty of putting one's most intimate convictions, the realities of one's soul, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Hot-door's shaving-soap was used by 76 per cent. of the entire manhood of America? There was only one place humanly conceivable where lingerie could be purchased; to prove it, the illuminated signboard promptly showed a lady in a costume usually confined to boudoirs. To equalise the immodesty of the sexes, a near male neighbour, at a height of two hundred odd feet, did an electrified turn by putting on and taking off a pair ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... with self-conceit; for it implies no immodesty or egotism. Even if the faithful study of one's self reveals a high order of natural gifts, it is not needful to imitate the son of the Emerald Isle who always lifted his hat and made an obsequious bow when ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... this character, Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "An immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle history, dealing with the story of Walter ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... related the miraculous Cure made upon Her, by Mr. Campbell's taking her up into his Bed-chamber, he adds, that she stood upright, drank a Glass of Wine, and evacuated a great deal of Wind. This Charge of Immodesty upon a young Lady unmarried, is what I can by no Means allow: nor does the uncleanly Term become the Pen of a chast and polite Writer. But the Lady shall be vindicated from this Aspersion; for if you consult all Authors, both Ancient and Modern, ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... the morning, Sancho showed no aversion to it whatever, for he bombarded Altisidora with all kinds of impertinent questions as to what was going on in Hell when she was there. Of course Altisidora denied having any intimate knowledge of this place, for in spite of her immodesty she had only got as far as ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Overbury. That shrewd individual, of course, saw through the suggestion to the intention behind it, but he was at a loss for an outlet for his talents, having left Rochester's employ, and he believed without immodesty that he could do useful work ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... was the fireside of the city, in which burned always the sacred fire, watched by the vestal virgins. In this worship, and its associations, we find the best side of Roman manners,—the love of home, the respect for family life, the hatred of impurity and immodesty. She was also called "the mother," and qualified as Mater Stata, that is, the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... there are great enchanters of a very fearful character. They would have given the world to prevent my remaining there an hour. When I arrived they sent me immediately two girls very showily dressed; the eldest could not be more than eleven years of age and the other seven, and both exhibited so much immodesty, that more could not be expected from public women; they carried concealed about them a magic powder; when they came I gave them some articles to dress themselves out with, and directly sent them back to the shore.[409-4] I saw here, built on a mountain, a sepulchre as large as a house, ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... and girls, particularly the latter, are only educated to please, to manage their persons, and regulate their exterior behaviour; and their minds are corrupted at a very early age, by the worldly and pious cautions they receive, to guard them against immodesty. I speak of past times. The very confessions which mere children are obliged to make, and the questions asked by the holy men I assert these facts on good authority, were sufficient to impress a sexual character; and the education of society was a school of coquetry ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... mind and objectionable manners, who was in a bad set at home and made herself cheap after the manner of a garrison hack, the terms being nearly equivalent. There was no pretence of impossible innocence among the elder girls, but neither was there any impropriety of language or immodesty of conduct. Certain subjects were avoided, and if a girl made any allusion to them by chance, she was promptly silenced; if she recurred to them persistently, she was set down at once as a dockyard girl and an outsider. The consequence of this high standard was an extremely ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... I may, I am sure, without immodesty, say was thorough and complete. On the 7th of May I presented my report. The facts which I found were such that only one conclusion was possible—the line was not in good condition; was not and had not been efficiently ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... from granting me to be a good poet, that they will not allow me so much as to be a Christian, or a moral man); may I have leave, I say, to inform my reader, that I have confined my choice to such tales of Chaucer as savour nothing of immodesty. If I had desired more to please than to instruct, the Reeve, the Miller, the Shipman, the Merchants, the Sumner, and above all the Wife of Bath, in the prologue to her tale, would have procured me as many friends and readers as there are beaux ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Further, among the fruits of the Spirit, the first place is given to charity, joy, and peace: to which, fornication, uncleanness, and immodesty, which are the first of the works of the flesh, are not opposed. Therefore the fruits of the Spirit are not contrary to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... and girl should be carefully trained to look with disgust on everything that is indecent in word or action. Let them be taught a sense of shame in doing shameful things, and teach them that modesty is honorable, and that immodesty is indecent and dishonorable. Careful training at the proper age may save many a ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... false imputations in reference to Sappho seems to be that the refined Athenians were incapable of appreciating the frank simplicity with which she poured forth her feelings, and therefore they confounded them with unblushing immodesty. While the men of Athens were distinguished for their perfection in every branch of art, none of their women emerged from the obscurity of domestic life. "That woman is the best," says Pericles, "of whom the least is said among ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... out the salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the divisions in Leaves of Grass, particularly that entitled Children of Adam, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness, Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit. The ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... enemies will do me none, and are so far from granting me to be a good poet, that they will not allow me so much as to be a Christian, or a moral man—may I have leave, I say, to inform my reader that I have confin'd my choice to such tales of Chaucer as savor nothing of immodesty. If I had desir'd more to please than to instruct, the Reeve, the Miller, the Shipman, the Merchant, the Sumner, and, above all, the Wife of Bath, in the prologue to her tale, would have procured me as many friends and ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... quietly savage. "Honest! Open you name it! There is but one definition for it. Immodesty! In a young girl that is deadlier than impiety. It is the wild blood of her ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... rested on him, for a moment, in speechless surprise; she looked back again at the bed. "Are you going to leave me by myself?" she asked wonderingly. Not the faintest suggestion of immodesty—nothing that the most profligate man living could have interpreted impurely—showed itself in her look or manner, as she said ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... spirit, and take this opportunity of saying publicly that I was extremely disappointed at the unsatisfactory verdict. The thing was a palpable assassination; an open verdict has a tendency to relax the exertions of Scotland Yard. I hope I shall not be accused of immodesty, or of making personal reflections, when I say that the Department has had several notorious failures of late. It is not what it used to be. Crime is becoming impertinent. It no longer knows its place, so to speak. It throws down the gauntlet ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... around. I must have seen you on the beach at that very time— one of the kiddies that swam like fishes. Why, merciful me, the women here were all riding cross-saddle, and that was long before the rest of the social female world outgrew its immodesty and came around to sitting simultaneously on both sides of a horse. I learned to swim on the beach here at that time myself. You and I may even have tried body-surfing on the same waves, or I may have splashed a handful of water into ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... select but rapidly increasing band of thinkers. There may be schisms in the new school with regard to details, but on the whole it is a united one. The members are unanimous in their fearless optimism. One and all they preach the same hopeful doctrine, that the attainment of a high standard of immodesty by woman will in time make ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... political criticism on literature was himself criminal, and has wreaked his own party feelings on the Papist Dryden, and the Tory Prior; Dryden he calls, in the most unguarded language, "a monster of immodesty and impurity of all sorts." There had been a literary quarrel between Dryden and Burnet respecting a translation of Varillas' "History of Heresies;" Burnet had ruined the credit of the papistical author while Dryden was busied on the translation; and as Burnet says, "he has wreaked his ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... utterly tropical; and indeed to one's unreasoning spiritual sense the two things belong together. All the requisites were present. The costumes were right; the black and brown exposures, unconscious of immodesty, were right; the juggler was there, with his basket, his snakes, his mongoose, and his arrangements for growing a tree from seed to foliage and ripe fruitage before one's eyes; in sight were plants and flowers familiar to one on books but ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the ghastly light and fell gloating over her gory trophy, Carmen saw but the frantic struggles of a diseased soul, portrayed as the skilled surgeon lays bare the malignant growth that is eating the quivering tissues of a human frame. The immodesty of dress, the sensual suggestiveness of the dance, the brutal flouting of every element of refinement and delicacy, blazoned in frenzied tone and movement the bloody orgy and dance of death which goes on incessantly ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... sacred, heroic form. If a man could paint the woman he loves a thousand times as the Stella Marts to put courage into the sailors on board a thousand ships, so much the more honor to her. Isn't that better than painting a piece of staring immodesty and calling it by ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... brought the father and mother home, was only occupied that evening by the son and daughter, Hyacinthe and Camille. Returning from the Princess de Harn's matinee, they were chatting freely, with that calm immodesty by which they sought to astonish one another. Hyacinthe, influenced by his perverted ideas, was attacking women, whilst Camille openly counselled him to respond to the Princess's advances. However, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... unwomanliness, the same reminders that a woman's sphere is the home, the same plea that she should leave serious affairs to men, who, indeed, had carried them on so well that the whole country was tormented with perpetual panic of an enemy over sea. There would be the same taunts of immodesty, the same filthy songs. Since science has presumed to take the place of theology, we should talk about hysteria instead of witchcraft, and hallucination instead of demoniacal possession. Physiologists would expound her enthusiasm as functional disorder ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... was above all things a chaste-minded man, modest as a nun. To the immodesty rampant about him he was in the habit of closing his eyes and his ears, until the flagrancy or the noise of it grew to proportions to which he might remain neither ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... women disguised, half drunk, were dancing La Chahut a dance which was never performed except at the end of the ball, when the municipal guards had retired. Among the depraved couples who figured in the revel, the Slasher remarked two who won applause above all by the disgusting immodesty of their postures, gestures, and words. The first couple were composed of a man nearly disguised as a bear, by means of a waistcoat and trousers of black sheepskin. The head of the animal, doubtless too heavy to carry, had been replaced by a kind of hood of long hair, which entirely covered ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... indecencies of Horace and Ovid as an example of the reverse in a republic—as if Ovid and Horace had not lived under a monarchy! and throughout the whole of this theory he is as thoroughly in the wrong. By refined taste he signifies an avoidance of immodesty of style. Beaumont and Fletcher, Rochester, Dean Swift, wrote under monarchies—their pruriencies are not excelled by any republican authors of ancient times. What ancient authors equal in indelicacy the French romances from the time of the Regent of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of all his works, might be better fitted to appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the notion, when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played, of an author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of its immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who invited the author to do it on the ground that no one else could do it so well. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... there was nothing to take hold of. There was nothing bold, forward or inviting in her manner. If a lady has long lashes, must she never droop them lest she be charged with coquetry? May not a flush spring as naturally from shy reserve as from immodesty? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... in rescuing the talent of my young parishioner from being buried in the ground, by giving it such warrant with the world as could be derived from a name already widely known by several printed discourses (all of which I may be permitted without immodesty to state have been deemed worthy of preservation in the Library of Harvard College by my esteemed friend Mr. Sibley), it seemed becoming that I should not only testify to the genuineness of the following production, but ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... not say: no fact, no story, from his curious half-medical reading, he would not find some plausible pretext to tell. Man's kinship to the animal, the material, and all the proofs of it:—he would never blush at them! In truth, he led the way to the immodesty of French literature; and had his defence, a sort of defence, ready. "I know very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings, who have not more to quarrel with in the licence of their ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... the thing divided is not to be reckoned among its parts. But lust is reckoned together with the aforesaid: for it is written (Gal. 5:19): "The works of the flesh are manifest, which are fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, lust [Douay: 'luxury']." Therefore it seems that fornication is unfittingly reckoned a species ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... she considered, “immoderate length in a sermon is a fault which excellence itself cannot expiate.” . . . “The present mode of dress in our young women of fashion, and their imitators, is, for its gross immodesty, a proper subject of grave rebuke for the preacher.” . . . “Nothing is more disgusting to me, and, indeed, to the generality of people, than dictatorial egotism from the pulpit. Even in the learned and aged clergyman it is priestly arrogance. When we see that man in the pulpit whom we are in ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... don't understand the shades of things,' I rejoined. 'Decencies and violations—there is no need for such heavy artillery! I can perfectly imagine that without the least immodesty she should have said to Jasper on the balcony, in fact if not in words—"I'm in dreadful spirits, but if you come I shall feel better, and that will be pleasant for ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... quarrel, to strike, to take revenge, to do evil, to steal, to tell lies, to deceive, to blaspheme; carelessness about the children, intemperance, luxury, excessive prodigality, drunkenness, uncleanness, immodesty, application to magic and witchcraft, impiety, with several other causes. By legitimate causes we do not here mean judicial causes, but such as are legitimate in regard to the other married partner; ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... always had been, that I had sufficient strength to restrain any incipient desire, and prudence enough to avoid temptation. My condition encouraged introspection. I was almost constantly probing my own mind, and by mere strength of will, which I had long cultivated until—I suppose there is no immodesty in saying it—I could govern myself, I drew back from every obstacle which my judgment pronounced insurmountable. The Doctor had been of the greatest help to me in this development of the will, and especially in that phase or exercise of it called self-control; ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... to Ghat and Ghadames; the oases of Fezzan, and the city of Mourzuk, have become too much vitiated by contact with The Coast and the Turks for affording fair specimens of Saharan tribes. Let us then compare what has been said to those hideous scenes of crime, of immodesty, and drunkenness, which abound in the great cities of Europe—the ever-present, ever-during stigma on our boasted civilization!—and ask the paradoxical question, What do we gain by European and Christian civilization? We have Chambers of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... fashionable women that one great objection to the woman's rights movement was the publicity of the conventions; the immodesty of speaking from a platform; and the trial of seeing one's name in the papers. Several ladies made such remarks to me one day as a bevy of us were sitting together in one of the fashionable hotels in Newport. We were holding a Convention there at that ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... pronounced by a king many years ago, one of the conditions being the prohibition of clothes above the waist, both for men and women. The latter are noted for their beauty, and excel as singers and dancers, but they suffer under the stigma of immodesty for the reason ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... Some talk of the immodesty, others of the folly, others of the maliciousness of the unbeliever; but not to deal in harsh or uncourteous epithets, may we not say, that it is most unphilosophic to dogmatize against the gospel on the slender ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880
... as she was, the girl had, at first, drawn near to her cousin, simply and naturally, obeying the law of attraction that draws the young toward the young. She had met his friendly advances with the immodesty of innocence, artless effrontery, the liberties taught by life in the country, the happy folly of a nature abounding in high spirits, and with all sorts of ignorant hardihood, unblushing ingenuousness and rustic coquetry, against ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... love were not more strong than nature, or fancy the sharpest extreme, my immodesty were the more, and my virtues the less; for nature hath framed women's eyes bashful, their hearts full of fear, and their tongues full of silence; but love, that imperious love, where his power is predominant, then he perverts all, and wresteth the wealth of nature to his ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... the acts or omissions which are approved or disapproved by the moral feeling in the two races respectively, but the feeling is the same. The feelings which prompt a Native woman to condemn barrenness in other women is the same as that which makes the average European lady look upon immodesty as a sign of immorality. The difference is objective, not subjective; it is in the outlook but not in the inner sense. That immorality is rife amongst Natives no one who knows them well will deny, but neither can putanism amongst the whites be denied. ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... there is anything my girls have done to forfeit respect and admiration," asserted Uncle John, stoutly. "To accuse them of boldness or immodesty is absurd. They have merely gone to work in a business-like manner and used their wits and common-sense in educating the voters. Really, my dears, I'm more proud of you today than I've ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... fashionable women that they objected to the woman's rights movement because of the publicity of a convention, the immodesty of speaking from a platform, and the trial of seeing one's name in the papers. Several ladies made such remarks to me one day, as a bevy of us were sitting together in one of the fashionable hotels in Newport. We were holding ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... madness!" cried the princess. "To wish to live thus alone, is to carry immorality and immodesty ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the shyness of youth, all the bashfulness of man with maiden were gone. Under the weight of that thought, that dreadful thought, he had grown old in a few minutes. His tone was hard, his manner pitiless. "You never loved him!" he repeated, the very immodesty of her excuse confirming his fears. "And I ask you, what is it? What is it that is between you and him? What is it that gives him ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... her lips but quickly closed them again. She realized there was something inconsistent in her explanation. Mother had accused her of immodesty: riding astride and wearing those scandalous pepper-and-salts and showing her legs. If mother was right, if she WAS brazen, somehow it didn't tie up ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... least, an honest fashion, and men who married could not well complain that they had been deceived by concealment. But that tells nothing against the modesty of our grandmothers. What is modest in dress depends entirely on what is customary; and there is an immodesty that hides, as well as one that exposes. Unconsciousness is modesty's triple shelter against shame. See here, the dissolute Marguerite of Navarre, visible only at head and hands; the former from the chin upwards, the latter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... scaled the carriages, were many of the commonest men and boys), than for its innocent vivacity. For, odd as it may seem to say so, of a sport so full of thoughtlessness and personal display, it is as free from any taint of immodesty as any general mingling of the two sexes can possibly be; and there seems to prevail, during its progress, a feeling of general, almost childish, simplicity and confidence, which one thinks of with a pang, when the Ave Maria has rung it away, for a ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... "Consistent with modesty," "sicut decet verecundiam sexus;" nothing can beat that bare-faced hypocrisy. So when afterwards the sex shortened their petticoats, other Simon Pures start up and put them in the stocks for immodesty. Poor women! Here was a wrong, Eusebius. Long or short, they were equally immodest. Immodest, indeed! Nature has clad them with modesty and temperance—their natural habit—other garment is conventional. I admire what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... me," John continued, "has been gracious. There has been no immodesty nor boldness ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... conduct, tending both to their sanctification and exemplarity. And to give these his endeavors their due force, he lived an exact model of what he inculcated to others: but his zeal exasperated the tepid part of that order, and raised a storm against himself. The immodesty {241} of women in their dress in that gay capital excited in him sentiments of the most just abhorrence and indignation. Some young ladies seemed to have forgot that clothing is the covering of the ignominy of sin, and ought to be an instrument of penance, and a motive of confusion and ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... repelled him, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way things should be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read Madame Gervaisais, and he spoke of Cherie (for all its 'immodesty') as an admirable thing, and a model for ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... their men, the Rodiya women are the most beautiful in all Ceylon. Their scantiness of raiment, it is pleaded in their behalf, is due in no sense to immodesty. Rodiya girls wander the country as dancers and jugglers, and their erect figures, elastic step, and regalness of carriage, would be envied by the proudest woman promenading Vanity Fair; some of them have faces so perfect in a ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... of England," says Polydore Virgil, "not only salute their relations with a kiss, but all persons promiscuously; and this ceremony they repeat, gently touching them with their lips, not only with grace, but without the least immodesty. Such, however, as are of the blood-royal do not kiss their inferiors, but offer the back of the hand, as men do, by way of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 357 - Vol. XIII, No. 357., Saturday, February 21, 1829 • Various
... and honey. But, unlike the honest simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... defined the outlines of the form as distinctly as the lightest wet drapery of the studio. Her dress, in short, achieved in its pure simplicity all at which the artistic skill of matrons, milliners, and maidens aims in a Parisian ball costume, without a shadow of that suggestive immodesty from which ball costumes are seldom wholly free. Exactly reversing Terrestrial practice, a Martial wife reserves for strictest domestic privacy that undressed full-dress, that frank revelation of her beauty, which the matrons of London, Paris, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg |
