"Voluptuousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which is eighty or one hundred miles in length, varying from ten to twenty in breadth, is well watered by the Rio Santa Clara and numerous arroyos, and is one of the most fertile and picturesque plains in California. For pastoral charms, fertility of soil, variety of productions, and delicious voluptuousness of climate and scenery, it cannot be surpassed. This valley, if properly cultivated, would alone produce breadstuffs enough to supply millions of population. The buildings of the Pueblo, with few exceptions, are constructed of adobes, and none of them have even the smallest ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... will naturally place it higher than the unmusical would. In other words, popular music needs to be simple, although elaborate music may be beautiful to the few. When elaborate music is the fashion among people to whom all music is a voluptuous mystery, we may be sure that what they love is voluptuousness or fashion, and not ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... unprincipled as she was ambitious, invited him to her court, lavished upon him, with queenly profusion, caresses and flattery, and enticed him with all those blandishments which might most effectually enthrall the impassioned spirit of youth. Voluptuousness, gilded with its most dazzling and deceitful enchantments, was studiously presented to his eye. The queen was all love and complaisance. She received him to her cabinet council. She affected to regard him as ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... and received high rewards for their services. Among them, one called Trimalcio was such an adept in his art, that he could impart to common fish both the form and flavour of the most esteemed of the piscatory tribes. A chief cook in the palmy days of Roman voluptuousness had about L800 a year, and Antony rewarded the one that cooked the supper which pleased Cleopatra, with the present of a city. With the fall of the empire, the culinary art sank into less consideration. In the middle ages, cooks laboured to acquire ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... been long felt as voluptuousness by Leland; and this is among the Calamities of Literature, and it is so with all those studies which deeply busy the intellect and the fancy. There is a poignant delight in study, often subversive of human happiness. Men of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... may serve his purpose—The fear of God, so far from being the beginning of wisdom, should be the beginning of folly—The command to love one's parents is more the work of education than of nature—Modesty is only an invention of refined voluptuousness—The law which condemns married people to live together, becomes barbarous and cruel on the day they cease to love ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... travel which facilitate clandestine sexual relations, the industrial art which ornaments our apartments, the increasing luxury and comfort of dwellings, beds, etc., are, at the present day, so many factors in the science of erotic voluptuousness. Prostitution itself has become adapted to all the pathological excrescences of vice. In a word, the artificial culture of the human sexual appetite has given rise to a veritable high school of debauchery. The artistic and realistic representations of erotic ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... school. Most of his poems are short, and present a picture of nature, or of some delicate, fleeting psychical emotion, but they are all filled with enchanting, artistic charm. His poetry is the quintessence of aesthetic voluptuousness, such as was evolved on the soil of the sybaritism of the landed gentry in the circles of the '40's of ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... intricate sentences, had got into Edwin's bedroom. Edwin began to read, as it were voluptuously. Not that he had a peculiar interest in Irish politics! What he had was a passion for great news, for news long expected. He could thrill responsively to a fine event. I say that his pleasure had the voluptuousness ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... on his brow and the imperial purple flowing in his train. He has been seated on a throne surrounded with minions and mistresses, giving audience to the envoys of foreign potentates, in all the supercilious pomp of majesty. The images of Asiatic despotism and voluptuousness have scarcely been wanting to crown the exaggerated scene. We have been taught to tremble at the terrific visages of murdering janizaries, and to blush at the unveiled mysteries of a ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... was like a dream to De Marsay, but one of those dreams which, even when they fade away, leave a feeling of supernatural voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... Asiatics are often appalled by the curious web of facts and fancies which has been woven concerning us. We are pictured as living on the perfume of the lotus, if not on mice and cockroaches. It is either impotent fanaticism or else abject voluptuousness. Indian spirituality has been derided as ignorance, Chinese sobriety as stupidity, Japanese patriotism as the result of fatalism. It has been said that we are less sensible to pain and wounds on account of the callousness ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... from the earliest ages, on the mere principles of human science. It is distinctly stated by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, where he draws a striking comparison between a man who, being first misled by sophistical reasonings, has gone into a life of voluptuousness, under an impression that he was doing no wrong,—and one who has followed the same course in opposition to his own moral convictions. The former he contends might be reclaimed by argument; but the latter he considers as incurable. ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... joy and buoyancy: about her there was a ravishing simplicity more than earthly: a blush upon her cheek became deeper,-it was the blush of love flashing in a dream, that tells its tale in nervous vibrations, adding enchantment to sleeping voluptuousness;-and yet all was sacred, an envied object no ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... among the upper ranks only and a few wealthy merchants (whom the sumptuary laws, prohibiting fine houses, gardens, carriages, and every kind of external shew and grandeur, have encouraged secretly to indulge and pamper their appetite in every species of luxury and voluptuousness) where a plurality of wives are to be found. Every great officer of state has his haram consisting of six, eight, or ten women, according to his circumstances and his inclination for the sex. Every merchant also of Canton has his seraglio; but a poor man finds one wife quite ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... this she was taken to pass a week at the luxurious abodes of Maria Antoinette. Versailles was in itself a city of palaces and of courtiers, where all that could dazzle the eye in regal pomp and princely voluptuousness was concentered. Most girls of her age would have been enchanted and bewildered by this display of royal grandeur. Jane was permitted to witness, and partially to share, all the pomp of luxuriously-spread tables, ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... amputation for her. But she faced it with calmness. She was not bowed with sorrow. She did not nurse the idea that her life was at an end; on the contrary, she obstinately put it away from her, dwelling on Cyril. She did not indulge in the enervating voluptuousness of grief. She had begun in the first hours of bereavement by picturing herself as one marked out for the blows of fate. She had lost her father and her mother, and now her husband. Her career seemed to be punctuated by interments. But after a while her gentle commonsense came ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... carved in the most skilful manner. From the vaulted ceiling a brazen lamp was suspended, whose light cast a mysterious gleam upon the scene. All was in the most gorgeous and splendid style of oriental voluptuousness. ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... criminal passions. It is exhibiting women with such approaches to nakedness as can have no other design than to breed lust behind the onlooking eyes. It is furnishing candidates for the brothel. It is getting us used to scenes that rival the voluptuousness and licentious ages of the past." As never before to-day, has the theater asked for the support of Church members. And the ideal stage, with virtuous performers, and with pure dramas, are held up as a sample of what Christian people are invited ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... charms of Nature in the tropics, by observing the remarkable beauty of a few individual objects. Their susceptibility to be affected by the scenes presented to their view is likewise exalted by the confinement of their voyage; they are enraptured with the novelty of everything about them, by the voluptuousness of the climate and the abundance of delicious fruits, and always afterwards recur to the scenes of their tropical visit with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... relate, but persistent efforts to maintain the disinterested claim on American friendship which we Germans have always (when in need of it) advanced, continue to be misrepresented in that stronghold of atheistical materialism and Byzantine voluptuousness, New York. To the gifted Professor von Schwank's challenge, that he could not fill a single "scrap of paper" with the record of acts of war on our part which were incompatible with Divine guidance and the promulgation of the higher culture, the effete and already discredited ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... which excepting "Fanny Hill" appeared to me to be truthful, that did, and it does so still; the others telling of recherche eroticisms, or of inordinate copulative powers, of the strange twists, tricks, and fancies, of matured voluptuousness, and philosophical lewedness, seemed to my comparative ignorance, as baudy imaginings, or lying inventions, not worthy of belief; although I now know by experience, that they may be true enough, however eccentric, and improbable, they may ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... was full of all manner of fantastic sentiments. Faith, hope, and love, which make others strong, had in him degenerated into superstition, frivolity, and voluptuousness—already he was but ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... of the Mediterranean lap one after another like the avowal of a woman, from whom you drag it word by word. It must be confessed, that the moment when the perfumed air brings fragrance to the lungs and to our day-dreams; when voluptuousness, made visible and ambient as the air, holds you in your easy-chair; when, a spoon in your hand, you sip an ice or a sorbet, the town at your feet and fair woman opposite—such Boccaccio hours can be known only in Italy and on the ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... her hair unloosed and streaming over her shoulders, barefooted, and clad in a clumsy coarse garment which seemed redolent with divine voluptuousness merely from having touched her body. Behind her came a gardener, carrying, half hidden in his long beard, an ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... the foot of the couch, and my heart confessed that the perfection of womanly beauty lay beneath my wondering eyes, but a beauty which, if in smiles, would rather madden with voluptuousness, than subdue with tenderness, and, if in repose, seemed to command ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... was, under the very shadow of the palace which should have been her home, that Marguerite held her little court; passing from her oratory to scenes of vice and voluptuousness which, happily, are unparalleled in these times; one day doing penance with bare feet and a robe of serge, and the next reposing upon velvet cushions and pillowed on down—now fasting like an anchorite, and now feasting like a bacchante; one hour dispensing ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... of martinet in the scenical grouping and draping of the circumstances in his murders—therefore it is that hope becomes reasonable, since all such refinements of preparation demand time. Murders of mere necessity Williams was obliged to hurry; but, in a murder of pure voluptuousness, entirely disinterested, where no hostile witness was to be removed, no extra booty to be gained, and no revenge to be gratified, it is clear that to hurry would be altogether to ruin. If this child, therefore, is to be ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... passion of the mind. Even supposing that an avaricious, ambitious, or timid man refrains from an excess of eating, drinking, or sexual intercourse, avarice, ambition, and fear are not therefore the opposites of voluptuousness, drunkenness, or lust. For the avaricious man generally desires to swallow as much meat and drink as he can, provided only it belong to another person. The ambitious man, too, if he hopes he can keep it a secret, will restrain ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... human heart. Some there are again, who entertain scruples of a different kind, and turn from a play because it is a fiction; while there are others, and they are most worthy of argument, who think that theatres add more than their share to the aggregate mass of luxury, voluptuousness, and dissipation, which brings nations to vitious refinement, enervation ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... toilet this morning; her attire was that of a lady of fashion, rich, elaborate, devised with consummate art, its luxury draping well the superb form wherein blended with such strange ardour the flames of heroism and voluptuousness. Her moving made the air delicate with faint perfume; her attitude as she laid down the packet and kept her hand upon it for a moment was self-conscious, but nobly so; if an actress, she was cast by nature for the great parts and threw her soul ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... licentious. He could not think, he gravely told Bishop Burnet, "God would make a man miserable for taking a little pleasure out of the way." Accordingly he followed the free bent of his desires, and his whole life was soon devoted to voluptuousness; a vice which an ingenious courtier obligingly describes as a "warmth and sweetness of the blood that would not be confined in the communicating itself—an overflowing of good nature, of which he had such a stream that it would not be restrained within the banks of a crabbed ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... a Master-Cook conceives himself to be a pupil of Epicurus, whose favourite but ambiguous axiom, that "Voluptuousness is the sovereign good," was interpreted by the bon-vivans of antiquity in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... doubled up in grief, with a glory of loose, Titian hair, chosen by Ditmar himself as expressing the nearest possible artistic representation of his ideal of the female form. Cora Ditmar's objections on the score of voluptuousness and of insufficient clothing had been vain. She had recognized no immorality of sentimentality in the art itself; what she felt, and with some justice, was that this particular Magdalen was unrepentant, and that Ditmar knew it. And the picture remained an offence to her as long as she lived. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... cruelty, covetousness, lust, slander, anger, voluptuousness, revenge, lying, prostitution, and envy are sins which arise from a consumption of a large quantity of aliments containing a higher ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... out the west Toys with the lilac pretty maids; Ruffles the meadow's verdant-vest, And rings the bluebells in the glades; The ash-buds change their sombre suit, The orchards blossom white and red - Promise of Autumn's riper fruit, When Spring's voluptuousness has fled. Awake! awake, O throstle sweet! And haste with all your choir to greet This Queen who comes with ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... after six months the pressure of normal appetites has begun to reassert itself—and to shop is one of the normal appetites of woman. I say "shop" instead of buy, to distinguish between the dull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiring things one might do without. It is evident that many of the thousands now fighting their way into the great shops must be indulging in the latter delight. At a moment when real wants are reduced to a minimum, how else account for the congestion ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the rich and mighty. We will show them how they can multiply their means seventy times seven. We will unite the race in one grand effort of prolific production and unlimited voluptuousness. We will be kings upon earth. All these things that thou seest from this high mountain of exceeding enterprise, all these kingdoms and their glory shall be thine, if thou wilt but give thyself up, O Association! body, soul, spirit, to the ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... the golden corn-field, and the author chooses the unsophisticated days of the Judges as the setting of his tale. In Canticles we have a contrasted picture between the simplicity of shepherd-life and the urban voluptuousness which was soon to attain its climax in the court of the Ptolemies. So the poet chose the luxurious reign of Solomon as the background for his exquisite "melodrama." Both Ruth and Canticles are home-products, and ancient Greek literature has no real ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... an unconquerable love in spite of all she had made me suffer. This sacred fire burned in my soul without growing dim for one instant during the whole six years of our separation. In spite of the rich vitality which pulsed through my veins; in spite of the promptings of an external nature full of voluptuousness; in spite of the bad examples and numerous opportunities which tempted mortal weakness in the freedom of a roving, military life, I call God to witness that I preserved my robe of innocence undefiled, and that I never felt ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... constitution of man, I see not any virtue contrary to justice, whereby it may be resisted and opposed. But one whereby pleasure and voluptuousness may be resisted and opposed, I ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... their character. They are, in effect, not what they are in themselves, but what they are to the feeling of their possessors. The King may be mean, degraded, miserable; the slave of ambition, fear, voluptuousness, and every low passion. The Peasant may be the real Monarch, the moral master of his fate, a free and lofty being, more than a Prince in happiness, more than a ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Cranach.[36] But one day a picture-dealer brought a small picture of the Madonna by old Albrecht to the Duke's gallery, and it made a powerful and wonderful impression upon me, so that I turned away completely from the voluptuousness of Italian art, and from that very hour determined to go back to my native Germany and study there the masterpieces upon which my heart was now set I came to Nuremberg here, and when I beheld Rose I seemed to see the Madonna who had so wonderfully stirred my heart, walking in bodily form on earth. ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... world, under the rule of the Caesars, exhausted itself in slavery, superstition, and voluptuousness. The people—intoxicated and, as it were, stupefied by their long-continued orgies—had lost the very notion of right and duty: war and dissipation by turns swept them away; usury and the labor of machines (that is of slaves), by depriving them ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... forcibly to the passions, and in general, by the freedom of their representations, hover on the borders of indecency. Let it be sufficient, however, to observe, that those who condemned the liberties which these writers take with the imagination could indulge themselves with the Anacreontic voluptuousness of the wise Solomon, when sanctioned by the authority ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... her; how beautiful she was! Her body was quivering; her eyes languid with love and moist with voluptuousness; her bosom was bare, her lips burning. I ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... liberty, breathe a sort of melancholy approaching to regret. I requested them to dance, and they consented. I know nothing more graceful than these dances of the country, which have all the originality which nature gives to the fine arts; a certain modest voluptuousness was remarkable in them; the Indian bayaderes should have something analogous to that mixture of indolence and vivacity which forms the charm of the Russian dance. This indolence and vivacity are ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... epig. 28. "Neither draped Diana nor naked Venus pleases me. One has too much voluptuousness about ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... compared with Cicero, we may often say of the former what Montaigne says of the latter, that "his manner of writing seemeth very tedious." Over the DE BENEFICIIS and the DE IRA one is sometimes moved to say, as the essayist does[130] over Cicero, "I understand sufficiently what death and voluptuousness are; let not a man busy himself to anatomise them." For the swift and penetrating flash of Montaigne, which either goes to the heart of a matter once for all or opens up a far vista of feeling and speculation, leaving us newly related to our environment ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... promptness; the elder negligent of his own concerns, the younger diligent and alert. They differed in the amount of time consumed at meals and in the number of guests whom they entertained. They differed more or less in their voluptuousness and in their expenditures and in the way in which they took solace and amusement." But in all other respects, "in life they marched side by side as equals and if it please God He will be their conductor in glory everlasting" is the final ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... man came into the parlor. His waxed moustache and his white imperial made him look like an old soldier; but his glance betrayed, under his glasses, the fine softness of eyes worn by science and voluptuousness. He was a Florentine, a friend of Miss Bell and of the Prince, Professor Arrighi, formerly adored by women, and now celebrated in Tuscany for his studies of agriculture. He pleased the Countess Martin at once. She questioned him on his methods, and on the results he obtained from them. He said ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... fortifies the democratic element in giving the people of the cities greater influence in the government. It arrives at nearly the same result by impoverishing the peasant and land owner, by the many new pleasures offered him and by displaying to him the ostentation and voluptuousness of luxury and ease. It tends to create bands of mercenaries rather than those capable of worthy personal service. It introduces into the nation luxury, ease, and avarice at the ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... now approaching the last year of his term, he seemed to resolve to pamper his appetite with every species of luxury. He carefully accumulated all the materials of voluptuousness and magnificence. He was particularly anxious in the selection of women who should serve for his pleasures. He had one Englishwoman, one Hungarian, one French, two of Germany, and two from different parts of Italy, all of them eminent for the perfections which ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... grant him bloody, Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin That has a name: but there's no bottom, none, In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters, Your matrons, and your maids, could not fill up The cistern of my lust; and my desire All continent impediments would o'erbear, That did oppose my will: better Macbeth Than such an ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... vulgus. The whole of which character (volgo) in general is divided into two factions; although subordinate to these, others are not wanting, of which some appeal to the high intelligence and splendour of rectitude, while others incite and force in a certain manner to the low, to the uncleanness of voluptuousness and compliance with natural desires. Therefore says ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... But I chanced to have no weapon at that time, nor any means of inflicting due punishment on the caitiff, which would not have been returned double on my head by him and his graceless associates. I mixed among them at the suggestion of my friend, and, following them to their den of voluptuousness and sin, I strove to be admitted among them, in hopes of finding some means of accomplishing my great purpose, while I found myself moved by the spirit within me so to do. But I was not only debarred, but, by the machinations of my wicked ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... reared, had dragged the house down to the usual impotent level. The government was conducted by a system of bureaucracy which relieved the titular shoguns from all responsibility and allowed them to live in profitless voluptuousness. So that one died and another reigned in his stead without causing more than a ripple upon the ...
— Japan • David Murray
... Besides, do I not know his artifices? I have repelled the monstrous anchorite who, with a laugh, offered me little hot loaves; the centaur who tried to take me on his back; and that vision of a beautiful dusky maid amid the sands, which revealed itself to me as the spirit of voluptuousness." ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... her secretly, she veiled heavily and drove to the theatre where Madame Nelson was singing. Shadowlike she cowered in the depths of a box which she had rented under an assumed name and followed with a kind of pained voluptuousness the ecstasies of love which the other woman, fully conscious of the victorious loveliness of her body, unfolded for the benefit of ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... opprobrium by going skilfully to work. The old-fashioned morality sermon kept the youth on the paths of clean life; the new-fashioned sexual instruction stimulates not only their sensual longings, but also makes it entirely clear to the young that they have nothing whatever to fear if they yield to their voluptuousness but make careful use of their new physiological knowledge. From my psychotherapeutic activity, I know too well how much vileness and perversity are gently covered by the term flirtation nowadays in the circle of ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... the next bull makes them forget it. All of which is good fun when not obscured by grand, vague ideas, and incidentally sells like hot cakes. Thenceforward the Casa Prometeo becomes an exporting house dealing in the good Spanish products of violence and sunshine, blood, voluptuousness and death, as ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... married man, that same fellow saith not, "Have me excused," as the others say; but he only saith, "I cannot come." Where it is to be noted, that the affections of carnal lusts and concupiscence are the strongest above all the other: for there be some men which set all their hearts upon voluptuousness; they regard nothing else, neither God nor his word; and therefore this married man saith, "I cannot come;" because his affections are more strong and more vehement than the other ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... the condition of their whole existence. Correggio conceived the universe under the one mood of sensuous joy: his world was bathed in luxurious light; its inhabitants were capable of little beyond a soft voluptuousness. Over the domain of tragedy he had no sway, and very rarely did he attempt to enter on it: nothing, for example, can be feebler than his endeavour to express anguish in the distorted features of Madonna, S. John, and the Magdalen, who are bending over the dead body of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... book was illustrated as well, not unskilfully, with sketches that professed to be illuminative of the text in the manner of Giulio Romano. These might have pleased the Biscayan, for if he had no Italian, and could, therefore, make nothing of the voluptuousness of the Scourge of Princes, he could, at least, see as well as another savage the meaning of a lewd image. But the privilege was denied him. Scarcely had he got the book in his fingers when it was plucked from them again, and thereafter, ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a trivial voluptuousness into art; and his sculpture may be sometimes called l'article de Paris. It is occasionally soiled by the sentiment, of which Gounod is the great exponent, a base soul who poured a sort of bath-water melody down the back of every woman he met, Margaret ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... diffusing their fragrance even among the downy clouds; the peaceful, sun-swept multi-coloured meadows; the trellised vines, the fig groves, the quince orchards, the orangeries: the absence of these did not disturb his serenity in the cellar, his voluptuousness in Bohemia, his enthusiasm in ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of cities, beneath the brightest of skies, and by the brightest of seas. Censoriousness was not the vice of the neighbours whom he had chosen. They were a race corrupted by a bad government and a bad religion, long renowned for skill in the arts of voluptuousness, and tolerant of all the caprices of sensuality. From the public opinion of the country of his adoption, he had nothing to dread. With the public opinion of the country of his birth, he was at open war. He plunged into wild ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of Nineveh and Assyria, noted for his luxury and voluptuousness. Arb[a]c[^e]s, the Mede, conspired against him, and defeated him; whereupon his favorite slave, Myrra, induced him to immolate himself on a funeral pile. The beautiful slave, having set fire to the pile, leaped into the blazing mass, and was burnt to death with the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... and purchase for me, by thy dangerous services, the soul of this desperado. Only thou canst chain, satiate, and then, drive to despair, his craving heart and his proud and restless spirit. Quick, quick! ascend! dispel the vapours of school-wisdom from his brain. Consume with the fire of voluptuousness the noble feelings of his heart. Disclose to him the treasures of nature, and hurry him into life, that he may the sooner grow tired of it. Let him see evil arise from good, vice rewarded, justice and innocence trodden under foot, as is the custom ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... but to do also. Seek the Lord, and your soul shall live, that the earth may bring forth the living soul. Be not conformed to the world. Contain yourselves from it: the soul lives by avoiding what it dies by affecting. Contain yourselves from the ungoverned wildness of pride, the sluggish voluptuousness of luxury, and the false name of knowledge: that so the wild beasts may be tamed, the cattle broken to the yoke, the serpents, harmless. For these be the motions of our mind under an allegory; that is to say, the haughtiness of pride, the delight of lust, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... writing which cannot be paralleled in ancient Greece, only they will there be seen, as it were, in their earlier and simpler forms. Traces of all the things that seem most un-Greek can be found somewhere in Greek literature: voluptuousness, asceticism, the worship of knowledge, the contempt for knowledge, atheism, pietism, the religion of serving the world and the religion of turning away from the world: all these and almost all other points of view one can think of are represented somewhere ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... at me? 'Tis true— Voluptuousness, grotesqueness, ghastliness, 85 Environ my devotedness as quaintly As round about some antique altar wreathe The rose festoons, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... predecessors, but even the artists of Scotland. This exhibition in Bologna did not by any means equal in excellence or interest the similar exhibition opened every spring in Edinburgh. The statuary displayed only beauty and voluptuousness of form: it wanted the simple energy and the chastened grandeur of expression which characterize the statuary of the ancients, and which have made it ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... 'Sorceries of Sin', is an 'Auto Sacramental', or Morality, of which the actors represent Man, Sin, Voluptuousness, etc., Understanding, and the Five Senses. The Senses are corrupted by the influence of Sin, and figuratively changed into wild beasts. Man, accompanied by Understanding and Penance, demands their liberation and encounters no resistance; but his free-will is afterwards seduced by the Evil Power, ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... arose Asmodai, the devil of lust: "'T is not unknown to you, mightiest King of the deep, nor to you, princes of the land of despair, how many of the gulfs of hell have I filled through voluptuousness and lewdness. What of the time I kindled such a flame of lust over all the world that the deluge had needs be sent to clear the earth of men, and to sweep them all into our unquenchable fire? What of Sodoma and Gomorrah, fine and fair cities, which I so consumed with ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... instincts, the most noble desires, and the most legitimate hopes. Such, too, are the terrible chastisements reserved for the thoughtlessness or foolish pride of these dissolute gray-beards, who prodigalize the last breath of their life in search of depraved voluptuousness." ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... construction and repair of the majestic edifices of religion, as in the painted booths and sordid sties of vice and luxury; as honourably and as profitably in repairing those sacred works, which grow hoary with innumerable years, as on the momentary receptacles of transient voluptuousness; in opera-houses, and brothels, and gaming-houses, and club-houses, and obelisks in the Champ de Mars? Is the surplus product of the olive and the vine worse employed in the frugal sustenance of persons, whom the fictions ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Agonistes without being moved, and those who look deepest into our present age may well be moved the most! One almost feels as if some great overpowering tide of all the brutalities and crudities and false sentiments and cunning hypocrisies, and evil voluptuousness, of all the Philistias that have ever been, is actually rushing to overwhelm us! Gath and Askalon in gross triumph—must this thing be? Will the Lord of Hosts lift no finger to help his own? And then the end comes; and the Euripidean "messenger" brings ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... had nothing about it of that oriental voluptuousness one reads of so much. It was more suggestive of the county hospital than any thing else. The skinny servitor brought a narghili, and I got him to take it out again without wasting any time about it. Then he brought the world-renowned Turkish ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... exquisite. The eyes were those of an angel, the mouth was that of a virgin; but in those heavenly eyes there was a terrestrial look and on that virginal mouth was the smile of a woman. In that place, at that hour, on that tapestry, this mingling of divine ecstasy and human voluptuousness had something at once charming and awful ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... bent together all at once and fell in a melting ruin.. and the victorious fire roared loudly above them, enveloping the whole Shrine anew in dense clouds of smoke and jets of flame,—Lysia had perished! All that proud loveliness, that dazzling supremacy, that superb voluptuousness, that triumphant dominion, . . swept away into a heap of undiscoverable ashes! And Zephoranim's haughty spirit too had fled,—fled, stained with guilt and most unroyal dishonor, all for the sake of one woman's fairness—the fairness of body only—the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... well be pictured than that afforded by the lean, neatly-groomed Scotsman, with his fresh, clean-shaven face and typically British air, in this setting of Eastern voluptuousness. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the temptations of Faust. His thirst was not for salvation but for experience—experience of the intellect and experience of sensation. He has left it on record in one of his letters that he was a victim at one period of "the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages." Faust in his cell can hardly have been a more insatiate student than Donne. "In the most unsettled days of his youth," Walton tells us, "his bed was not able to detain him beyond the hour ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... again; four fat years of wantonness and riot preceding fourteen hungry famine-stricken years of bloodiest civil war. The voluptuousness and infamy of the Louvre were almost paralleled in vice, if not in splendour, by the miniature court at Pau. Henry's Spartan grandfather would scarce have approved the courses of the youth, whose education ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... pedal-point on two notes (the submediant and the dominant) sustained through the entire song with a fine fidelity to the words and the lullaby spirit; a "Nocturne" in which Nevin has revealed an unsuspected voluptuousness in Mr. Aldrich' little lyric, and has written a song of irresistible climaxes. The two songs, "Dites-Moi" and "In der Nacht," each so completely true to the idiom of the language of its poem, are typical of Nevin's cosmopolitanism, referred to before. This same ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... thin silk which clings closely and is pale-blue, and has heraldic lilies of the palest gold woven into it. This and as much lace as can possibly be employed are the most distinctive feature of the costume. It does not aim at any definite century, but seeks to emphasize the youthful voluptuousness of the figure, the magnificent blond ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... David's chance had come, but the moment was too completely beautiful, the sudden sense of understanding too lovely for him to break it with words. He wanted to savor it, to take joy of its delicate sweetness. It was his voluptuousness to delight in it, not brush its bloom away with a lover's avowal. He was the idealist, moving in an unexpectedly realized dream, too exquisite for words to intrude upon. So they walked onward, looking across the long land, hand clasped ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... The first emotion she excited was surprise at the radiant and lucid expression, which mantled her whole face, and made the very blood seem eloquent. In her large dark eye the proud consciousness of intellect was softened only by melting voluptuousness; but something of sadness about her beautiful mouth gave indication that the heavenly part of her nature ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... temptations hourly renewed and rooted in the very centre of his head-quarters. "Daphne, by Orontes," a suburb of Antioch, was infamous for its seductions; and Daphnic luxury had become proverbial for expressing an excess of voluptuousness, such as other places could not rival by mere defect of means, and preparations elaborate enough to sustain it in all its varieties of mode, or to conceal it from public notice. In the very purlieus of this great nest, or ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... reminiscences is familiarly illustrated in "Faust." The contrast between two opposing principles is marked in all of Gounod's dramatic works, and in "Faust" this struggle of "a soul which invades mysticism and which still seeks to express voluptuousness" not only colors the music with a novel fascination, but amounts to an ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... in the allegorical Vishnuite drama called Prabodhacandrodaya and written at Kalanjar near the end of the eleventh century Buddhists and Jains are represented as succumbing to the temptations of inebriety and voluptuousness. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... now night; and the house of Onesiphorus the Elder was blazing with torches, alive with music, and all the hurry and stir of a sumptuous banquet. All the wealth and fashion of Laodicea were there, Christian and heathen; and all that the classic voluptuousness of Oriental Greece could give to shed enchantment over the scene was there. In ancient times the festivals of Christians in Laodicea had been regulated in the spirit of the command of Jesus, as recorded by Luke, whose classical Greek had made his the established version ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the Regent's Park. As yet, art triumphs, and here the lordlings of wealth may enjoy otium cum dignitate: but in a few years Nature may enable this domain to vie with Daphne of old, and become to London what Daphne was to Antioch, whose voluptuousness and luxury are perpetuated in history. But the beginnings of such triumphs furnish more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... the speculation, of their mercenary, and abandoned master, to whom they each paid a rent after the rate of two or three hundred pounds sterling per annum. This place presents a scene of profligate voluptuousness, not to be equalled upon any spot in Europe. Women of character are almost afraid to appear here at noon day; and a stranger would conceive, that at night, he saw before him, one third ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... pretty widely in the last few years, and had seen almost every kind of dance in the various ports at which he had called, and the towns he had visited in the East, but for absolute voluptuousness, and the portrayal of physical passions, he had never seen anything to compare with this which he ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... was spread over the whole East; and ascribing entirely to his rare and uncommon prudence the extent of his dominions, and the greatness of his riches, persuaded himself that he was "a god, and sat in the seat of God."(19) On the other side, he also designed to chastise the luxury, the voluptuousness, and the pride of those haughty merchants, who thought themselves kings of the sea, and sovereigns over crowned heads; and especially, that inhuman joy of the Tyrians, who looked upon the fall of Jerusalem (the rival of Tyre) as their own aggrandizement. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... inclinations. Young Moireau (for such was the shopman's name) was not long ere he arrived with his parcel. Madame d'Egmont was ready to receive him: she had had sufficient time to exchange her shabby walking dress for one which bespoke both coquetry and voluptuousness; the softness of her smile, and the turn of her features announced one whose warmth of passions would hold out the most flattering hopes of success to him who should seek her love. Madame Rossin and the young shopman were soon engaged in conversation, further animated by the bright ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... appetite for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and though De Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, though Coleridge began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof that he did not end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no proof whatever that he did so end—until the habit was formed. It is quite consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge's own express affirmations, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... warning and his well-known ferocity of nature, would beat him so severely that he would never offend again. In the gathering dusk of an autumn evening, Tabby came, half-triumphantly, half-tremblingly, but in great wrath, to tell Emily that Keeper was lying on the best bed, in drowsy voluptuousness. Charlotte saw Emily's whitening face, and set mouth, but dared not speak to interfere; no one dared when Emily's eyes glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her lips were so compressed ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... It was, therefore, not one of the least happy occurrences in his life that he went to Rome when society was not only in the most favourable state for the improvement of his mind, and for convincing him of the deleterious influence of the arts when employed as the embellishments of voluptuousness and luxury; but also when the state of the arts was so mean, that the full effect of studying the antique only, and of grouping characters by academical rules, should appear so striking as to satisfy him that he could never hope for any eminence, if he did not attend ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... sort," who yielded without difficulty to the solicitations of the sailors. "Some of them," says he, "who came on board for this purpose, seemed not to be above nine or ten years old, and had not the least marks of puberty. So early an acquaintance with the world seems to argue an uncommon degree of voluptuousness, and cannot fail of affecting the nation in general. The effect, which was immediately obvious to me, was the low stature of the common class of people, to which all these prostitutes belonged. Among this whole order, we saw few persons above the middle ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... and music, conversation, reading and company fill up the hours till midnight, when the third bath is taken immediately before retiring. This routine is seldom varied, except by the arrival of strangers, bent, like our party at Batavia, on sight-seeing. We soon wearied of the very voluptuousness of this stereo-typed course of indulgence, and welcomed in preference the fatigues and annoyances of exploring the thousand objects of interest that were beckoning us onward to jungle, mountain or sea-coast. Our friends, who were old residents, shook their heads knowingly, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... life as he was at the head of his army, rude as his profession, and proud as a conqueror; he oppressed the German princes no less by his haughtiness, than their country by his contributions. He consoled himself for the toils of war in voluptuousness and the pleasures of the table, in which he indulged to excess, and was thus brought to an early grave. But though as much addicted to pleasure as Alexander or Mahomet the Second, he hurried from ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... environ her, so to speak. Mildred is delicate in her tastes, so delicate that she scarcely ever expresses herself. Her mind and body are pure; her heart beats faster when she learns of distress. Voluptuousness, Venus, and Vice are all merely words to her. Mother does not explain this to the decorator. "My daughter is returning from school," she says, "I want her room done." "What style of room?" "After all you are supposed to know ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... thirteen hundred years Of Empire ending like a shepherd's tale; He must be roused. In his effeminate heart There is a careless courage which Corruption 10 Has not all quenched, and latent energies, Repressed by circumstance, but not destroyed— Steeped, but not drowned, in deep voluptuousness. If born a peasant, he had been a man To have reached an empire: to an empire born, He will bequeath none; nothing but a name, Which his sons will not prize in heritage:— Yet—not all lost—even yet—he may redeem His sloth and shame, by only being that Which he should be, as ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... eyes were full of sweetness, reverie, and restrained fire; a smile of ineffable voluptuousness played around her lips, and her magnificent hair was as dark as ebony and long enough to serve her ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... bread with vomit; which things are altogether opposite to the purity and sanctity of that fountain, or of conjugial love: from which opposition comes conjugial cold, and according to this cold is the lascivious voluptuousness of adulterous love, which consumes itself of its own accord. The reason why this is an evil of sin is because the holy principle is covered and thereby its channel into the body is obstructed, and in the place ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... womanly purity and innocence quail before unwomanly self-assertion and voluptuousness, so manly loyalty and unselfishness give way before unmanly treachery and self-seeking. It is true that the bad men do not finally triumph, but they triumph over the good with whom they happen to come in contact. In "King Lear," what man shows any virtue who ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... of this apostasy from the Lord was a frightful corruption of manners. The next result of spiritual adultery was the carnal one. Voluptuousness formed the fundamental characteristic of the Asiatic religions in general, and, in particular, of those with which the Israelites came in contact. But the pernicious influence extended still further over the whole moral territory. Where there is no holy God, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... was considerably above the middle height, and so finely formed that one could not determine the exact character of her figure. At one time it seemed all stateliness, at another time elegance personified, and flowing voluptuousness at another. She was Juno, Psyche, Hebe, by turns, and for aught ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... had brought Charles I. prisoner to Hampton Court. There it was that the king, intoxicated with pleasure and amusement, held his court—he who, a poet in feeling, thought himself justified in redeeming, by a whole day of voluptuousness, every minute which had been formerly passed in anguish and misery. It was not the soft greensward of Hampton Court—so soft that it almost resembled the richest velvet in the thickness of its texture—nor was it the beds of flowers, with their variegated hues, which encircled the ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... produces some agreeable effects. There is a dash of Shelley in it, too, for the life on the isle of Paradise with Alceste Contarini is plainly borrowed from Epiphsychidion. Disraeli does not even disdain a touch of "Monk" Lewis without his voluptuousness, and of Mrs. Radcliffe without her horrors, for he is bent on serving up an olio entirely in the taste of the day. But through it all he is conspicuously himself, and the dedication to beauty and the extraordinary intellectual exultation of such a book as Contarini Fleming ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... What man has ever heard the moral reflections and the corrupting confidences of these young girls? They alone know the sports at which honor is lost in advance, those essays in pleasure, those promptings in voluptuousness, those imitations of bliss, which may be compared to the thefts made by greedy children from a dessert which is locked up. A girl may come forth from her boarding school a virgin, but never chaste. She will have discussed, time and time again at secret meetings, the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... notice that Venus is the protectrice of musicians, embroiderers, perfumers, classic modellers, and all who work in elegant attire or administer to the luxuries of the great; but when she is afflicted, she represents 'the lower orders of the votaries of voluptuousness.' ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... will prove to little purpose. The learning will, it is true, remain; but it will be as the quartz out of which the gold has been already crushed, or the dry husks of corn. It will be valueless and turn to no good use, will serve only to feed the swine of intellectual voluptuousness and infidelity. It is, believe me, the higher learning of the soul that gilds our earthly lore. The loftier object of all education is so to train the intellect that it may become competent to understand something, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... not even the uncountable figures of stone in the bas-reliefs which, appearing to turn and whisper to each other, seem in the shadows to take a delight in portraying by pantomimic gestures a love wholly allied to voluptuousness and license. ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... Solomon—Wisdom two, six to nine. 'Let us fill oursel's wi' costly wine an' ointments,' I said: 'an' let no flower o' the spring pass by us. Let us crown oursel's wi' rosebuds, afore they be withered: let none of us go without his due part of our voluptuousness'—" ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... half-mocking phrases with which, as a rule, she fenced herself about in those moments when he sought to draw her closer to him, were gone. Her eyes were as bright as ever, but softer. Her mouth was firm, yet somehow with a faint, womanly voluptuousness in its sweet curves. The fingers which lay unresistingly in his ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... summoned the other worlds, the stars, to come nearer to him, and to give an account of themselves') and Kepler ('who hath received it into his care, that no new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge'). He rebukes himself for his abandonment to 'the worst voluptuousness, which is an hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages.' At twenty-three he was a soldier against Spain under Raleigh, and went on the 'Islands Voyage'; later on, at different periods, he travelled over many parts of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... averse to trouble of any sort, so that the necessity for the simplest manual operations will rouse me to indignation: but if a thing will contribute largely to my ever-growing voluptuousness, I will undergo a considerable amount of labour to accomplish it, though without steady effort, being liable to side-winds ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... top with pearls, showed their golden bronze bodies which moved with the ease of an adder. They twisted, turned, swayed their hips, bound with a narrow black girdle, threw themselves back, bowed down, inclined their heads to right and left as if they found a secret voluptuousness in touching their polished chins with their cold, bare shoulders, swelled out their breasts like doves, knelt and rose, pressed their hands to their bosom or voluptuously outspread their arms, which seemed to flutter as the wings of Iris or Nephthys, dragged their limbs, bent the knee, displayed ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... portraying the natives, made an agreeable exposition of their ways and days, and their naive blending of Christian and Maori beliefs. His description of the festival called Areosis is startling. Magical practices, with their attendant cruelties and voluptuousness, still prevail in Tahiti, though only at certain intervals. Very superstitious, the natives see demons and ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... And scorn those joys thou never shalt possess. Go bear these tidings to great Lucifer: Seeing Faustus hath incurr'd eternal death By desperate thoughts against Jove's deity, Say, he surrenders up to him his soul, So he will spare him four and twenty years, Letting him live in all voluptuousness; Having thee ever to attend on me, To give me whatsoever I shall ask, To tell me whatsoever I demand, To slay mine enemies, and to aid my friends, And always be obedient to my will. Go, and return to mighty Lucifer, And meet me in my study at ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... morality, sobriety, and submissiveness. All arts, except military music and war dances, will be eliminated from the city. She needs neither poets nor painters not yet musicians, who corrupt morals by softening them, and by making all feel the secret pang of voluptuousness. All theories, whether aristocratic or tending more or less to communism, are derived from the politics of Plato either by being evolved from them or by ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Greek manners and taste. Homer, as we saw, was right in making Troy essentially a Greek city, with inhabitants superior in all culture to their kinsmen on the Western shore, and perhaps proportionally weaker on the practical or moral side, and with an element of languid Ionian voluptuousness in them, typified by the cedar and gold of the chamber of Paris—an element which the austere, more strictly European influence of the Dorian Apollo will one day correct in all genuine Greeks. The Aegean, with its islands, is, then, a bond of union, not a barrier; ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... beautiful, some obscene. Hogs and frogs wound themselves up together in inextricable tangles, monkeys with ignoble gestures were mixed up with interlaced birds in never ending variety—it was a world of caricatures of voluptuousness, of monkey-like actions and satirical suggestions, in which appeared carnal passion with ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... travelling, another ambition, a third study, a fourth voluptuousness and a mistress. Why do these men take so ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... defending or attacking something; only the lily-livered hide their natural cowardice by asking the impudent question, What is it all about? The heroic gird on the armor of the Lord, square their shoulders, and establish a muscular tension which serves to dispel doubt and begets the voluptuousness of bigotry and fanaticism.[28] In this mood questions become issues of right and wrong, not of expediency and inexpediency. It has been said that the worthy people of Cambridge are able promptly to reduce the most complex social or economic problem to ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... Joan of Arc's having loved and been beloved; and her death is a surprising and most affecting variation upon that of Agrican in Boiardo. Tasso's enchantress Armida is a variation of the Angelica of the same poet, combined with Ariosto's Alcina; but her passionate voluptuousness makes her quite a new character in regard to the one; and she is as different from the painted hag of the Orlando as youth, beauty, and patriotic intention can make her. She is not very sentimental; but all the passion ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... false. An exquisite artist; physically and spiritually he is art; he is the muse herself, or rather, he is one of the minions of the muse. Passing from flower to flower he goes, his whole nature pulsing with butterfly voluptuousness. He has written poems as good as Hugo, as good as Leconte de Lisle, as good as Banville, as good as Baudelaire, as good as Gautier, as good as Coppee; he never wrote an ugly line in his life, but he never wrote a line that some one of his brilliant ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... impetuous with frenzy, incapable of suffering the slightest resistance even from the hours and the elements, without flying into a passion that threatened to destroy his body; obstinate to excess; passionately fond of all kind of voluptuousness, of women, with even a worse passion strongly developed at the same time; fond not less of wine, good living, hunting, music, and gaming, in which last he could not endure to be beaten; in fine, abandoned to every passion, and transported by every pleasure; ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... brunette. Her features were not perhaps very regular, but her glossy black hair was a beauty in itself. She had a pair of dark, melting eyes, and her wide, high forehead showed that she was gifted with great intelligence. There was an air of restrained voluptuousness about her, and she seemed ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... was that K'ung K'ung, the Taoist, in consequence of his perception, (in his state of) abstraction, of passion, the generation, from this passion, of voluptuousness, the transmission of this voluptuousness into passion, and the apprehension, by means of passion, of its unreality, forthwith altered his name for that of "Ch'ing Tseng" (the Voluptuous Bonze), and changed the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... girl who had given herself entirely to him, in all her trust and sincerity, in all her candor, and all her chastely-timid innocent modesty. But Adrienne's love was insipid compared with the intoxicating and appetizing voluptuousness of this woman, so adorable in her exquisite luxury, the refinements of her charm, the singular grace of her attitudes, of her mind, of her disjointed conversation which dared everything, mocked, ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... up for no other purpose than that of ministering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious masters. Voluptuousness is therefore considered as their chief accomplishment.... The Moors have singular ideas of feminine perfection. The gracefulness of figure and motion, and a countenance enlivened by expression, are by no means essential points in their standard: ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... course. The bouquets were exchanged every half-hour, and music soft and subdued, but constant and thrilling, wound them up by exquisite gradations to that pitch of refined excitement which is so strange a union of delicacy and voluptuousness, when the soul, as it were, becomes sensual, and the body, as it were, dissolves into spirit. And in this choice assembly, where all was youth, and elegance, and beauty, was it not right that every sound should be melody, every sight a sight of ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... of great talents, and of brilliant wit; but, a worn-out votary of voluptuousness, his desires became fastidious in proportion as they grew weak, and the native tenderness of his heart was undermined by a vitiated imagination. A thoughtless career of libertinism and social enjoyment, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... scoffs at, who scatter abroad your all, even unto the raiment of your poverty, and did gird sack-cloth about your loins, and did resolve as beggars to endure the gibes and the kicks wherewith brutal insolence and swilling voluptuousness drive away misery from their tables, that by so doing ye might thoroughly purge yourselves from ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... however, to art, than any popular craving for "human interest" or for the comfort of amorous voluptuousness, is the unpardonable stupidity of puritanical censorship. Such censorship, in its crass impertinence, assumes that its miserable and hypocritical negations represent that deep, fierce, terrible "imperative" uttered by the soul's ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... summer would have astonished her husband, with her new neighbors. Apparently she was not over twenty-five. Her chestnut hair was a marvel for brightness and profusion, her broad brow smooth and white, her figure, as Winston had described it to his sister, rounded, even to voluptuousness, yet supple as it had been at fifteen. In her cheeks, too, the blushes fluctuated readily and softly, and when she smiled, her teeth showed like those of a little child in size and purity. Her voice matched her beauty well, never loud, always melodious, with a peculiar, gliding, legato movement ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... entertainment was not conformable to the Carthaginian custom, or to military discipline, but as might be expected in a city and in a house both remarkable for luxury, was furnished with all the allurements of voluptuousness. Perolla, the son of Calavius, was the only person who could not be won either by the solicitations of the masters of the house, or those which Hannibal sometimes employed. The youth himself pleaded ill health as an apology, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... heaven, the duplicate blooming of the hills. On these latter there were no trees, nor even shrubs of any size. The impressions wrought on the observer were those of richness, warmth, color, quietude, uniformity, softness, delicacy, daintiness, voluptuousness, and a miraculous extremeness of culture that suggested dreams of a new race of fairies, laborious, tasteful, magnificent, and fastidious; but as the eye traced upward the myriad-tinted slope, from its sharp junction with the water to its vague termination amid the folds of overhanging ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the devil who worked in her entrails, and there raged like a tempest, and from that came the astringent biting, nitrous shooting, precipitant, and diabolical movements, squeezings, and writhings of love and voluptuousness, from which several men had emerged bruised, torn, bitten, pinched and crushed; and that since the coming of our Saviour, who had imprisoned the master devil in the bellies of the swine, no malignant beast had ever been seen in ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... Theocritus nor Ariosto had a finer or a more healthful sense of the pleasantness of external objects, or loved better to luxuriate amidst sunbeams and flowers, the songs of nightingales, the juice of summer fruits, and the coolness of shady fountains. His conception of love unites all the voluptuousness of the Oriental haram, and all the gallantry of the chivalric tournament, with all the pure and quiet affection of an English fireside. His poetry reminds us of the miracles of Alpine scenery. Nooks and dells, beautiful as fairyland, are embosomed in its most ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... chamber, flooded my mind with a drowsy sense of the romantic, till, from very excess of melancholy sweetness in the picture, I was fain to close my eyes. I avow that that lonesome room—gloomy in its lunar bath of soft perfumed light—shrouded in the sullen voluptuousness of plushy, narcotic-breathing draperies—pervaded by the mysterious spirit of its brooding occupant—grew more and more on my fantasy, till the remembrance had for me all the cool refreshment shed by a midsummer-night's dream in the dewy deeps of some Perrhoebian grove of cornel and lotos ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... else established the truth of the assertion that he had not become weaker in Alexandria and had not delayed there out of voluptuousness. For how could he have won that victory so easily without employing a great store of insight and great force? When now Pharnaces had fled he was preparing to conduct a campaign at once against the Parthian, but as certain quarrels were taking place there he withdrew rather ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... and delicacy, exacting all proofs of decency and gallantry, patient efforts, respect, vows, discretion, and reciprocal affection. The ideal was one of heroism, nobleness, and bravery. In the eighteenth century this ideal became mere desire; love became voluptuousness, which was to be found in art, music, styles, fashions—in everything. Woman herself was nothing more than the embodiment of voluptuousness; it made her what she was, directing and fashioning her. Every movement she made, every garment she wore, all the care ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... the character of his physiognomy. His falling collar displayed a full white throat, which might have served as a model for a statue of Antinous, had it not borne more the stamp of genius in its proportions than of physical voluptuousness. The hands, which now hastily resumed their neglected occupation, had all the fairness and well-moulded contour of a woman's, without that delicacy of size which would have stamped them as effeminate. Had he been aware of his own beauty, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... bees, who create all wealth and fill the magazines with provisions, fuel and clothing, enjoy only a minor part of this product, while the drones, the idlers, keep the warehouses locked up, and revel in luxury and voluptuousness." Engel said: "The history of all times teaches us that the oppressing always maintain their tyrannies by force and violence. Some day the war will break out; therefore all workingmen should unite and prepare for the last war, the outcome of which will be the end forever of all war, and ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... of Aspasia was instinct with the voluptuousness of intellect. From the eyes, the cheek, the divine lip, one might hive honey. Both the Loves were exquisite: one, that zephyr sentiment which visits all the roses of life; the other, the Amore Greco, may be fitly described ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the gentlemen. She lives, however, after her own taste. Her house, I am told, must have been built and furnished about the time of Sir Charles Grandison: every thing about it is somewhat formal and stately; but has been softened down into a degree of voluptuousness, characteristic of an old lady, very tender-hearted and romantic, and that loves her ease. The cushions of the great arm-chairs, and wide sofas, almost bury you when you sit down on them. Flowers of the most rare and delicate kind are placed about the rooms, and on little japanned stands; and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... vain that she struggled." We might compare these passages with a letter of July 10, 1836, in which she tells how she throws herself, all dressed as she is, into the Indre, and then continues her course through the sunny meadows, and with what voluptuousness she revels in all the joys of primitive life, and imagines herself living in the beautiful times of ancient Greece. There are days and pages when George Sand, under the afflux of physical life, is pagan. Her genius then is that of the greenwood ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... careful of his person, well fed, and not only without principles, but evidently with the principle that one should take advantage of the pleasure that offers itself. There was a bond between them, music,—the most refined form of sensual voluptuousness. What was there to restrain them? Nothing. Everything, on the contrary, attracted them. And she, she had been and had remained a mystery. I did not know her. I knew her only as an animal, and an animal nothing can or should restrain. And now I remember their faces ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... them curiously inlaid with gold, and very artificially made: Some are very large, almost ten paces high, standing upright, and having many smaller idols placed around, which seem to give reverence to the great one. The priests of these idols appear to live more regularly, and are less addicted to voluptuousness than other idolaters. Yet wantonness is not looked upon in this country as any great sin; for they say if a woman invites a man, there is no harm in compliance, but if the man solicits the woman, it ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... which a mulatto might avenge the insult of a white,—prohibiting the freed from wearing the same dress as their former masters or mistresses wore;—"the belles affranchies found, in a costume whereof the negligence seemed a very inspiration of voluptuousness, means of evading that social inferiority which the law sought to impose upon them:—they began to inspire the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... former misdoings. Thus one writer asserts;[297] "This monarch, in the former part of his life, was remarkable for dissipation and extravagance of conduct; in the latter, he became the slave of the popedom. Voluptuousness, ambition, superstition, each in their turn had the ascendant in this extraordinary character." Thus does another sum up the whole question in one short note:[298] "The assertions of his reformation are so express, that the fact cannot ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... history and her present condition, in the regal palaces she has reared. Upon these monumental walls are inscribed, in letters more legible than the hieroglyphics of Egypt, and as ineffaceable, the long and dreary story of kingly vice, voluptuousness and pride, and of popular servility and oppression. The unthinking tourist saunters through these magnificent saloons, upon which have been lavished the wealth of princes and the toil of ages, and admires their gorgeous ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... staves, which left large apertures for the passage of his hawklike gaze. This brown-skinned, broad-shouldered priest, hitherto condemned to the austere virginity of the cloister, was quivering and boiling in the presence of this night scene of love and voluptuousness. This young and beautiful girl given over in disarray to the ardent young man, made melted lead flow in his-veins; his eyes darted with sensual jealousy beneath all those loosened pins. Any one who could, at that moment, have seen the face of the unhappy man glued to the wormeaten bars, would have ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... leviable on their respective occupations. And accordingly during the reign of Yudhishthira who was ever devoted to virtue, his dominion grew in prosperity. Indeed, the prosperity of the kingdom was increased not by these alone but even by persons wedded to voluptuousness and indulging in all luxuries to their fill. And the king of kings, Yudhishthira, whose sway extended over all, was possessed of every accomplishment and bore everything with patience. And, O king, whatever ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli |
