"Sensuality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... any horrible, fantastic, or grotesque elements. The crucifix represented a man dying in the agony of torture, and it was the chief symbol of the religion. The suggestion in all this art produced barbaric passion and sensuality. Any one who, in childhood, had in his hands one of the old Bibles illustrated by wood cuts knows what power the cuts had to determine the concept which was formed from the text, and which has persisted through life, in ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... music, however, for it is impotent, with all its blatant pretense. The composer seeks to fill the opening scene with languor and lassitude; he fills it with ennui instead. If De Lara's music were a hymning of anything, I should say it was a hymning of sensuality in its lowest terms; but there are neither eloquent melodies nor moving harmonies in the score. De Lara is a feeble distemper painter. The current of his music never really flows; it moves sluggishly now and then, and eddies lazily about every petty incident. In the scene of debauchery ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the whole piece, one of the most perfect of the most perfect of poets; and a phrase struck him like a blow: Du, stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt. Where was the pride of his heart? And he raged against himself, as a man bites on a sore tooth, in a heady sensuality of scorn. "I have no pride, I have no heart, no manhood," he thought, "or why should I prolong a life more shameful than the gallows? Or why should I have fallen to it? No pride, no capacity, no force. Not even a bandit! and to be starving ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Sodom nor of Gomorrah. She has neither an emancipated aquiline nose nor a witty little snub nose. It is just an ordinary straight nose. A good- natured smile plays usually around her mouth, but it is not very attractive; the somewhat hanging under-lip betrays fatigued sensuality. The chin is full and plump, but nevertheless beautifully proportioned. Also her shoulders are beautiful, nay, magnificent. Likewise her arms and hands, which, like her feet, are small. Let other contemporaries describe the charms of her bosom, I confess my incompetence. The ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... insult to your wife. If you get it into your hands, you will read it again, and then you will do some foolish thing, for you have lost grip of yourself. Here is the only place for such stuff—an outburst of sensuality!" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... suaire' which is at Chambery. Is it not found that Saint Luke thrice made with his own hand the portrait of Our Lady?... That holy evangelist ought certainly to have known the will of his Lord and Master better than you, my opponent, who wish to interpret the Scripture according to your sensuality." Discours des Guerres de Provence (Arch. curieuses, iv. 501, 502). Of course, the author never dreamed that his ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... people might begin to doubt that you had any. You like all that, and you like to feel there is nothing you do not know and no length you have not gone, and so you ring all the changes on all the varieties of intrigue and sensuality, and go over the gamut of sickly sentiment and nauseous license as an orchestra tunes its strings up every night! That is what all you people call love; I am content enough to ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... things within themselves, as the dark little Southern infants do, the Northern Jesus-children reach out delicate little hands of wondering innocence towards delicate, flower-reverential mothers. Compare a Botticelli Madonna, with all her wounded and abnegating sensuality, with a Hans Memling Madonna, whose soul is pure and only reverential. Beyond me is the mystery and the glory, says the Northern mother: let me have no self, let me only seek that which is all-pure, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... influences of remote followers of Epicurus it led to the degeneration of ethical practice. "Beware of excesses," says Epicurus, "for they will lead to unhappiness." Beware of folly and sin, for they lead to wretchedness. Nothing could have been better than this, until people began to follow sensuality as the immediate return of efforts to secure happiness. Then it led to {225} corruption, and was one of the causes of the downfall of Greek as well as the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... singular reversion takes place if the rencontre be between poor men. It is then a diabolical act, a murder, which nothing short of the gallows can serve for punishment. The creatures whom he had made mere objects to serve his sensuality were before him; he traced the gloomy history of their unfortunate sires; he knew that Ellen and Clotilda were born free. The cordon that had bound his feelings to the system of slavery relaxed. For the first time, he saw that which he could not ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... all the more pernicious as the chiefs, as a rule, owned most of the young females, while the young men could barely afford to buy an old widow. Happily this custom is dying out, owing to the influence of the planters and missionaries; they appealed, not unwisely, to the sensuality of the young men, who were thus depriving themselves of the women. Strange to say, the women were not altogether pleased with this change, many desiring to die, for fear they might be haunted by the offended spirit of ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... his despair. Rosa Vanozza possessed all the vices and all the virtues of a Spanish courtesan; her devotion to the Virgin amounted to superstition, her fondness for her children to weakness, and her love for Roderigo to sensuality. In the depth of her heart she relied on the influence she had been able to exercise over him for nearly thirty years; and like a snake, she knew haw to envelop him in her coils when the fascination of her glance had lost its power. ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... musingly, 'to be the most suited for mortals. In thy words and emblems I see nothing but sensuality of the least material order. And to all there seemeth, too, to be a time when one clasp of the hand that is loved is more than the comprehension of the grandest thought. Beauty, I will give up my child to thee; and O, if thou canst ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... against sensuality, which would make you gluttons, drunkards, and debauchees; against idleness, which would make you useless to others and a burden to them; against selfishness and vanity, which would make others detest you; envy, which would render you unhappy and hateful; ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... much are largely the outcome of sensuality. To see a man eat sensually is to know how great a sensualist he is. Sensualism is a vice which manifests itself in many forms. Poverty has its blessings. It compels abstinence from rich and expensive foods and provides no ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... any means easy to dupe. Nature defends her mental brutes by the thickness of their hide. Win his mistress if possible; she is the best person to manage him. Such creatures are the natural prey of artful women; their very stolidity covers all but sensuality. To ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his coat according to his cloth, and thought himself a greater man, in proportion as he diminished his wants, placed his luxuries in idleness and sunshine, and seems to have relished these enjoyments with as much sensuality as Plato did his fine house and delicate fare. Even he was more reasonable than those sectarians, who have prevailed in almost all religions, and who, believing that the Deity created man for the express purpose of inflicting upon him ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various
... he may be right—who knows! So a year passed away in sadness, with a few bad turnings into sensuality, followed by repenting in verse. It was the anniversary of her death, and Dante was outlining angels to illustrate his sonnets wherein he apotheosized Beatrice. And behold! as he day-dreamed of his Beatrice sweet consolation came in double form. First he saw a gentle ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... further than to the extent at which selfishness blinds the judgment, and delighting in mischief when there was nothing to dread from it. To all this may be added an incisive tone of voice, and language keenly sarcastic or servilely obsequious, an insatiable and inordinate sensuality, innumerable conquests among the fair sex, and extraordinary adventures. At first sight, at a Court masquerade, in 1659, the bully made an impression upon the precieuse, and she noticed him for his exquisite elegance during the marriage fetes of Louis XIV. When she met him in ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... into some of these moveable prisons, and I must confess that I never beheld such an assemblage of ill-looking faces as were collected within them. In the countenances of some of the prisoners unbridled passion and degrading sensuality were so plainly and so odiously portrayed, that one shuddered to reflect that such features could be an index of the human mind. Most of them were Creole Indians; but there were a few Europeans among them. To me it was melancholy to behold the ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... and no man becomes an angel all at once. Trust yourself to Christ, and He will lift you to Himself; turn your back upon Him, as some of you are doing, and you will settle down, down, down in the muck and the mire of your own sensuality and selfishness, until at last the foul ooze spreads over your head, and you are lost in the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... almost morbid consciousness of the deformity of moral evil, he reverenced in himself and in others the presence of a spirit which connected humanity with its Maker, and by unfolding the greatness of the spiritual capacities of men, he hoped to elevate them above the degradation of sensuality and sin. He was not a teacher of spiritual pride, conceit and self-worship, but of those vital principles of love and reverence which elevate man only by directing his ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... the covering of a sheet, his arms thrust out bare from the short-sleeved hospital shirt, his unshaven flushed face contrasting with the pallid and puffy flesh of neck and arms, he gave an impression of sensuality emphasized by undress. The head was massive and well formed, and beneath the bloat of fever and dissipation there showed traces of refinement. The soft hands and neat finger-nails, the carefully trimmed hair, were sufficient indications of a kind of luxury. The animalism of the man, however, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... and this pain, it is probable that vanity is more largely concerned than the senses, because it is only the things of the mind, and not mere sensuality, that produce such violent convulsions. The lower animals are familiar with lust, but not with the passionate ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... region is broad and deep, with a stout neck, we know the great force and activity of the animal nature, and unless the upper surface of the brain is well developed all over, we may expect some excess in the way of violence, temper, selfishness, perversity, sensuality, dishonesty, avarice, rudeness of manners, moral insensibility, slander, contentiousness, jealousy, envy, revenge, or some other form of wickedness, according to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the quarter deck to the space below, you see the utmost extremity of human misery; such crouding, such filth, such stench[769]!' BOSWELL. 'Yet sailors are happy.' JOHNSON. 'They are happy as brutes are happy, with a piece of fresh meat,—with the grossest sensuality. But, Sir, the profession of soldiers and sailors has the dignity of danger. Mankind reverence those who have got over fear[770], which is so general a weakness.' SCOTT. 'But is not courage mechanical, and to be acquired?' JOHNSON. 'Why yes, Sir, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... may clothe himself—the most elevating feeling with which the mind can be inspired. One of Pythagoras's wisest maxims, in his 'Golden Verses,' is that with which he enjoins the pupil to "reverence himself." Borne up by this high idea, he will not defile his body by sensuality, nor his mind by servile thoughts. This sentiment, carried into daily life, will be found at the root of all the virtues—cleanliness, sobriety, chastity, morality, and religion. "The pious and just honouring ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... she threw off the damp cloth, and revealed the clay model of a head. The face was unmistakable, but it expressed every baseness—cunning, arrogance, cruelty, and sensuality. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... bouche de France" says, "Un bon coulis d'ecrevisses est le paradis sur la terre, et digne de la table des dieux; and of all the tribe of shell-fish, which our industry and our sensuality bring from the bottom of the sea, the river, or the pond, the craw-fish is incomparably the most ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... expensive couches and tables, to call in the assistance of butchers and cooks, or to fatten like voracious animals in private. For so not only their manners would be corrupted, but their bodies disordered; abandoned to all manner of sensuality and dissoluteness, they would require long sleep, warm baths, and the same indulgence as in perpetual sickness. To effect this was certainly very great; but it was greater still, to secure riches from rapine and from envy, as Theophrastus expresses it, or rather by their eating in common, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... found out fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His art never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to reap where ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... suicide. Darwin, in his 'Zoonomia,' reports a case where an officer, holding the rank of lieutenant-colonel, could not tolerate a breakfast in which this odious article was wanting; but, as a savage retribution invariably supervened within an hour or two upon this act of insane sensuality, he came to a resolution that life was intolerable with muffins, but still more intolerable without muffins. He would stand the nuisance no longer; but yet, being a just man, he would give nature one final ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... any taste for pleasure or politeness; a species of disposition that could not be very agreeable to me, who always despised money, had an unbounded benevolence of heart, and loved pleasure beyond every other consideration. When I say pleasure, I would not be understood to mean sensuality, which constitutes the supreme happiness of those only who are void of sentiment and imagination. Nevertheless, I received some civilities in this place, and, among the rest, the reputation of having for my lover the king of P—'s minister, who was young and airy, and visited me ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... cruelty and debauchery surpassing the deeds of Nero. Two emperors in particular, Kee and Chow, are held up as monsters of wickedness and examples of dissoluteness beyond comparison. The last, under the influence of a woman named Ta-Ke, became a frightful example of sensuality and cruelty. Among the inventions of Ta-Ke was a cylinder of polished brass, along which her victims were forced to walk over a bed of fire below, she laughing in great glee if they slipped and fell into the flames. In fact, Chinese invention ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... meat and drink'. He keeps up perpetual holiday and open house, and we live with him in a round of invitations to a rump and dozen.—Yet we are not to suppose that he was a mere sensualist. All this is as much in imagination as in reality. His sensuality does not engross and stupify his other faculties, but 'ascends me into the brain, clears away all the dull, crude vapours that environ it, and makes it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes'. His imagination ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... remorse? What is public or private faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest further than a laugh: if, plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the whole wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved: if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Sir Henry Irving had the ungrateful part of the villain. To be sure, he was a villain of much complexity; and Tennyson thought that his subtle blend of Roman refinement and intellectuality, and barbarian, self-satisfied sensuality, was not "hit off." Synorix is, in fact, half-Greek, half-Celt, with a Roman education, and the "blend" is rather too remote for successful representation. The traditional villain, from Iago downwards, is not apt to utter ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... contract he ascribes the subsequent degradation of human love through sensuality; and all the sin and selfishness thence ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... man, you think of him (but probably inaccurately) as a Jew. Russians are very male, except in their inchoate, confused thinking. Their special brand of humour and of sentimentality are male; their exuberant strength and aliveness, their sensuality, and their savage cruelty.... If ever women come to count in Russia as a force, not merely as mates for the men, queer things will happen.... Here in this town things are, for the moment, tidy and ordered, ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... dozen times, "He'll come back to me. She'll never be able to make him happy." And so I pictured Sylvia upon her honeymoon, followed by an invisible ghost whose voice she would never hear, whose name she would never know. All that van Tuiver had learned from Claire, the sensuality, the ennin, the contempt for woman—it would rise to torment and terrify his bride, and turn her life to bitterness. And then beyond this, deeps upon deeps, to which my imagination did not go—and of which the Frenchwoman, with all her freedom of tongue, gave me no ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... ever since she began to think for herself, the dawning of a great light has flooded the world. We are the mothers of men. Show me the mothers of a country and I will tell you of the sons. If men would ever rise above their sensuality and materialism, they must have mothers whose pure souls, brave hearts and clear intellects have touched them deeply before their birth and equipped them for the journey ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... negro, and which both my Edinburgh and Glasgow readers must have often remarked on the respective High Streets of these cities. The features are generally bloated and overcharged, the profile lines usually concave, the complexion coarse and high, and the expression that of a dissipation and sensuality become chronic and inherent. And how this class—constitutionally degraded, and with the moral sense, in most instances, utterly undeveloped and blind—are ever to be reclaimed, it is difficult to see. The immigrant Irish form also a very appreciable element in the degradation of our large towns. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... description of the pleasures and temptations of Rome, that he hardly knew whether he was in the Vatican or in the Temple of Venus. The Cardinal made him more nearly acquainted with his sister, who was married to Alphonso of Arragon. This siren displayed voluptuousness and sensuality in a form and face so attractive and charming, that Faustus stood before her ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... place was that court where Daniel was? Half shambles and half pigsty. Luxury, sensuality, lust, self-seeking, idolatry, ruthless cruelty, and the like were the environment of this man. And in the middle of these there grew up that fair flower of a character, pure and stainless, by the acknowledgment ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Paris drunk with gold, mad with the delirium of excesses, Paris with no aim except joy, no method but extravagance, held within her gilded gates one citadel of sensuality which remained ever an object of mystery, a source of curiosity even in that dissipated and pleasure-sated city. In the Palais Royal, back of the regally beautiful gardens, back of the noble rows ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... conjunction therewith consider this other: "It is the Night of the World, and still long till it be Day: we wander amid the glimmer of smoking ruins, and the Sun and the Stars of Heaven are as if blotted out for a season; and two immeasurable Phantoms, HYPOCRISY and ATHEISM, with the Ghoul, SENSUALITY, stalk abroad over the Earth, and call it theirs: well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... apologies for their shortcomings, and a screen for their pollutions; for if libidinous affection be lewdness, still more does the perception of licentious love constitute lewdness. Hence it is that the indulgence of sensuality and the gratification of licentious affection originate entirely from a relish of lust, as well as from a hankering after licentious love. Lo you, who are the object of my love, are the most lewd being under the heavens from remote ages to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... from him a sarcastic smile; and he acknowledged, with the naivete peculiar to the inhabitants of those countries, that of all the enjoyments of life, without excepting sleep, none was comparable to the pleasure of eating good beef (carne de vaca): thus does sensuality obtain an ascendancy, where there is no occupation for ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... fox, he lay couched in his Castle of Malepartuis, with his emissaries at Rome, at Paris, and at Edinburgh. In the morning he was the subtle pretender to the Irish throne; in the afternoon, when the wine was in him, he was a dissolute savage, revelling in sensuality with his unhappy countess, uncoupled from her horseboy to wait upon his pleasure. He broke loose from time to time to keep his hand in practice. At Carlingford, for example, he swept off one day 200 sheep and oxen, ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... drawn from occupations as hardy as war." The animal energy cannot and ought not to be suppressed; if debarred from its natural channel, it will force for itself unnatural ones. A vigorous life of the senses not only does not tend to sensuality in the objectionable sense, but it helps to avert it. Health finds joy in mere existence; daily breath and daily bread suffice. This innocent enjoyment lost, the normal desires seek abnormal satisfactions. The most brutal prize-fighter is compelled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... moral region. Between the two measurements there is a comparative difference of one and a half inches, in the heads of Webster and Grady. That inch and a half marks the difference between the debauched sensuality of the 'Lion of the North' and the moral graces of the ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... the old ethnic philosophy. You will find it all in a convenient andconcentrated, portable form in Horace's beautiful Ode to Thaliarcus. What I most object to in the old gentleman is his sensuality." ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... is, that, after death, they go to a place of joy and plenty, in which sensuality is no more omitted than in Mahomet's paradise. There they are to find women in abundance, a country thick of all manner of game to humor their passion for hunting, and bows and arrows of the best sort, ready made. But these regions are supposed ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... loved too well to eat, is certain; but that his sensuality shortened his life, will not be hastily concluded, when it is remembered that a conformation so irregular lasted six-and-fifty years, notwithstanding such pertinacious ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... a Prahasana or Farce, and is especially a satire upon princes who addict themselves to idleness and sensuality, and fail ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... madness. Under other circumstances the noble enthusiasm, with other surroundings the strong will, of Jan of Leyden might have left a different mark on the page of history. Dragged down in this whirlpool of fanaticism, sensuality, and despair, we can only look upon him as a factor of the historic judgment, a necessary actor in that tragedy of Muenster, which forms one of the most solemn chapters of ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Ghosts" with eugenic reform ideas. The inherited paralysis on a luetic basis is accepted there as a tragic element of human fate. On the height of true art the question of decency or indecency has disappeared, too. The nude marble statue is an inspiration, and not a possible stimulus to frivolous sensuality, if the mind is aesthetically cultivated. The nakedness of erotic passion in the drama of high aesthetic intent before a truly educated audience has not the slightest similarity to the half-draped chorus ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... energy comprehended simply physical life, or the power to reproduce, and was represented by various emblems which will be noticed farther on in this work. In still later ages, after male reproductive power had become God, and when, through superstition and sensuality, the masses of the people had descended to the rank of slaves, monarchs, representing themselves to their ignorant subjects as the source of all blessings, even of life itself, appropriated the titles of the sun, and ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... absorbed on some object which will divert his thoughts intellectually or ideally; and by slight yet constant pressure, exercised not by fits and starts, but day after day, directly and indirectly, his father must form an antipathy in him to brutish, selfish sensuality. Above all, there must be no toying with passion, and no books permitted, without condemnation and warning, which are not of a heroic turn. When the boy becomes a man he may read Byron without danger. To a youth ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... silent and unpeopled now! How often has the train of captives looked, with sinking hearts, upon the distant city, and beheld its population pouring out, to hail the return of their conqueror! What riot, sensuality and murder, have run mad in the vast palaces now heaps of brick and shattered marble! What glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence and famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing is now heard but the wind, and ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... of his property. He examined samples of grain, handled pigs, and, on market days, made bargains over a tankard with drovers and hop merchants. His chief pleasures were commonly derived from field sports and from an unrefined sensuality. His language and pronunciation were such as we should now expect to hear only from the most ignorant clowns. His oaths, coarse jests, and scurrilous terms of abuse were uttered with the broadest accent of his province. It was easy to discern from the ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... the Greek example, it strays on dangerous ground, unless Nature is the model. The Italians of the Seventeenth Century, tired of forever imitating and copying, lost all their refinement in the effort to originate. Grossness, sensuality took the place of fine purity in border designs. Inflation, so to ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... this punishment increased my affection for the person who had inflicted it. All this affection, aided by my natural mildness, was scarcely sufficient to prevent my seeking, by fresh offences, a return of the same chastisement; for a degree of sensuality had mingled with the smart and shame, which left more desire than fear of a repetition. I was well convinced the same discipline from her brother would have produced a quite contrary effect; but from a man of his disposition this was not probable, and if I abstained from meriting correction ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... his virtuous father at the age of twenty. He had been educated with singular care, but was wholly given up to coarse sensuality. The people, however, still hoped that he might be worthy of his father, and received him, upon his accession, with loud expressions of joy. For a short time he concealed his true disposition; but his sister Lucilla, jealous of her brother's wife Crispina, formed a conspiracy ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... world—Magic for Devotion—Sensuality for Worship—breaks in upon our vision, as the scene changes from the Halls of Montsalvat to Klingsor's palace. Klingsor, an impure knight, who has been refused admittance to the order of the "Sangrail," enters into a compact with the powers of evil—by magic ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... the lovely story in which this parable is embedded. A woman of notoriously bad character had somehow come in contact with Jesus Christ, and had by Him been aroused from her sensuality and degradation, and calmed by the assurance of forgiveness. So, when she heard that He was in her own town, what could she do but hasten to the Pharisee's house, and brave the cruel, scornful eyes of the eminently respectable people that would meet her there? She carries ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... prepossessing. In these the features are full and languid. The eyes are large; but the expression, though remarkable, is not pleasing, and indicates cunning more than thought, passion more than feeling; while the heavy lips and massive chin wear a look of sensuality which is not to be mistaken. Possibly all are like the original, but represented her under different circumstances, or at different periods of her life. Previous to her engagement with the king, she was the object of fleeting attentions from ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... Julian. Pedant and apostate as he was, he devoted his short life to one great idea, the restoration of the Roman Empire to what it had been (as he fancied) in the days of the virtuous stoic Emperors of the second century. He found his dream a dream, owing to the dead heap of frivolity, sensuality, brutality, utter unbelief, not merely in the dead Pagan gods whom he vainly tried to restore, but in any god at all, as a living, ruling, judging, rewarding, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... great commercial city and seaport, business shrewdness was linked with sensuality and profanation, and a great temple of Venus was built, where one thousand priestesses were required to lead a life of religious infamy to make money for their despicable masters. There were constant importations of new girls from Lesbos and the ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... soothed by giving them to drink. So here reason should draw in the reins, because nature itself may be contributing to it and we should consider with fear that all this may not be perfect, and that much sensuality may be involved in it. The infant soul should be soothed by the caresses of love, which shall draw forth its love in a gentle way, and not, as they say, by force of blows. This love should be inwardly under control, and not as a caldron, fiercely boiling because ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... Full of this sensuality we were now entring the room, where one of his boys, set there for that purpose, call'd aloud to us, "ADVANCE ORDERLY." Nor is it to be doubted, but we were somewhat concern'd for fear of breaking the orders of the place. But while ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... development. It cherished the arts by which itself was adorned, and its idols became the models of beauty. But, however highly the Greeks may have succeeded in the Beautiful and even in the Moral, we cannot concede any higher character to their civilization than that of a refined and ennobling sensuality. Of course this must be understood generally. The conjectures of a few philosophers, and the irradiations of poetical inspiration, constitute an occasional exception. Man can never altogether turn aside his thoughts from infinity, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... his anecdotes—all of which I had heard before—admired his jokes, and fooled his egotistical soul till he had no shred of self-respect remaining. He laid his nature bare before me—and I knew what it was at last—a mixture of selfishness, avarice, sensuality, and heartlessness, tempered now and then by a flash of good-nature and sympathetic attraction which were the mere outcomes of youth and physical health—no more. This was the man I had loved—this fellow who told coarse stories ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... was enjoying his rubber comforter on the cool green grass, or on the slightly painful gravel, or on the fiercely hot asphalt, summer was to him a season of unsurpassed sensuality, flooding his character with rich productive thought and a passionate adoration for his great-aunt Maud, who was wont to beguile the long sun-stained hours by lying amid cushions among the foliage, humming "The Star-Spangled Banner," while she removed with the point of her nail-scissors caramels ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... folds about her exquisite face completing a classic picture of such radiant beauty as is seldom seen nowadays among the increasingly imperfect and repulsive specimens of female humanity which 'progress' combined with sensuality, produce for ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... encountered. The fellow was not absolutely ugly, so far as mere contour of features was concerned; but there was so dropsical a bloat in his cheeks, such a stagnant sallowness in his complexion, such a watching scowl in his eyes, such a drawling sullenness of speech, such sensuality in the turn of his resolute lips, that I trembled to know he was to be my daily companion. His dress and skin denoted slovenly habits, while a rude and growling voice gave token of the bitter heart that kept the enginery of the brute ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... forbearance and those kindly prepossessions, without which human life can in no condition be profitably looked at or described. For we must remember that it is the nature of vice to force itself upon notice, both in the act and by its consequences. Drunkenness, cruelty, brutal manners, sensuality and impiety, thoughtless prodigality and idleness, are obstreperous while they are in the height and heyday of their enjoyment; and when that is passed away, long and obtrusive is the train of misery which they draw after them. But on the contrary, the virtues, especially those of humble ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... other innumerable minstrelsies of nature, as well as from the higher art of man, that soothe, elevate, and solemnise. It is true, indeed, that there are grosser appetites of the body which many pervert so as to enslave the spirit; thus abusing by gluttony, drunkenness, and every form of sensuality, what God the merciful and wise has intrusted to man to be used for wise and merciful ends. But even here there is already perceptible a marked difference between those appetites and the more refined tastes alluded to; inasmuch as the former are found ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... forfeited for ever, when the pointed significancy of the confessor's questions, and the direct knowledge which he plants in the mind, have awakened a guilty familiarity with every form of impurity and unhallowed sensuality. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... throughout the land.'[167] What a display of reigning hypocrisy and rampant fanaticism was it to see the game at cat openly played by men on Sunday, the church bells calling them to their sport!!! Had Southey been poet-laureate to Charles II, he might with equal truth have concealed the sensuality, open profaneness, and debauchery of that profligate monarch and his court of concubines, and have praised him as 'the Lord's anointed.' Bunyan was an eye-witness of the state of the times in which he lived, and he associated with numbers of the poor in Bedfordshire and the adjoining ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... honorable example set them by the distinguished founder of it; but this example was soon lost, and was succeeded by the most extreme degeneracy and debasement. The successive sovereigns began soon to live and to reign solely for the gratification of their own sensual propensities and passions. Sensuality begins sometimes with kindness, but it ends always in the most reckless and intolerable cruelty. The Ptolemies became, in the end, the most abominable and terrible tyrants that the principle of absolute and irresponsible power ever produced. There was one vice ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... full of bloody Crimes, and Cities full of Violence, and much innocent Blood shed, so that Blood touched Blood, yea, Sodoms sins have abounded amongst us. Pride, fulness of Bread, Idleness, Vanities of Apparel, and shameful sensuality filled the Land. ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... wheezings, gaspings, and short-breathed phrases of Liszt; no longer the evil sensuality, loose construction, formlessness, and drunken peasant dances of Tchaikovsky; but a blending of Wagner, Brahms, Liszt—and the classics. Oh, Strauss, Richard, knows his business! He is a skilled writer. He has his chamber-music moments, his lyric outbursts; his early songs are sometimes ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... favors to ask of Me? Give Me, if thou wilt, a list of all thy desires, all the wants of thy soul. Tell Me, simply, of all thy pride, sensuality, self-love, sloth; and ask for My help in thy struggles to ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... importance of this fundamental rule. In his Inaugural Lecture, published two years ago, the following extravagant sentence occurs: "Before the Revolution, the fervour and the austerity of Rousseau had cast out from good society the levity and sensuality of Voltaire" (p. 15). This view—which he appears to have abandoned, for in his Irish History he tells us that France "has now become the eldest daughter of Voltaire"—he supports by a reference to an abridgment of French history, much ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... glow and bustle of a Paulo or Tintoret, are totally mistaken. The principles by which each are attained are so contrary to each other, that they seem, in my opinion, incompatible, and as impossible to exist together, as to unite in the mind at the same time the most sublime ideas and the lowest sensuality. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... letter to Hector, on March 7 of this year, described Congreve as 'very dull, very valetudinary, and very recluse, willing, I am afraid, to forget the world, and content to be forgotten by it, to repose in that sullen sensuality into which men naturally sink who think disease a justification of indulgence, and converse only with those who hope to prosper by indulging them ... Infirmity will come, but let us not invite it; indulgence will allure us, but let us ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... to this story, Montaigne says in his Essay on Cruelty: "Such as have sensuality to encounter, willingly make use of this argument, that when it is at the height it subjects us to that degree that a man's reason can have no access... wherein they conceive that the pleasure doth so transport us that our reason cannot perform its office whilst we are so benumbed ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... the mind which it is good for us to study when we are at home and by ourselves,—the manner in which thought passes into act, the conflict of passion and reason in many stages, the transition from sensuality to love or sentiment and from earthly love to heavenly, the slow and silent influence of habit, which little by little changes the nature of men, the sudden change of the old nature of man into a new one, wrought by shame or by some other overwhelming impulse. ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... younger than herself. Their life together was an excellent example of the exact opposite of domestic bliss, and in treating the boy like a culprit, they transformed him—as always happens in similar cases—into a severe judge of their own conduct. The father's unbridled sensuality and the mother's unbridled tongue gave a succession of moving pictures of family discord to the inquisitive eyes of the future novelist. His childhood was anything but cheerful, and late in life he said he could distinctly remember the salt taste of the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... have for a brother. It happens, however, in certain natures of a sensibility particularly precocious and faithful at the same time, that the awakening of effective life is so strong, so encroaching, that the impassioned friendship persists, first through the other awakening, that of sensuality, so fatal to all the senses of delicacy, then through the first tumult of social experience, not less fatal to our ideal ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... more to say to you, which I scarcely know how to communicate. Somebody here has loaded your character with very heavy imputations. You are said to be addicted to gaming, sensuality, and the lowest vices. How much grief this intelligence has given to all who love you, you will easily imagine. To find you innocent of these charges would free my heart from the keenest solicitude it has hitherto felt. I leave ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... Poetry: she danced with Sensuality a characteristic dance, to which Imagination played ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... hair, flowing down from his cowl, was also clouded and streaked with the kithings of the cranreuch of age. There was, however, a youthy and luscious twinkling in his eyes, that showed how little the passage of three-and-fifty winters had cooled the rampant sensuality of his nature. His right leg, which was naked, though on the foot was a slipper of Spanish leather, he laid o'er Mistress Kilspinnie's knees as he threw himself back against the pillar of the bed, the better to observe and converse with my ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... become a compulsive neurotic,[22] with all the hypermorality of the latter, pride in his moral purity and extravagant self reproaches, even a lustful self laceration after he had at one single time been overpowered by sensuality. Furthermore his lack of resoluteness, decisiveness and courage is not, as he mentions, the result of his myopia but of his neurosis. He has developed himself, out of an unconscious rivalry, in direct contrast to his intensely narrow-minded father. ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... with the wars, who carried himself as though glad now to be at home again. He seemed to hear approaching feet, and he withdrew into the shadow as two others advanced. One of these was a handsome youth with an eager face, in which spirituality and sensuality contended. The other was older, of an uncertain age, and his expression was mocking and evil; he carried some sort of musical instrument, and to this he seemed to sing while the younger man looked ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... his cream without enthusiasm, pausing at times and turning his head away. In fact, he persisted only out of an incorrigible sensuality, and finally withdrew a pace or two, leaving creamy traces still upon the saucer. With a multitude of fond words his kind mistress drew his attention to these, whereupon, making a visible effort, he returned and disposed ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... is obtained from a somewhat similar collection of stories, "Der Geist der Romane im letzten Viertel des 18ten Jahrhunderts," Breslau and Hirschberg, 1788, in which the author (S.G. Preisser?) claims to follow the spirit of the period and gives six stories of revolting sensuality, with a thin whitewash ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... with each other, and infecting Christianity, even at its strongest periods, with fatal terror of doctrine, and ghastliness of symbolic conception, passing through fear into frenzied grotesque, and thence into sensuality. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... Japanese inform the enemy of the slight preparations of the country. As a result, the governor has acquired a wretched reputation and character, even among the Chinese Sangleys and the Japanese of the country (who are infidels), not only for sensuality and lasciviousness, but for other and worse doings. We have the country in the most wretched condition that can be imagined. Never has it been so wretched, as is affirmed openly by the oldest residents here, as well as ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... excuse for these excesses. Augustin goes too far when he makes the gods responsible for this riot of sensuality. What is true is that they did nothing to hinder it. And it is also true that the lechery, which he flings so acridly in the face of the pagans, the gross stage-plays, the songs, dances, and even prostitution, were all more or less included in the essence of paganism. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... resourceful mind that possibly the best way of securing this girl's attachment to him, would be by a vivid appeal to her senses. His prestige was at stake, and in this dilemma men have been known to go to even greater lengths than when driven by sensuality alone. He did not underestimate the vigour of her passions, and knew that in this direction there was hope of ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... which Harrington's cultivated mind recoiled from the grossness of vulgar and ignorant infidelity. We called at the cottage of a little farmer, a tenant of his, somewhat notorious both for profanity and sensuality. Presuming, I suppose, on his young landlord's suspected heterodoxy, and thinking, perhaps, to curry favor with him, he ventured (I know not what led to it) to indulge in some stupid joke about the legion and the herd of swine. "Sir," said he, scratching his ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... delirium, is quite peculiar to the Albertina bronze. It is just this which the portrait of the Capitol lacks for the completion of Caligula. The man who could be so represented in art had nothing wholly vulgar in him. The brutality of Caracalla, the overblown sensuality of Nero, the effeminacy of Commodus or Heliogabalus are all absent here. This face idealizes the torture of a morbid soul. It is withal so truly beautiful that it might easily be made the poem ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... express the beautiful and pure in music while cherishing at the same time, a bad heart and a mean nature behind it. Singing is such a personal thing, that one's mentality, one's inner nature, is bound to reveal itself. Each one of us has evil tendencies to grapple with, envy, jealousy, hatred, sensuality and all the rest of the evils we are apt to harbor. If we make no effort to control these natural tendencies, they will permanently injure us, as well as impair the voice, and vitiate the good we might do. I say it in all humility, but I am earnestly trying to conquer the ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... has already written—I believe that the women will save us. I do not fear the fate of the older peoples. I am sure that we shall not fall into nothingness from the present height of our civilization, by reason of our sensuality and vice, as all the great nations have done, heretofore. The women will rebel. The women will not allow it. But"—he added with his benign smile, dropping into a lighter tone, as if he felt that he had been more serious than the occasion warranted, and addressing Mrs. Malcomson specially—"but ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... have carved to cut the brine For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror. Impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps, But that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed: Still, sensuality was grown ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the health and vigour which the heroes and heroines of antiquity possess in the writings of Homer. The lines of Lucretius describing the immolation of Iphigenia are worth the whole of Goethe's long poem. Again, there is a profligacy, an inhuman sensuality, in his works which is utterly revolting. I am not intimately acquainted with them generally. But I take up my ground on the first canto of 'Wilhelm Meister;' and, as the attorney-general of human nature, I there ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... enthusiasm for the Laundry. And he paid no compliments to Jane: of the two he was more interested by the elder lady, whose farm and dairy in Surrey he heard her tell of with a shining glance, observing that he liked thick cream: there was a touch of home in it. The innocent sensuality in the candid avowal of his tastes inspired confidence. Mrs. Lackstraw fished for some account of his home. He was open to flow on the subject; he dashed a few sketches of mother and sisters, dowerless girls, fresh as trout in the stream, and of his own poor estate, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting, as it were, trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force. The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human kind is distributed has become less misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially recognized ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... impulse to his plebeian auditories. Ambition was his sole line of politics. Devoid of honour, principles, or morality, he only loved democracy because it was exciting. It was his element, and he plunged into it. He sought there not so much command as that voluptuous sensuality which man finds in the rapid movement which bears him away with it. He was intoxicated with the revolutionary vertigo as a man becomes drunken with wine; yet he bore his intoxication well. He had that superiority of calmness in ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... unseasonable rise; some successful captures of walrus also took place; and these circumstances, combined perhaps with some superstitious customs of which we were ignorant, seemed the signal for giving way to sensuality. The lamps were accumulated, and the kettles more frequently replenished; and gluttony, in its most disgusting form, became for a while the order of the day. The Esquimaux were now seen wallowing in filth, while ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... noble, strong, successful, happy; I'm absolutely perfect; no one else In all the world can be compared to me. Now will I offer up a sacrifice, Give gifts with lavish hand, and be triumphant." Such men, befooled by endless vain conceits, Caught in the meshes of the world's illusion, Immersed in sensuality, descend Down to the ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... larger knowledge, crowd upon him, clamorous for solution, not to be denied, insisting on a settlement to-day. He is forced to make a choice, and may either forsake the divinity he serves, falling back, for the practical and aesthetic conduct of life, on those common instincts of sensuality which oscillate between the conventicle and the tavern as the poles of duty and pleasure, or, more pathetically still, he may attempt to bring the code of the observatory to bear immediately on the vagaries of the untameable world, and suffer ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... "Sensuality contaminates the body, depresses the understanding, deadens the moral feelings of the heart, and degrades man from his rank in the creation."—Murray's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... was so pretty. He had possessed so few women of such ingenuousness. This love without debauchery was a new experience for him, and, drawing him out of his lazy habits, caressed at once his pride and his sensuality. Emma's enthusiasm, which his bourgeois good sense disdained, seemed to him in his heart of hearts charming, since it was lavished on him. Then, sure of being loved, he no longer kept up appearances, and insensibly his ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... not all: the sensuality and gross vice, and the hateful moroseness and harshness of temper, which result from our indisposition for gayety and enjoyment, are literally awful to think of. Pride and licentiousness triumph in our land, because we ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... the poem is to describe the progress of a libertine through life, not an unprincipled prodigal, whose profligacy, growing with his growth, and strengthening with his strength, passes from voluptuous indulgence into the sordid sensuality of systematic debauchery, but a young gentleman, who, whirled by the vigour and vivacity of his animal spirits into a world of adventures, in which his stars are chiefly in fault for his liaisons, settles at last into an honourable ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... nothing to do; I doubt not they are all spent wisely and profitably; but what are their hours of recreation? Those hours that with us are passed in the enjoyment of all that art can win from nature; when, if the elaborate repast be more deeply relished than sages might approve, it is redeemed from sensuality by the presence of elegance and beauty. What is the American pendant to this? I will not draw any comparisons between a good dinner party in the two countries; I have heard American gentlemen say, that they could ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... have acquired certain indisputable advantages, and yet have perished from failing in other characters. The Greeks may have retrograded from a want of coherence between the many small states, from the small size of their whole country, from the practice of slavery, or from extreme sensuality; for they did not succumb until "they were enervated and corrupt to the very core." (27. Mr. Greg, 'Fraser's Magazine,' Sept. 1868, p. 357.) The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Long Gallery of the Louvre. The features were rather large, the face rather broad. The expression was sombre, almost surly in the repose of the painted canvas, and the eyes were brown, almond-shaped like those of an Oriental; the red lips were exquisitely modelled, and the sensuality was curiously disturbing; the dark, chestnut hair, cut short, curled over the head with an infinite grace. The skin was like ivory softened with a delicate carmine. There was in that beautiful countenance more than beauty, for what most fascinated the observer was a supreme and disdainful ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... character of the higher and more educated classes who reside in the towns, partakes, but perhaps in a lesser degree, of the good parts of the Gaucho, but is, I fear, stained by many vices of which he is free. Sensuality, mockery of all religion, and the grossest corruption, are far from uncommon. Nearly every public officer can be bribed. The head man in the post-office sold forged government franks. The governor and prime minister openly combined to plunder the state. Justice, where ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Essentially he will be a moral man, certainly so far as to exercise self-restraint and live in an ordered way. Unless this is so, he will be unable to give his principal energies to thought and work—that is, he will not be a good typical engineer. If sensuality appear at all largely in this central body, therefore,—a point we must leave open here—it will appear without any trappings of sentiment or mysticism, frankly on Pauline lines, wine for the stomach's sake, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... were caricatured for their sensuality at the Reformation. Their Abbey suffered in consequence; for the condemnator, out of the ruins, built himself a house, which may still be seen near the church. "The regality," says Mr. Chambers, "soon after passed into the hands of Lord Binning, an eminent lawyer, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... which the Greeks derived from Ctesias, and passed on to the Romans, and through them to the moderns generally, the greatest defect in the Assyrian character—the besetting sin of their leading men—was luxuriousness of living and sensuality. From Ninyas to Sardanapalus—from the commencement to the close of the Empire—a line of voluptuaries, according to Ctesias and his followers, held possession of the throne; and the principle was established from the first, that happiness consisted in freedom from all ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... human elements, and expressed them in beautiful form to the imagination and the senses. The brush of the same painter depicted Bacchus wedding Ariadne and Mary fainting on the hill of Calvary. Careless of any peril to dogmatic orthodoxy, and undeterred by the dread of encouraging pagan sensuality, the artists wrought out their modern ideal of beauty in the double field of Christian and Hellenic legend. Before the force of painting was exhausted, it had thus traversed the whole cycle of thoughts and feelings that form the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... powerful only to the begetting of hideous moral and social corruptions. God spoke (it is said) through the Vedic rishis, the sages of the Himalayas—and the result has been caste, cow-worship, suttee, abominations of asceticism, and nameless orgies of sensuality. God spoke through Moses, and the result was—Judaism! God spoke through Jesus, and the result was Arianism and Athanasianism, the Papacy, the Holy Office, the Thirty Years' War, massacres beyond computation, and the slowly calcined flesh of an ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... uninterrupted prosperity to ease and comfort, a wife who loved him as dearly as she was beloved, the children on whom his soul hung in hope and fondness, to privations at the prospect of which his own courage sank, and which a sublime philosophy alone can enable sensuality to undergo. "You will never persuade me, Orange," said Egmont, "to see things in the gloomy light in which they appear to thy mournful prudence. When I have succeeded in abolishing the public preachings, and chastising the Iconoclasts, in crushing the rebels, and restoring ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... relish. They may be termed a kind of spiritual sensuality, wherein the soul letting itself go too far, by reason of the sweetness it finds in them, falls imperceptibly into decay. The crafty enemy presents such sort of interior elevations and raptures for baits to entrap the soul, to fill it with vanity and self-love, to fix its esteem ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... upon our streets who are solid bestiality and villainy done up in flesh and skin. Each feature is as eloquent of rascality as an ape's of idiocy. Experts skilled in physiognomy need no confession from impish lips, but read the life-history from page to page written on features "dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, branded by remorse; the body consumed with sloth and dishonored with selfish uses; the bones full of the sins of youth, the face hideous with secret vices, the roots dried up beneath and the branches cut off above." It is as natural and ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... priests of Mexico, she saw nothing but ignorance, sensuality, bigotry, and indolence, nothing calculated to shake her faith as a Protestant, or cause her to forget her mother's first injunction; while the foppishness, frivolity, insolence, ignorance, and pride, of the men, by whom ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... table now interrupted. He was elegant in the costume of the time, in imported linen and cloth from an English loom. His hair was thick and black; his eyebrows straight, his body and his face rich in the blood and the vitalities of youth. But sensuality was on him like a shadow. The man was given over to ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... light,—in which it is revealed either as the instrument by which men and women "cooperate with the Creator" to bring children into the world, on the one hand; and on the other, as the sinful instrument of self-gratification, lust and sensuality, there is bound to be an endless conflict in human conduct, producing ever increasing misery, pain and injustice. In crystallizing and codifying this contradiction, the Church not only solidified its own power over men but reduced ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... word, Adrienne was the most complete, the most ideal personification of SENSUALITY—not of vulgar, ignorant, non intelligent, mistaken sensuousness which is always deceit ful and corrupted by habit or by the necessity for gross and ill-regulated enjoyments, but that exquisite sensuality which is to the senses what intelligence is ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... about his bree, His tap-lip lang by inches three - A slockened sort 'mon,' to pree A' sensuality - A droutly glint was ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to the finer sensibilities of the heart! Fools, that expect your verdant Millennium, and nothing but Love and Abundance, brooks running wine, winds whispering music,—with the whole ground and basis of your existence champed into a mud of Sensuality; which, daily growing deeper, will soon have ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... folly are not always associated with genius scarcely needs demonstrating. I allow that many great men have been sensual fools, but we can by no means allow that folly and sensuality are inseparable from greatness. My point is to prove that littleness must be conquered before a man can be great or good. Macaulay lived a life of perfect and exemplary purity; he was good in all ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... beauty of the trees was hers also, and that, as for the spirit of those horizons, of the village of Roussainville, of the books which I was reading that year, it was her kiss which would make me master of them all; and, my imagination drawing strength from contact with my sensuality, my sensuality expanding through all the realms of my imagination, my desire had no longer any bounds. Moreover—just as in moments of musing contemplation of nature, the normal actions of the mind being suspended, and our abstract ideas of things set on one ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... priests who were called "Sealers." The impression from this seal represents a man upon his knees, with his hands tied behind him, and a sword pointed at his throat. The ass is identified with Typhon not only because of his colour, but also because of his stupidity and the sensuality of his disposition. The Persian king Ochus was nicknamed the "Ass," which made him to say, "This ass shall dine upon your ox," and accordingly he slew Apis. Typhon is said to have escaped from Horus by a flight of ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... at the portrait, but the likeness had vanished. In the frank sensuality of Sir Frederick's crimson smirk he could find no affinity to Lucia's ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... sour ascetic life. I believe not only in the thorns on the rosebush, but in the roses which the thorns defend. Asceticism is the child of sensuality and superstition. She is the secret mother of many a secret sin. God, when he made man's body, did not give us a fibre too much, nor a passion too many. I would steal no violet from the young maiden's ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... chiselled with equal delicacy; and yet there was only one point of real beauty in the entire countenance. The mouth was perfect. But the man with a perfect mouth is usually one whom it will be found expedient to avoid. Without a certain allowance of sensuality no man is genial—without a little weakness there is no kind heart. This Frenchman's mouth was not, however, obtrusively faultless. It was perfect in its design, but, somehow, many people failed to take note of the fact. It is so with the ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... different matter. This objection is a mere childish prejudice reinforced by outworn superstitions. The religious terror excited by certain formidable free-thinkers and anti-social philosophers in earlier days went much deeper than this, and was quite free from that mere prurient itch of perverted sensuality which inspires the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... pursues the subject, and represents the internal conquests of self-mastery, the conquests of a man over his passions, his violence, his covetousness, his ambition, his despair, his sensuality. Sir Guyon, after conquering many foes of goodness, is the destroyer of the most perilous of them all, Acrasia, licentiousness, and her ensnaring Bower of Bliss. But after this, the thread at once of story and allegory, slender henceforth at the best, is neglected and often entirely lost. The ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... garble and besmirch,—Nietzsche endeavours to reinstate in their former places of honour. Voluptuousness, or sensual pleasure, is a dangerous thing to discuss nowadays. If we mention it with favour we may be regarded, however unjustly, as the advocate of savages, satyrs, and pure sensuality. If we condemn it, we either go over to the Puritans or we join those who are wont to come to table with no edge to their appetites and who therefore grumble at all good fare. There can be no doubt that the value of healthy innocent voluptuousness, like the value of health itself, must have been ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... you what I thought was intended by the first rehearsal of them, namely, to show how Antichrist got in with his sensuality, and opposed it to the true light of the Word of God, exalting himself above God, and also above all Divine revelation; this was his light against light. But, I say, why is it repeated? For he saith, 'Light was against light in three ranks' again. Truly, I think it is repeated to show ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan |
