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More "Austerity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... having inadvertently sucked down a fly which in an adventurous mood has strolled into one of those little holes in the instrument, coughs himself half out of his evening clothes, does the conductor forsake his air of austerity and use language unbefitting a solemn occasion? Does he pick up his music-stand and hurl it at the offender? He does not. It would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 1, 1920 • Various
... an entertainment, and fled to Delhi. He there professed himself a Calendar or religious person, to shun the punishment due to his crimes. These Calendars go about loaded with iron chains and live abstemiously; yet with all their outward shew of religious austerity, they practice all manner of lewdness and wickedness in secret. They enter into no town, but blow a horn on the out-skirts, that people may bring them alms. Sometimes they go about in bands of two thousand or more, laying the country ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... favour of an immediate interview with him. The letter was marked "Private and Confidential," and had been addressed to him at the bank, instead of at home—two unusual circumstances which made him obey the summons with the more alacrity. The senior member of the firm, a man of much austerity of manner, made him gravely welcome, requested him to take a seat, and proceeded to explain the matter in hand in the picked expressions of a veteran man of business. A person, who must remain nameless, but of whom the lawyer had every reason to think well—a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... almost feminine aspect of the Louvain Town Hall with the forbidding masculinity of the destroyed Ypres Cloth Hall. Again, the profusion of ornament and statuettes, the delicate flanking towers, especially in Bruges and Louvain, contrast with the austerity of the old "halles." These luxurious mansions were built neither for military nor for economic purposes. They are far too small to be of any use as covered markets. In fact, the new municipal buildings of the fifteenth century only preserved one characteristic of their predecessors. They were ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... boasting an aristocracy of morals, and eminently persuasive of public opinion, if not commanding it. Previous to the relaxation, by amendment, of a certain legal process, this class was held to represent the austerity of the country. At present a relaxed austerity is represented; and still the bulk of the members are of fair repute, though not quite on the level of their pretensions. They were then, while more sharply divided from the titular superiors they are socially absorbing, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... recognition that in vigorous intelligence, after all, divinity was most likely to be found a resident. With this was connected the feeling, increasing with his advance to manhood, of a poetic beauty in mere clearness of thought, the actually aesthetic charm of a cold austerity of mind; as if the kinship of that to the clearness of physical light were something more than a figure of speech. Of all those various religious fantasies, as so many forms of enthusiasm, he could well appreciate the picturesque; that was made easy by his natural Epicureanism, already prompting ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... song of a bird, but it was a melody which no bird would adhere to. A theme was repeated again and again. In the middle of trills, grace-notes, runs and catches it recurred with a strange, almost holy, solemnity,—a hushing, slender melody full of austerity and aloofness. There was something in it to set her heart beating. She yearned to it with her ears and her lips. Was it joy, menace, carelessness? She did not know, but this she did know, that however terrible it was personal ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... Felix. Like her husband and cousin, during the early years of the Restoration, she was a brilliant type of the period, combining, as she did, godliness with worldliness, occasionally figuring in politics, and concealing her youth under the guise of austerity. However, in 1828, her mask seemed to fall at the moment when Madame de Mortsauf died; for, then, she wrongly fancied herself the object of Eugene de Rastignac's wooing. Under Louis Philippe she took part in an intrigue formed for the purpose of throwing her sister-in-law, ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... for the people. He had been poor and laborious; but greatness did not change the tone of his spirit, or lessen the sympathies of his nature. His character was strangely symmetrical. He was temperate, without austerity; brave, without rashness; constant, without obstinacy. His love of justice was only equalled by his delight in compassion. His regard for personal honor was only excelled by love of country. His self-abnegation ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Apostate, and slew a Pagan champion who challenged the best man amongst the Christians. Returning to his own country he devoted himself to religion, and became Abbot of Glastonbury, but subsequently retired to a cave on the side of a mountain, where he lived a life of great austerity. Once as he was lying in his cell he heard two men out abroad discoursing about Wyn Ab Nudd, and saying that he was king of the Tylwyth or Teg Fairies, and lord of Unknown, whereupon Collen thrusting his ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... to take it: a welcome gift it was. He examined my face, I thought, with austerity, as I came near: the traces of tears were doubtless very ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... gentleness of manner goes a long way with such young folk as we were all then, when it is seen naturally and easily worn for our sakes, and in sympathy with our accustomed glee, by one who in his ordinary deportment may have added the austerity of religion to the venerableness of old age. Smiles from old Laurence Logan, the Seceder, were like rare sun-glimpses in the gloom—and made the hush of his house pleasant as a more cheerful place; for through the restraint laid on reverent youth by feeling ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... verdict by a long course of behavior; austerity in the family begets fear; an affectation, whether of folly or resentment, is at last credited to nature; man is seldom allowed to escape from the ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... and musical. It had charmed many a woman's heart, despite the fact that he had led a life of austerity and sought no woman's smiles. But this girl at the sound of it gave a loud cry and bounded up the mountain, leaping through the ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... with military austerity, "the quality and condition of your cattle places them beyond our consideration. Beef intended for delivery at this post must arrive here with sufficient flesh to withstand the rigors of our winter. ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... manifest that the scene of this Jesuit's labours had not been chiefly, or long, beyond the borders of civilization. In the plain bare room where, for all its hospitality and good cheer, reigned an air of rude simplicity and austerity of life—into this somewhat rarefied atmosphere Father Richmond brought a whiff from another world. As he greeted the two strangers, and said simply that he had just arrived, himself, by way of the Anvik portage, the Colonel ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... now by the bond of a common danger. Indeed, the near approach of a crisis in their fortunes had broken down much of the distinction of manner which had served to separate them. The sectary had lost something of his austerity and become flushed and eager at the prospect of battle, while the giddy man of fashion was hushed into unwonted gravity as he considered the danger of his position. Their old feuds were forgotten as they gathered on the parapet and gazed with set faces at the thick columns ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lifted face and found it merely lovely; he was far too much of a fool to see that it was working with a final fatigue and that its austerity was agony. He was even fool enough to ask it a question. "Why did you save us?" ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Provinciales, and the design of an apology for Christianity with which his Pensees are connected, together with certain scientific studies and the deepening passion of religion, make up what remained of Pascal's life. His spirit grew austere, but in his austerity there was an inexpressible joy. Exhausted by his ascetic practices and the inward flame of his soul, Pascal died on August 19, 1662. "May God never leave me" ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... had changed since the days of Robespierre's supremacy; Spartan austerity had vanished; and the former insane jealousy of individual pre-eminence was now favouring a startling reaction which was soon to install the one supremely able man ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... names and foibles, he involuntarily felt that he was telling over a roll of the mighty. The white villagers came marching through his mind as beings austere, and the very cranks and quirks of their characters somehow held that austerity. There were the Brownell sisters, two old maids, Molly and Patti, who lived in a big brick house on the hill. Peter remembered that Miss Molly Brownell always doled out to his mother, at Monday's washday ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... was the old Duxbury: the Duxbury of long, cold winters, privations, and austerity. Down by the shore to-day is the new Duxbury—a Duxbury of automobiles, of business men's trains, of gay society at Powder Point, where in the winter is the well-known boys' school—a Duxbury of summer cottages, white and ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... they always take care so to direct their wood-cutting task that the tree may fall on the water-side, but this is by no means the case, and appears to be simply due, as Martin points out, to the fact that trees by the water-side usually slope towards the water. The austerity of labour alternates, it may be added, with the pleasures of the table. From time to time the Beavers remove the bark of the fallen trees, of which they are very fond, and feed ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... birth, made him, the moment he had recovered from a surprise which had almost deprived him of reason, suspect, himself, the imposition she mentioned. He had therefore sent for the woman, and questioned her with the utmost austerity; she turned pale, and was extremely embarrassed; but still she persisted in affirming, that she had really brought him the daughter of Lady Belmont. His perplexity, he said, almost distracted him: he had always observed, ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... forests and upon the plains of the west: whatever they may have been before their migration, they soon become meditative, abstracted, and taciturn. These, and especially the last, are the peculiar characteristics of the Indian; his taciturnity, indeed, amounts to austerity, sometimes impressing the observer with the idea of affectation. The dispersion, which must have been the effect of unlimited choice in lands—the mode of life pursued by those who depended upon the chase for ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... rooms and their associations recalled to me forcibly the mysterious Pair, whose proceedings had filled my mind with so much of curiosity and interest when I was last a sojourner in the abode. During my residence in Germany I had not forgotten them; and although the austerity of my pursuits in that country had schooled my fancy to a soberer pace, I could not forbear from enquiring, in one or two letters which I had occasion to write to the younger Sainsbury, whether the milkman of Walworth and his Shadow still pursued their rounds uninterrupted, or if ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... choice should fall on one of the two schools which offered such an end, those of the Porch and the Garden. Which of the two would a man like Lucretius prefer? The answer is not so obvious as it appears. For Lucretius has in him nothing of the Epicurean in our sense. His austerity is nearer to that of the Stoic. It was the speculative basis underlying the ethical system, and not the ethical system itself, that determined his choice. Epicurus had allied his theory of pleasure [61] with the atomic theory of Democritus. Stoicism had ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... been the first of a long series of antagonism and recoils, and as the child had matured, the purity and loftiness of her nature had by this very contact grown chilled toward austerity. Thus nature lends a gradual protective hardening to a tender surface during abrasion with a coarser thing. It left Isabel more reserved with her grandmother than with any one else of all the persons ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... a stain to everybody's nobility, if men of no original honor should rise to the highest dignity and power; while others, conscious of their own evil practices, and of the violation of the laws and customs of their country, were afraid of the austerity of the man; which, in an office of such great power was likely to prove most uncompromising and severe. And so consulting among themselves, they brought forward seven candidates in opposition to him, who sedulously set themselves to court the people's favor by fair promises, as ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... of life austere enough, she, by her confessor's advice, took the habit of the third order of St. Francis, called the Penitents; and, three years after, that of the mitigated Clares or Urbanists, with the view of reforming that order, and reducing it to its primitive austerity. Having obtained of the abbot of Corbie a small hermitage, she spent in it three years in extraordinary austerity, near that abbey. After this, in order to execute the project she had long formed of re-establishing the primitive spirit and practice ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... hero proceeds from the same wish to do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to be solemn, and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine-drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk, or gold. A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses; but without railing or precision, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... his attempt. So cruelly disappointed in a man whom all Paris deemed incorruptibly honest, de Gourville suspected nothing else from Mademoiselle de l'Enclos. It was absurd to hope for probity in a woman of reprehensible habits when that virtue was absent in a man who lived a life of such austerity as the Grand Penitencier, hence he determined to abstain from visiting her altogether, lest he might hate the woman he had ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... all!" cried his noble friend. "My discovery of the unbrotherly sentiments of Philip has tended to enlighten me towards the hatefulness of his policy. The reserve of his nature—the harshness of his soul—the austerity of his bigotry—chill me to the marrow!—The Holy Inquisition deserves, in my estimation, a name the very ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... sky, and all around us is floating music as enlivening as the song of birds, yet solemn as the strains of the sanctuary. It is that of a life in unison from its childhood to its close; rising indeed like "an unbroken hymn of praise to God." There is no austerity in its piety, no levity in its gladness. It shows that "virtue in herself is lovely," but if "goodness" is ever "awful," it is not here in the company of this young ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... little if he had been accredited to some dissolute court, such as that in which the Marchioness of Montespan had lately been dominant. But there was an obvious impropriety in sending him on an embassy rather of a spiritual than of a secular nature to a pontiff of primitive austerity. The Protestants all over Europe sneered; and Innocent, already unfavourably disposed to the English government, considered the compliment which had been paid him, at so much risk and at so heavy a cost, as little better than an affront. The salary of the Ambassador was fixed at a hundred pounds ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... He could not stay in bed, and he could not hang about the house. He did not know how to demean himself to either of the young men when he met them. He could not be cordial as he ought to be with Urmand; nor could he be austere to George with that austerity which he felt would have been proper on his part. He was becoming very tired of his dignity and authority. Hitherto the exercise of power in his household had generally been easy enough, his wife and Marie had always been loving and pleasant in their obedience. Till ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... passion for the general interest; when they can be kept alive and be brought into play, in subordination and subservience to the great end, they are cherished as useful, and revered as laudable; and whatever austerity and rigour you may impute to my character, there are few more susceptible of personal ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... Red King was not only grievous, it was arbitrary, capricious, cruel, and without semblance of law. The austerity of the Conqueror had been conspicuous; equally conspicuous was the debauchery of his son. The Conqueror had been faithful and conscientious in seeing that vacancies in the Church were filled up quickly and wisely. ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought Becket's ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... under the spell of such surroundings, we are not surprised to learn that Kant was of a singularly grave, gentle and quiet demeanour, which in old age tended to deepen into austerity and increased conscientiousness, were that possible, in the fulfilment of his duties. With the simple words, "It is the time," his servant Lampe called him every morning at five minutes to five, and never to the end, according to the testimony of his servant, was ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... which have been built up by his success. On shipboard, Senor Pages had been a genial, charming, distinguished fellow passenger. In his luxurious business office he still was genial, charming, but his environment seemed to lend him a certain austerity. ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... much struck with the undemonstrativeness of their meeting, for there was high esteem for austerity in the Puritan world, in contrast to the utter want of self-restraint shown by the ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... many temptations to falsehood. They should be encouraged to talk freely of all their amusements to their parents, and to ask them for whatever they want to complete their little inventions. Instead of banishing all the freedom of wit and humour, by the austerity of his presence, a preceptor, with superior talents, and all the resources of property in his favour, might easily become the arbiter deliciarum ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... Presbyterian doctrines during the days of Elizabeth, now had these imposed upon it by superior authority. The two Commonwealth Masters, John Arrowsmith (1644-1653) and Anthony Tuckney (1653-1661), were able men of Puritan austerity, the rule of the latter being the more strict; judging from the after careers of its members, the College was certainly capably directed. A well-authenticated College tradition relates that when, at an election, the President called upon the Master to have regard to the "godly," Tuckney ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... Master's, 80-l. Gea and Ouranos, Grecian Deities of Earth and Heaven, 850-l. Geburah, in the Kabalah, is called Judgment, which includes limitation, 764-l. Geburah, Mother, Severity or Strict Justice, the fifth Sephiroth, 552-m. Geburah, one of the Sephiroth; Austerity, Rigor or Severity, 753-m. Geburah represents, or is, the Ox, 798-m. Geburah, the Sephiroth, conjoined sexually with Gedulah to produce Tepareth, 764-l. Gaber, an Arab, cultivated the Hermetic Science, 840-l. Gedulah and Geburah, the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... into the hands of a bookseller. Had it depended on her relatives, the name of Lady Mary had only reached us in the satires of Pope. The greater part of her epistolary correspondence was destroyed by her mother; and what that good and Gothic lady spared, was suppressed by the hereditary austerity of rank, of which her family was too susceptible. The entire correspondence of this admirable writer and studious woman (for once, in perusing some unpublished letters of Lady Mary's, I discovered that "she had been in the habit of reading seven ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... of the outrage was plain enough to Hale's inexperience now. Yet he could not understand the cool acquiescence of his fellow-passengers, and was furious. His reflections were interrupted by a voice which seemed to come from a greater distance. He fancied it was even softer in tone, as if a certain austerity was relaxed. ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... the portrait of his father, exactly above the head of the girl, as if it were ignoring her in its painted austerity of feeling. He did not finish the sentence; but he did not remain ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... valley, when I came upon an artificial opening in the face of a low precipice, and recognized it by its location as a hermitage which had often been pointed out to me from a distance as the den of a hermit of high renown for dirt and austerity. I knew he had lately been offered a situation in the Great Sahara, where lions and sandflies made the hermit-life peculiarly attractive and difficult, and had gone to Africa to take possession, so I thought I would look in and see how the atmosphere of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... mirrors or bottle displays, Jorgensen had had some drifter paint a night desert: all dull pink and bronze crags smothering in sand under a black sky. The stars twinkled like glass beads, which they were. Lights were dim enough to hide the Martian austerity of the metal furnishings. ...
— Fee of the Frontier • Horace Brown Fyfe
... of modern times early monachism must seem an unbeautiful and even offensive life. True piety was exceptional, fanaticism the rule. Ideals which were surely false impelled men to lead a life of idleness and savage austerity,—to sink very near the level of beasts, as did the Nitrian hermits when they murdered Hypatia in Alexandria. But this view does not give the whole truth. To shut out a wicked and sensual world, with ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... of this kind can be found with 'Ghosts,' that drastic tragedy of a house built on the quicksands of falsehood, that appalling modern play with the overwhelming austerity of an ancient tragic drama, that extraordinarily compact and moving piece, in which the Norwegian playwright accomplished his avowed purpose of evoking "the sensation of having lived thru a passage of actual ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... hitherto she had been wonderfully successful. All through his married life she had resided at the palace and been the ruling power, and when his wife had died twenty years before, snuffed out by the cold austerity of the Bishop's sister and the ecclesiastical monotony of Blanford, Miss Matilda had assumed the reins of power, and had never laid ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... saints—mortals canonised by the Kin-rey—and build temples in their honour. The laws concerning personal and ceremonial purity, which form the principal feature of this religion, are exceedingly strict, not unlike those imposed on the ancient Jews. There are several orders of priests, monks, and nuns, whose austerity, like that of Europe, is maintained in theory more than ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... impression, the precise purpose in his situation to be consulted; and that they were illustrated by parables, the choice and structure of which would have been admired in any composition whatever;—when we observe him free from the usual symptoms of enthusiasm, heat and vehemence in devotion, austerity in institutions, and a wild particularity in the description of a future state; free also from the depravities of his age and country; without superstition amongst the most superstitious of men, yet not decrying positive distinctions or external observances, but soberly calling ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... to each other. Their faces daily lost something of that deathlike hue which had at first marked them, and they visibly improved in strength. They began to throw off some of that cold reserve and forbidding austerity, which had kept the hunter so long in ignorance of their true character. Every day, their appearance and behaviour approximated more nearly to that of the beings of ordinary life. One evening the hunter returned very late, after having spent the day in toilsome exertion. Again he deposited ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... merchandising, with tourism and construction assuming greater importance. Sugar, the chief crop, accounts for nearly half of exports, while the banana industry is the country's largest employer. The government's tough austerity program in 1997 resulted in an economic slowdown that continued in 1998. The trade deficit has been growing, mostly as a result of low export prices for sugar and bananas. The tourist and construction sectors strengthened in early 1999, supporting growth of 6% in 1999 ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of the Louvre. Ombos told me that the life of Albert Magnus had been written by Dr. Sighart. This Dominican, magnus in magia, major in philosophia, maximus in theologia, was distinguished alike for his knowledge of the black art and his great virtue, for austerity of regimen, and dislike of any form of society. For other details of this philosopher I must refer you to Sighart's excellent monograph and Mr. James Mew's work on The Black Art from which we learn that Albert of Cologne was accused by the vulgar of holding ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... severity Was not confined to feeling for her friend, Whose fame she rather doubted with posterity, Unless her habits should begin to mend: But Juan also shared in her austerity, But mix'd with pity, pure as e'er was penn'd: His inexperience moved her gentle ruth, And (as her junior by six ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... formed upon the imagination, the character, and the custom of a nation. The Italians are passionately fond of the fine arts, of music, painting, and even pantomime: of every thing, in short, that strikes the senses. How then could they be satisfied with the austerity of an eloquent dialogue, as their only theatrical pleasure?[24] Vainly has Alfieri, with all his genius, endeavoured to reduce them to it; he felt himself that his system ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... greatest misgivings; that matron, keeping her eye on the girls, that carefully selected library, the porter's bell, these casual allusions to "discipline" that set her thinking of scraps of the Babs Wheeler controversy. There was a regularity, an austerity about this project that chilled her, she hardly knew why. Her own vague intentions had been an amiable, hospitable, agreeably cheap establishment to which the homeless feminine employees in London could resort freely and cheerfully, and it was only very slowly that she perceived that ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... changed and the well-balanced figures, raising bent arms, danced with riotous abandon. In a minute or two the melancholy note was struck again and the movements were marked by dignified reserve. Kit got a hint of Southern passion and, by contrast, of the austerity that often goes with ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... formulated. A person was as liable to be charged with heresy if better than the crowd as if worse. "In fact, amid the license of the Middle Ages ascetic virtue was apt to be regarded as a sign of heresy. About 1220 a clerk of Spire, whose austerity subsequently led him to join the Franciscans, was only saved by the interposition of Conrad, afterwards Bishop of Hildesheim, from being burned as a heretic, because his preaching led certain women to lay ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... very bare. It almost looked like the parlour of a convent; with a little more austerity, whitened walls and a few thick velvet and gilt lives of the saints on the tables, the likeness would have been complete. The house itself was conventual in aspect, and Lady Channice, as she stood there in the quiet light at the window, looked not unlike a nun, were it not for her crown of pale ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... uses of illusion; but if that note of sympathy had been offered to Hilda she would doubtless have retorted that it was precisely because she saw him that she loved him. His figure, in its poverty and austerity, was always with her; she made with the fabric of her nature a kind of shrine for it, enclosing, encompassing, and her possession of him, by her knowledge, was deep and warm and protecting. I think the very fulness of it brought her a kind of content with which, but for Llewellyn ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... phenomenon intensely excited the poor Romanists, who looked on him as a genuine "saint" of the ancient breed. The stamp of heaven seemed to them clear in a frame so wasted by austerity, so superior to worldly pomp, and so partaking in all their indigence. That a dozen such men would have done more to convert all Ireland to Protestantism, than the whole apparatus of the Church Establishment, was ere long my conviction; though I was at first ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... reached the final stage of human progress, and turned over the last leaf in the volume of human improvements. The day when this is said and believed marks the end of a nation's life. Is it possible that, after all, our old protestant spirit, with its rationality, its austerity, its steady political energy, has been struck with something of the mortal fatigue that seizes catholic societies ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... square: it was hither, towards this clear-limned goal, that bore him, like a magic carpet, the young enthusiast's most ambitious dream.—But in the life that swarmed about the Conservatorium, there was nothing of a tedious austerity. It was one of the briskest times of day, and the short street and the steps of the building were alive with young people of both sexes. Young men sauntered to and from the cafe at the corner, or stood gesticulating ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... filled with a ponderous amiability. It was not often that this took a practical form, though it is on record that in an exuberant moment he once gave a small boy a halfpenny. More frequently it merely led him to soften the porcine austerity of his demeanour. Today, business having been uncommonly good, he felt pleased with the world. He had left his cash-desk and was assailing a bowl of soup at one of the side-tables. Except for a belated luncher at the end of the room the place was empty. It was one of the hours when ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... friends. A generous mind, perhaps, would rather itself suffer jealousy than be quick in suspecting, or complacent in causing, or precise in setting it down. But Mrs. Hutchinson doubtless offered up the envy of her companions in homage to her Puritan lover's splendour. His austerity did not hinder him from wearing his "fine, thick-set head of hair" in long locks that were an offence to many of his own sect, but, she says, "a great ornament to him." But for herself she has some dissimulated vanities. She was negligent ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... recluse as he did and assuming a manner of forbidding austerity when forced to meet his fellows, the man had been endowed by them with a reputation for close—if not sharp—dealing, and this trust in him evinced by the boy moved him deeply, and with a voice in which there was a half sob, ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... moved calmly and solemnly. Above it the wreaths swung, the red flowers glimmered vividly, the red ribbons fluttered. The Cossacks rode alongside. There was austerity and suspicion in their looks—they were prepared to suppress any demonstration. The chanting of a prayer could be heard. Each time the subsided chant was renewed, the Cossacks listened with great intentness. No—it was ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... of these brown cylinders now, neglecting to remove his glance of gloating austerity from the operator's ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... Psalms touch perfection as lyrical strains: of the ecstacy of passion in love I suppose "The Song of Songs" to express the very last word. There are chapters of Isaiah that snatch the very soul and ravish it aloft. In no literature known to me are short stories told with such sweet austerity of art as in the Gospel parables—I can even imagine a high and learned artist in words, after rejecting them as divine on many grounds, surrendering in the end to their divine artistry. But for high seriousness combined with architectonic ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... excessive pride and pretensions to strict orthodoxy in all outward observances. Abdulmelik ben Salih, who was a well-known general and statesman of the time, was especially renowned for pietism and austerity ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected to the papacy as Clement V., through the management of Philip the Fair. A dependant of the King of France and a subject of the King of England, the new pope showed a complaisance towards kings which stood in strong contrast to the ultramontane austerity of his predecessors. He refused to visit Italy, received the papal crown at Lyons, and spent the first years of his pontificate in Poitou and Gascony. Ultimately establishing himself at Avignon, he began that seventy years of Babylonish captivity of the apostolic see which greatly ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... acquaintance, and that only with the Inferno, probably from Rivarol's version.[50] Since then there have been four or five French versions in prose or verse, including one by Lamennais. But the austerity of Dante will not condescend to the conventional elegance which makes the charm of French, and the most virile of poets cannot be adequately rendered in the most feminine of languages. Yet in the works of Fauriel, Ozanam, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... at ease in a school in which every vital activity is rigidly repressed, and in which he spends most of his time in sitting still and waiting for orders. Nor will it add to his happiness to live habitually in an atmosphere of constraint, of austerity, of suspicion, of gloom. But I need not take pains to prove that education, as it is conducted in Western countries, is profoundly repugnant to the natural instincts of the healthy child. For that is precisely what it is intended to be. The idea of a child enjoying his "lessons" is foreign to the ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... term will depend on renewed commitment to responsible monetary and fiscal policies and to the introduction of structural reforms to liberalize markets and promote competition. The government of Ronald VENETIAAN has begun an austerity program, raised taxes, and attempted to control spending. The Dutch Government has restarted the aid flow, which will allow Suriname to access ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... and went to their homes; and somehow after that, though the sun shone as brightly and the birds fluttered and sang as joyously, a silence fell upon Pinetucky,—a silence full of austerity. The men talked in subdued tones when they met, as though they expected justice to discharge one of her thunderbolts at their feet; and the women went about their duties with a degree of nervousness that was aptly described by Miss Jane Inchly long afterwards, when reciting the experiences of ...
— Mingo - And Other Sketches in Black and White • Joel Chandler Harris
... Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed more for each other than was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... look at the reverse side of the picture, and endeavour to show how the narrow limits of Wordsworth's power are connected with certain moral defects; with the want of quick sympathy which shows itself in his dramatic feebleness, and the austerity of character which caused him to lose his special gifts too early and become a rather commonplace defender of conservatism; and that curious diffidence (he assures us that it was 'diffidence') which induced him to write ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Rossetti: and this fact, added to the circumstance of his being at the time in the very throes of those difficulties with his art which he was soon to surmount, must be understood to account for the austerity of his early portrait. Rossetti was not in a distinct sense a humourist, but there came to him at intervals, in earlier manhood, those outbursts of volatility, which, to serious natures, act as safety-valves after prolonged tension of all the powers of the mind. At such moments of levity he is described ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... present at this interview," the bishop declared, with marked austerity, "nor at any other interview that may subsequently become necessary, though I hope we shall come to such a satisfactory understanding to-day as to make further conferences superfluous. This arrangement is ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... person who lives now to carry himself back, by reading or conversation, into the prospects or feelings of the people of Scotland about a hundred years ago. The religious persecutions of the Stuarts had given a darker hue to the old austerity of their Calvinism. The expectation of change constantly held out by that family divided the nation into two parties, differing on a point which necessarily made each of them rebels in the eyes of the other; and thus the whole ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... are insensible of tender treatment; and I believe the number of those is small indeed who would not recompense it with the most grateful returns. They are naturally frank and affectionate; and, in general, there is nothing but austerity of look and distance of behaviour, that can prevent those amiable qualities from being evinced on every occasion. There are, probably, but few men who have not experienced, during the intervals of leisure and reflection, a conviction of this truth. In the hour of absence and of solitude, who ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... and daughter renew their acquaintance, and though she saw that Gillian was in an agony to speak about something, did not guess what an ordeal the girl felt it to have to begin with the father, unseen for four years, and whose searching eyes and grave politeness gave a sense of austerity, so that trepidation was spoiling all the elation at having a father, and such a ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which he expects a Patent from Trinity College, Dublin; or, at any rate, from Squire Johnston, Esq., who paternizes many of the pupils; Book-keeping, by single and double entry—Geometry, Trigonometry, Stereometry, Mensuration, Navigation, Guaging, Surveying, Dialling, Astronomy, Astrology, Austerity, Fluxions, Geography, ancient and modern—Maps, the Projection of the Sphere—Algebra, the Use of the Globes, Natural and Moral Philosophy, Pneumatics, Optics, Dioptics, Catroptics, Hydraulics, Erostatics, Geology, Glorification, Divinity, Mythology, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... Sage Tasio, who was watching the procession from the street, "it avails you nothing to have been the forerunner of the Good Tidings or that Jesus bowed before you! Your great faith and your austerity avail you nothing, nor the fact that you died for the truth and your convictions, all of which men forget when they consider nothing more than their own merits. It avails more to preach badly in the churches than to be the eloquent voice crying in the desert, this is what ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... not to the sword but to the sufferings, the renunciation, and the nobility of its early Caliphs. Islam decayed when its followers, mistaking the evil for the good, dangled the sword in the face of man, and lost sight of the godliness, the humility, and austerity of its founder and his disciples. But, I am not at the present moment, concerned with showing that the basis of Islam, as of all religions, is not violence but suffering not the taking of life but ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... obstinacy of a stupid man; the abbe undertook to persuade him that he was in love with the marquise. It was not a difficult matter. We have described the impression made upon the chevalier by the first sight of Madame de Ganges; but, owing beforehand the reputation of austerity that his sister-in-law had acquired, he had not the remotest idea of paying court to her. Yielding, indeed, to the influence which she exercised upon all who came in contact with her, the chevalier had remained her devoted servant; and the marquise, having no reason to mistrust civilities ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... this snowy cloak and get nearer the fire. Your hands are like ice." His voice was very calm and kind. It soothed Lane's strained nerves. With what eagerness did he scrutinize the old minister's face. He knew the penetrating eye, the lofty brow and white hair, the serious lined face, sad in a noble austerity. But the lips were kind with that softness and sweetness which comes from gentle words and frequent smiles. Lane's aroused antagonism vanished in ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... to feel resentment, and this was indeed an insinuation not only unwarrantable in itself, but one which a man of so peaceable and guileless a life, affecting even an extreme and rigid austerity of morals, might well be tempted to repel with scorn and indignation; and Aram, however meek and forbearing in general, testified in this instance that his wonted gentleness arose from no lack of man's natural spirit. ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... however, a vague gray aloofness which chimed with his spirit, a sober austerity as of a stricken whale,—a mother-whale surely, for was not her young one there at her nose,—fled here to heal her wound perchance, ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... these details I have at least given a hint of their inevitable adjuncts,—the licentiousness in which he indulged at the very time that he made a most brilliant marriage, and the delight that he took in boys past their prime (a practice which he also taught Nero to follow). Nevertheless, his austerity of life had earlier been so severe that he had asked his pupil neither to kiss him nor to eat at the same table with him. [For the latter request he had a good reason, namely, that Nero's absence would enable him to conduct his philosophical studies ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... He unites great austerity with great good-nature. He unites great sensibility with great force and will power. He loves solitude, and he loves to be in the thick of the fight. His love of nature is equaled only by his love of the ...
— Camping with President Roosevelt • John Burroughs
... word Om; hence the wise follow by this support the one or the other of the two. If he meditates upon its one letter (a) only, he is quickly born on the earth; is carried by the verses of the Rig Veda to the world of man; and, if he is devoted there to austerity, the duties of a religious student and faith, he enjoys greatness. But if he meditates in his mind on its two letters (a and u), he is elevated by the verses of the Yajur Veda to the intermediate region; comes to the world of the moon and, having enjoyed there power, returns again (to ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... poets, on virtue and decency, Jeremy Collier, a non-juring clergyman, attacked the stage. His charge against the authors was unquestionably right; but his attack upon the stage itself, exhibited a disposition splenetic almost to misanthropy, and an austerity of principle urged to unsocial ferocity. In his fury he renounced the idea of reforming the stage; he was for abolishing it entirely. He attacked the poets with "unconquerable pertinacity, with wit in the highest degree keen and sarcastic, and with all ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... him to trip over his partner's feet, and it was with marked austerity that he turned. As he recognized Bertram, however, coldness melted, ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... burst from the bystanders—"A Tory! a Tory! a spy! a refugee! hustle him! away with him!" It was with great difficulty that the self-important man in the cocked hat restored order; and, having assumed a tenfold austerity of brow, demanded again of the unknown culprit what he came there for, and whom he was seeking? The poor man humbly assured him that he meant no harm, but merely came there in search of some of his neighbors, who used to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... peach-bloom colours of their columned aisles. Carrara provided the Pisans with mellow marble for their Baptistery and Cathedral; Monte Ferrato supplied Pistoja and Prato with green serpentine; while the pietra serena of the Apennines added austerity to the interior of Florentine buildings. Again, in other instances, we detect the influence of commerce or of conquest. The intercourse of Venice with Alexandria determined the unique architecture of S. Mark's. The Arabs and the Normans left ineffaceable ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Fear'd her stern frown, and she was queen oth' Woods. What was that snaky-headed Gorgon sheild That wise Minerva wore, unconquer'd Virgin, Wherwith she freez'd her foes to congeal'd stone? But rigid looks of Chast austerity, 450 And noble grace that dash't brute violence With sudden adoration, and blank aw. So dear to Heav'n is Saintly chastity, That when a soul is found sincerely so, A thousand liveried Angels lacky her, Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt, And in cleer ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... is only a drop in the ocean. Canton is China, as Benares is India. And that conjunction of ideas set me thinking. To come from India to China is like waking from a dream. Often in India I felt that I was in an enchanted land. Melancholy, monotony, austerity; a sense as of perennial frost, spite of the light and heat; a lost region peopled with visionary forms; a purgatory of souls doing penance till the hour of deliverance shall strike; a limbo, lovely but phantasmal, unearthly, over-earthly—that is the kind of impression India left on my ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... might be traced in the cloud which darkened her brow, when a consciousness of what was due to religion stood most prominently forward. At such times she became severe and abstracted; and yet her occasional austerity could hardly be condemned by her subjects, when it led to that firmness and courage, and that inflexibility in the decrees of justice, for which she was so remarkable. If the grave historian has stamped her character with these attributes of heroism, ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... compared with it." Add to this picture the movable hangings and decorations of its many altars, and we cannot honestly attribute the coldness of the present effect to any fault in the original design. Elsewhere this austerity of monochrome is modified to a great extent by the variety (anachronisms though they be) of later architectural insertions. Salisbury, through the very purity of its design, especially suffers from its translation from chromatic ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... even conceive that the austerity of the abbeys can profit it. The doctrine of mystical compensation escapes it entirely. It cannot represent to itself that the substitution of the innocent for the guilty is necessary when to suffer merited ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... man, whose visage is spoiled by a dishonest glance, and demeanor tarnished by an innate vulgarity, is a teacher of foreign languages. He assumes important airs, as teachers generally do and though affecting, in his discourse, a Puritan austerity, few men are more intensely devoted to the pursuit of gain. An adventurer, he had but one purpose in view when he settled in the United States and commenced teaching—to find an heiress. After a fruitless search among his young pupils of the fair sex, he finally ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... religion in which he believed, surrounded with loving friends; and even his enemies felt that a great man in Israel had fallen. Nothing then was said of his defects, for great defects he had,—a towering intellectual pride like Chatham, an austerity like Gladstone, passions like those of Mirabeau, extravagance like that of Cicero, indifference to pecuniary obligations, like Pitt and Fox and Sheridan; but these were overbalanced by the warmth of his affections ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... the sight of the two men holding a woman in their arms. The superior also hurried to the scene of action; but, far more a creature of the world than any of the female members of the court, notwithstanding her austerity of manners, she recognized the king at the first glance, by the respect which those present exhibited for him, as well as by the imperious and authoritative way in which he had thrown the whole establishment into confusion. As soon as she saw the king, she retired to her own apartments, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... And it hath well been said: Dame Nature is A gentle mother if we follow her; But if she drives our steps no fury wields A fiercer lash; yet all her punishments Are kindly meant; our puny faculties Would nest forever fledgeling in our minds, Did not her wise austerity compel Their flight. ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... so little has been written of her charm, that this tribute is only fair to Her Majesty. She is tall, perhaps five feet eight inches, with deep-blue eyes and beautiful colouring. She has a rather wide, humorous mouth. There is not a trace of austerity in her face or in any single feature. The whole impression was of sincerity and kindliness, with more ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... been fanaticism. While her husband was a worshiper from a love of God and his holy laws, she was prompted by fears of the wrath to come. He bowed in thankfulness, even while he wept their loss, to the Power that had borne his little ones to a brighter world, while her life gained new austerity from the thought that they had been taken from her as a judgment on her worldliness and idolatry. She loved to dwell upon the sufferings of the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, and emulate their rigid lives, forgetting that it was the dark persecution of the times in which they lived ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... her Italian waiting-women had, as we have seen, on first setting her foot in Spain, for a moment thrown the young Queen into a condition bordering on despair. By advice, however, the respectful devotedness of which served to soften its austerity, and by an absolute abnegation of herself, Madame des Ursins drew closely towards her the broken-hearted princess by discreetly assuaging all her first girlish sorrows. She became a friend, a sister, almost a mother to the exiled-one, and ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... of the Lyceum—and Plato reasoned in the Academy, which he held with his school, and into which no ungeometrical mind was to enter. And though some dog of a Cynic might despise the union of the ornamental with the useful, and claim austerity as the rule of life, yet to the great body of the social Greek people the gymnasium offered all those attractions which boulevards, cafes, and jardins-chantants do now to the Gallic nation. There is more than one point of resemblance ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... and austere young man in the doorway, Baby let go his fascinating toes. He chuckled with delight. He jerked himself more than ever up and down. He struggled to be free, to be lifted up and embraced by the young man. Silence and austerity were no deterrent to Baby, so assured was he of his position, of his welcome, of the safe, warm, tingling place that would presently be his in the hollow of the young man's arm. The desire of it made Baby's arms and his body writhe, with ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... that the fruits of that chastisement are now sweet to him. Nor do his parents ever appear to have treated him with the cold, almost loveless austerity that so many elders frequently felt it their duty to adopt toward their children. Their discipline was tempered by kindness and an earnest Christian faith. Although Hans Kingo seems to some extent to have been influenced by the strict Presbyterianism of his Scotch ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... Anthony discriminated gloomily; "but appearances are risky things to judge by. It may have charms for a voluptuary like you; but I"—and he took a tone of high austerity—"I, as an Englishman, have my suspicions of anything so ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... sided; its bare walls glared steel-gray in the sun, smooth, glistening surfaces that had been polished by wind and water. No weathered heaps of shale, no crumbled piles of stone obstructed its level floor. And, softly toning its drab austerity, here grew the white sage, waving in the breeze, the Indian Paint Brush, with vivid vermilion flower, and ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... be carrying austerity too far indeed. I pray you never to mention it again, if you have any regard for my peace of mind. And now tell me, my sweet little sister, what do you think of my dear friend, the Chevalier de Vidalinc? does not he seem ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... convincing ground to believe that we have found that mercy which also sets open the door for them to come and partake with us. Ministers, I say, should do thus, both by their doctrine, and in all other respects. Austerity doth not become us, neither in doctrine nor in conversation.37 We ourselves live by grace; let us give as we receive, and labour to persuade our fellow-sinners, which God has left behind us, to follow after, that they may partake with us ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... that the Smithfield priests, who burned the protestants in the time of Queen Mary, had just such faces as the doctor's. If we were papists, I should like him very much for my confessor; his seeming austerity would give you and I a great reputation for sanctity; and his good, indulgent heart, would be the very thing that would suit us, in the affair of penance and ghostly direction. Farewell, my dear ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... morality has nothing to do with art, or even that everything moral should be destitute of art. These people are completely deceived and unwittingly promote pornography, by repelling humanity with their austerity and driving it to the opposite extreme. The aesthetic and moral sentiments should be harmoniously combined with intelligence and will, each of these departments of the mind participating by its special energies in the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... government revenues and exports. In the early 1980s rapidly rising oil revenues enabled Congo to finance large-scale development projects with growth averaging 5% annually, one of the highest rates in Africa. The world decline in oil prices, however, has forced the government to launch an austerity program to cope with declining ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... cool gray dress, so that it would be ready for the next afternoon. While her mother was away Kate cleaned the spare bedroom and moved her mother's possessions into it. She made it as convenient and comfortable and as pretty as she could, but the house was bare to austerity, so that her attempt at prettifying was rather a failure. Then she opened the closed room and cleaned it, after studying it most carefully as it stood. The longer she worked, the stronger became a conviction ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... intelligent. No doubt but that his features were capable of a vast range of expression; but, as I never saw them otherwise than beaming with benevolence, or sparkling with wit, I must refer to Master James, or Master Frank, for the description of the austerity of his frown, or the awfulness of ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... times, to bring a strength-giving peace to her father's troubled mind. Even Mrs. Porter, implacably bitter against racing, must condone what was so evidently Allis's study, if it tended to their happiness; the mother had softened somewhat in the austerity of her opposition. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... and was replaced by the very different ideal of chivalry. It consisted chiefly of three new elements. The first element was a spirit of gallantry which gave women a wholly new place in the imaginations of men. It was in part a reaction against the extreme austerity of the saints, and this reaction was much intensified after the cessation of the panic which had risen at the close of the tenth century about the approaching end of the world. It was in part produced ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... would not at any time have held any temptation for him. The inherited austerity of his blood and a fastidiousness of temperament beyond the appeal of this chromo beauty would have prevented it in any case, but just now he was under the spell of an exaltation which lifted him above even the possibility ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... noticeable element in their art is that of the grotesque and burlesque, never, of course, quite absent even from early books, but now most prominent and most delightful. The defect of the art of this time is lack of strength and austerity; its delicacy ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... expected to do; and they came forward with an affectation of stern dignity, the burlesque humour of which delighted all those lively revellers. And when with adroit mimicry their slight arms and mincing steps mocked that grand and masculine measure so associated with images of Spartan austerity and decorum, the exhibition became so humorously ludicrous, that perhaps a Spartan himself would have been compelled to laugh at it. But the merriment rose to its height, when the Egyptian, who had withdrawn for a few minutes, reappeared with a Median ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... and tittle-tattle of a shallow age. He never trafficked with the merchants for his soul, nor brought his wares into the market-place for the idle to gape at. Passionate and romantic though he was, yet there was in his nature something of high austerity. He loved seclusion, and hated notoriety, and would have shuddered at the idea that within a few years after his death he was to make his appearance in a series of popular biographies, sandwiched between the author ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... to appear in person before Mrs Deborah, which she immediately did. When Mrs Deborah, putting on the gravity of a judge, with somewhat more than his austerity, began an oration with the words, "You audacious strumpet!" in which she proceeded rather to pass sentence on the prisoner ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... Goddard seemed to grow in magnitude, she gradually arrived at the conclusion that it was John's fault. Half an hour ago, in the flush of triumph she had indignantly denied that anything could be John's fault. She now resolved to behave to him with great austerity. Such an occurrence as his falling in love could not be passed over with indifference. It seemed best that he should leave Billingsfield ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... common with Jonathan Edwards. There was in both the same inflexible logic and devotion to ideas, the same personal purity and austerity. The place of the mystic's fire which burned in Edwards was taken in Calhoun by a passionate devotion to the commonwealth. In both there was a certain moral callousness which made the one view with complacence a universe including a perpetual hell of unspeakable torments; while ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... be quick in suspecting, or complacent in causing, or precise in setting it down. But Mrs. Hutchinson doubtless offered up the envy of her companions in homage to her Puritan lover's splendour. His austerity did not hinder him from wearing his "fine, thick-set head of hair" in long locks that were an offence to many of his own sect, but, she says, "a great ornament to him." But for herself she has some dissimulated vanities. She was negligent of dress, and when, after much waiting and many ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... shall prevail at last! Surely ye shall prevail! Your silence and austerity shall win at last: Desire and mirth, the world's ephemeral lights shall fail, The sweet star of your queen ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... Hill-men, or Cameronians, was at that time much noted for austerity and devotion, in imitation of Cameron, their founder, of whose tenets Old Mortality became a most strenuous supporter. He made frequent journeys into Galloway to attend their conventicles, and occasionally carried with him gravestones from ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... with a flowing beard, and of great austerity of manner, had come to inspect the slaves. He selected only the young and comely, and Hubert had the misfortune to be one so distinguished. All men bowed before the potentate, whoever he was, and Hubert saw that he had become the property of ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... Adeline's serene severity Was not confined to feeling for her friend, Whose fame she rather doubted with posterity, Unless her habits should begin to mend: But Juan also shared in her austerity, But mix'd with pity, pure as e'er was penn'd: His inexperience moved her gentle ruth, And (as her junior by six weeks) ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... There was but one thing that all could have in any quantity, and that was land; each had all of this he wanted for the taking,—or if it was known to belong to the Indians, he got its use for a few trinkets or a flask of whisky. A few of the settlers still kept some of the Presbyterian austerity of character, as regards amusements; but, as a rule, they were fond of horse-racing, drinking, dancing, and fiddling. The corn-shuckings, flax-pullings, log-rollings (when the felled timber was rolled off the clearings), house-raisings, maple-sugar-boilings, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Ximenes, did, carry with me to Court the austerity of a monk; nor, if I had done so, could I possibly have gained any influence there. Isabella and Henry were different characters, and their favour was to be sought in different ways. By making myself agreeable to the ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... very frequent inconsistency among men, to frown down unmercifully the very weaknesses which they encourage and of which they derive the benefit. For my part, I hold severely aloof from a degree of austerity as ridiculous in a man as uncharitable in a Christian. And as to that unfortunate conversation which a deplorable chance caused you to hear, and in which my expressions, as it always happens, went far beyond the measure of my thought, it is an offense which I can never ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... ascetic or hermit, who flies from society and lives in retirement, or who practices a greater degree of mortification and austerity than others do, or who inflicts extraordinary severities ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to their pleasures and to comply with the desires of the multitude, as a steersman shifts with the winds. Quitting that loose, remiss, and, in some cases, licentious court of the popular will, he turned those soft and flowery modulations to the austerity of aristocratical and regal rule; but, employing this uprightly and undeviatingly for the country's best interests, he was able generally to lead the people along, with their own will and consent, by persuading and showing them what ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... strong and full of blood. The very discipline that had given a gloomy cast to his mind had given strength and fortitude to his body. He was austere, because austerity was all that he had ever known or had a chance of knowing; but too often austerity is but the dam that holds back the flood of potential passion. Not to know the power which rages behind the barricade is to leave the structure ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... them, hates even itself; it conspires for its own loss, it works towards its own ruin—in fact, caring only to exist, and providing that it may be, it will be its own enemy! We must therefore not be surprised if it is sometimes united to the rudest austerity, and if it enters so boldly into partnership to destroy her, because when it is rooted out in one place it re-establishes itself in another. When it fancies that it abandons its pleasure it merely changes or suspends its enjoyment. When even it is conquered in its full ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... its way rapidly into the Scottish kirks (how can the shade of John Knox endure a 'kist o' whistles' in good St. Giles'?), but it is not used yet in some of those we attend most frequently. There is a certain quaint solemnity, a beautiful austerity, in the unaccompanied singing of hymns that touches me profoundly. I am often carried very high on the waves of splendid church music, when the organ's thunder rolls 'through vaulted aisles' and the angelic ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... particulars, in discussing this part of the subject. My mind recoils from them. With a Roman austerity, I show my empty purse and Percival's to the shrinking public gaze. Let us allow the deplorable fact to assert itself, once for all, in that manner, and ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... great the same point was always strenuously laboured. When they imposed penance, they were remarkably indulgent to persons of that rank. But they always made them purchase the remission of corporal austerity by acts of beneficence. They urged their powerful penitents to the enfranchisement of their own slaves, and to the redemption of those which belonged to others; they directed them to the repair of highways, and to the construction ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... consciousness made him stricter and sterner than ever; as if he would quench all wondering, slanderous talk about him in the town by a renewed austerity of uprightness; that the slack-principled Mr Bradshaw of one month of ferment and excitement might not be confounded with the highly-conscientious and deeply-religious Mr Bradshaw, who went to chapel twice a day, and gave ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... said the landlady, with sudden austerity, "I'll have you know as it's none of your business saying words what's onpleasant—and me his mother, too. What's it you say? Cloven hoof? He's a personable gentleman, if he has got summat a matter with a foot, and ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... The austerity of his life increased the mysterious homage which his commune with the stars had won him, and the boldest of the warriors bowed his head to the ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... the crucifix and turned to him. They searched each other with their eyes. She saw, without wholly understanding, the pain in his. He saw, also unintelligently, the austerity ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... At their head was their Sub-Prior, a character whose influence on the after position of Spain was so great, that we may not pass it by, without more notice than our tale itself perhaps would demand. To the world, as to his brethren and superiors, in the monastery, a stern unbending spirit, a rigid austerity, and unchanging severity of mental and physical discipline, characterized his whole bearing and daily conduct. Yet, his severity proceeded not from the superstition and bigotry of a weak mind or misanthropic feeling. Though his whole time and thoughts appeared devoted to the ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... with Mrs. Durgin than she expected to keep herself in mentioning him. This might well have been necessary with the mother's pride in her son, which knew no stop when it once began to indulge itself. What struck Westover more than the girl's self-possession when they talked of Jeff was a certain austerity in her with regard to him. She seemed to hold herself tense against any praise of him, as if she should fail him somehow if she relaxed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... over the walls; the wistaria is climbing up the cypresses; a pomp of camellias and azaleas is in all the gardens; while in the grassy bays that run up into the hills the primrose banks still keep their sweet austerity, and the triumph of spring over the just banished winter is still ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... size arouses vulgar wonder, and its theme strikes terror into all who gaze on it. Yet it is neither so strong nor so beautiful as the vault-paintings of the Sistine. The freshness of the genius that created Eve and Adam, unrivalled in their bloom of primal youth, has passed away. Austerity and gloom have taken possession of the painter. His style has hardened into mannerism, and the display of barren science in difficult posturing and strained anatomy has become wilful. Still, whether we regard this fresco as closing the long series of "Last Judgments" to ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... papers respecting the business, only now and then throwing in a skilful catchword as prompter, when he saw the principal, and apparently most active magistrate, stand in need of a hint. As for Sir Robert Hazlewood, he assumed on his part a happy mixture of the austerity of the justice, combined with the display of personal dignity appertaining to ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... in the empty archway, the satisfaction on her face not veiling its pure austerity. She was not much past thirty-three, but she looked older, for she was gaunt. Her flesh had lost its firmness, her dressmaking had stooped her, her strong frame moved as if it habitually shouldered its way. In her broad forehead and deep eyes and somewhat in her silent mouth, you read the woman—the ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... will manifest itself in morals in the two forms of austerity and sensuality, so in religion it shows itself in the opposite direction of an ideal pantheism and a gross idolatry. Spiritualism first fills the world full of God, and this is a true and Christian view of things. But it takes another step, which is to deny all real existence ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... could not stay in bed, and he could not hang about the house. He did not know how to demean himself to either of the young men when he met them. He could not be cordial as he ought to be with Urmand; nor could he be austere to George with that austerity which he felt would have been proper on his part. He was becoming very tired of his dignity and authority. Hitherto the exercise of power in his household had generally been easy enough, his wife and Marie had always been loving and pleasant in their obedience. ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... with a mild austerity and again lowered his eyes. I cannot now but wonder how the rhythm of a voice so soft, so monotonous, could give such pleasure to the ear. I almost doubted my own eyes when I looked upon his yellow, on that unmoved, sad, mad, ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... day; he had lived it to-day. His heart suddenly flooded with warmth for Fallows. Fallows had been through all this—all the burning and zealotry of it, and had come forth into the coldness and austerity of service. It was very wonderful. Peter Mowbray's eyes smarted. They, and the service, had certainly crumpled the old fronts of calm and the sterile pools of intellect. He loved the peasants now, and he knew why.... He ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... is grey, narrow-streeted, simple; with a great, new, decent, Greek-porticoed cathedral, dedicated to the eponymous saint. A certain austerity defines it from more picturesque hill-cities with a less uniform history. There is a marble statue of S. Marino in the choir of his church; and in his cell is shown the stone bed and pillow on which he took ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... form and subject from the Greeks, at a comparatively late date in Rome's political history. That this borrowing assisted greatly in Latin cultural advancement, none may deny; but it is also true that the new Hellenised literature exerted a malign influence on the nation's ancient austerity, introducing lax Grecian notions which contributed to moral and material decadence. The counter-currents, however, were strong; and the virile Roman spirit shone nobly through the Athenian dress in almost every instance, imparting to the ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... spirit which Mr. Southey manifests towards his opponents is, no doubt, in a great measure to be attributed to the manner in which he forms his opinions. Differences of taste, it has often been remarked, produce greater exasperation than differences on points of science. But this is not all. A peculiar austerity marks almost all Mr. Southey's judgments of men and actions. We are far from blaming him for fixing on a high standard of morals, and for applying that standard to every case. But rigour ought to be accompanied by discernment; and of discernment Mr. Southey ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... lacquered cane which he had found within the box. Deep ruffles of white hung down from his wrists, and a fall of wide lace drooped from the bosom of his ruffled shirt. His wig, deep curled and well whitened, gave a certain austerity to his mien. At his instep sparkled new buckles of brilliants, rising above which sprang a graceful ankle, a straight and well-rounded leg. The long lapels of his rich coat hung deep, and the rich waistcoat ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... about ten to fifteen francs apiece,—in English money from eight to twelve shillings. They were painted in a theatrical style, which Millet himself detested—all pink cheeks, and red lips, and blue satin, and lace collars; whereas his own natural style was one of great austerity and a certain earnest sombreness the exact reverse of the common Parisian taste to which he ministered. However, he had to please his patrons—and, like a sensible man, he went on producing these cheap daubs to any extent required, for a living, while he endeavoured to perfect himself ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... room where the money-lender lived, before a hearth full of ashes, in the midst of which the wood was successfully defending itself against the fire. Popinot's courage froze at sight of the usurer's green boxes and the monastic austerity of the room, whose atmosphere was like that of a cellar. He looked with a wondering eye at the miserable blueish paper sprinkled with tricolor flowers, which had been on the walls for twenty-five years; and then his anxious glance fell upon the chimney-piece, ornamented with a clock shaped ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... a personal friend of the emperor's, a Catholic, amiable in his deportment, and generally beloved by his subjects. But the prince who had succeeded him in the Landgraviate, as the next heir, was everywhere odious for the harshness of his government, no less than for the gloomy austerity of his character; and to Klosterheim in particular, which had been pronounced by some of the first jurisprudents a female appanage, he presented himself under the additional disadvantages of a very suspicious ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... floating music as enlivening as the song of birds, yet solemn as the strains of the sanctuary. It is that of a life in unison from its childhood to its close; rising indeed like "an unbroken hymn of praise to God." There is no austerity in its piety, no levity in its gladness. It shows that "virtue in herself is lovely," but if "goodness" is ever "awful," it is not here in the company of this young ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... every token of extreme distress, except that there was an air of solemn and sad composure that crowned the whole. For the present, all appearance of gloom, stateliness, and austerity was gone. As I entered he looked up, and, seeing who it was, ordered me to bolt the door. I obeyed. He went round the room, and examined its other avenues. He then returned to where I stood. I trembled in every joint of my frame. I exclaimed within myself, "What scene of death has ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... to live industrious lives in town or country, some would pursue scientific developments, some want pleasures of this sort or that, some would live lives of religion and kindliness, or religion and austerity. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... all the charms of female apparel, trembling and blushing, as she again appeared as a woman before the eyes of the man she loved. Wallace sighed as he touched her hand, for there was something in her air which seemed to say, "I am not what I was a few minutes ago." It was the aspect of the world's austerity, the decorum of rank and situation—but not of the heart—that had never been absent from the conduct of Helen; had she been in the wilds of Africa, with no other companion than Wallace, still would those chaste reserves which lived in her soul have been there the guardian of her actions, for ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... gray hair brushed back from a heightening forehead might have proclaimed him even beyond middle age, and his stature, of about medium height, acknowledged easy living in its generous habit. The stock and cravat of an earlier day gave a certain austerity to the shrewd face, lighted by a pair of keen gray eyes, which now turned to greet the new-comer. He rose, and both bowed formally before they advanced to take each other by the hand. They were acquaintances, if not intimate friends. Evidently this particular ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... figure—or of her hands. So much had youth left her. Her face was thin and pale, and of the contour vaguely called aristocratic. It was perhaps the iron gray hair rolling back from the pale face held the suggestion of austerity. But that which best expressed her was the poise of her head. She carried it as if she had a right ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... turned voluptuary. There was also a sag at the corners. His flesh hinted of grossness, especially so in the eagle-like aquiline nose that must once have been like the other's, but that had lost the austerity the other's still retained. ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... about it; and the stone walls hung with tapestry, on which quaint figures moved restlessly with the draught from an open window, would have given an eerie feeling to a man, for instance, sitting alone there at twelve o'clock at night. But in the gloom and austerity of the still and distant chamber sat Jane in white satin with pearls about her neck, and the room ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... seating himself more comfortably on the cushions. 'His letter is idiotic. He is just finishing his law studies, and he will inherit his father's practice as a solicitor. You ought to see the style he has already assumed—all the idiotic austerity of a philistine, who has turned ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... have been better acquainted with ecclesiastical history, and with the origin and progress of that system of opinions upon which the authority of the church was established; and they had thereby the advantage in almost every dispute. The austerity of their manners gave them authority with the common people, who contrasted the strict regularity of their conduct with the disorderly lives of the greater part of their own clergy. They possessed, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... scientific and impersonal, almost entomological indeed, in her method; she killed every remark as he made it and pinned it out for examination. In the biological laboratory that was their invincible tone. But she disapproved more and more of her own mental austerity. Here was an experienced man of the world, her friend, who evidently took a great interest in this supreme topic and was willing to give her the benefit of his experiences! Why should not she be at her ease with him? Why should not she know things? It is hard enough anyhow for a human ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... the next new moon,— The sealing-day betwixt my love and me For everlasting bond of fellowship,— Upon that day either prepare to die For disobedience to your father's will; Or else to wed Demetrius, as he would; Or on Diana's altar to protest For aye austerity and single life. ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... the fruit of her careful denials, whose door she could bolt if she wanted to, and nobody had the right to come in. It was such a strange little room, so different from any she had known, and so sweet. It was like a cell. Except for the two beds, it suggested a happy austerity. "And the name of the chamber," she thought, quoting and smiling round at it, ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... perfume, light!" said Rodin, with emphasis. "But it is no dream. How many monks, how many hermits, like Rancey, have, by prayers, and austerity, and macerations, attained a divine ecstasy! and if you only knew the celestial pleasures of such ecstasies!—Thus, after he became a monk, the terrible dreams were succeeded by enchanting visions. Many times, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... time he was aware, without admitting it, that, if the thing came into court, Robina's evidence might be a little damaging to the appearances of wisdom and patience, of austerity and dignity, which he had preserved so well. He had had an unacknowledged vision of Robina standing in the witness box, very small and shy, with her eyes fluttering while she explained to the gentlemen of the jury that she ran away from her husband ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... from the courtier-like decision of our friend, and opine, though with all due respect, that even a friar's coarse serge, ('Vestimenta da Bizoco,' was the phrase used by Colonna; a phrase borrowed from certain heretics (bizocchi) who affected extreme austerity; afterwards the word passed into a proverb.—See the comments of Zerfirino Re, in 'Vita di Cola di Rienzi'.) the parade of humility, would better become thee, than this gaudy pomp, the parade of pride!" So saying, he touched the large loose sleeve fringed ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... suggest that we were only four in number while his party still included sixteen men; and as, moreover, we were to go forward and they were to follow, at least a full proportion of the perils he apprehended would fall upon us. But the austerity of the captain's features would not relax. "A very extraordinary proceeding, gentlemen!" and repeating this, he rode off to ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... and the keen light raked her room, laying its bareness still more bare. It was furnished, Laura's room, with an extreme austerity. There was a little square of blue drugget under the deal table that stood against the wall, and one green serge curtain at each window. There was a cupboard and an easy-chair for Mr. Gunning on one side of the fireplace next the window. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... the proud and massive belfry of Bruges, and the almost feminine aspect of the Louvain Town Hall with the forbidding masculinity of the destroyed Ypres Cloth Hall. Again, the profusion of ornament and statuettes, the delicate flanking towers, especially in Bruges and Louvain, contrast with the austerity of the old "halles." These luxurious mansions were built neither for military nor for economic purposes. They are far too small to be of any use as covered markets. In fact, the new municipal buildings of the fifteenth century only preserved one characteristic of their predecessors. They ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... gives no answer, except to tell us[67] that the austerity, purity, and zeal of the first Christians, their good discipline, their belief in the resurrection of the body and the general judgment, and their persuasion that Christ and his apostles wrought miracles, had made a great many converts. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... and how deeply stirred she was. She had blazed up in answer to him, but that very fire lit up something in her which was not new, but which now stood out full armed—a clear-eyed austerity. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... he strictly followed the scriptural injunction not "to spare the rod." His victims were repeatedly heard to remark that these flagellations partially counterbalanced the lack of exercise which he felt very keenly in his sedentary life. But with all his austerity his pupils would occasionally be astonished over the amount of humor that he was capable of displaying. His handwriting was exquisitely minute in character, and I have in my possession two valentines composed by him and sent to me which are quaintly beautiful in language and, although sixty ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... himself in his tragic and newborn austerity of spirit, as any right-minded and clean-living man should hate paper roses or painted faces. Every foot of it, that night, seemed a muffled and mediate insult to intelligence. The too open and illicit invitation of its confectionery-like halls, ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... the vacant portfolio as Archbishop of Canterbury, hoping thus to secure him as an ally; but a Becket, though accustomed to ride after a four-in-hand and assume a style equal to the king himself, suddenly became extremely devout, and austerity characterized this child of fortune, insomuch that each day on bended knees he bathed the chapped and soiled feet of thirteen beggars. Why thirteen beggars should come around every morning to the archbishop's study to have their feet manicured, or how that could possibly mollify ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... feels a difficulty in generalizing the characteristics of the Florentine school. He adopts the somewhat exaggerated (as he allows) account of M. Levesque. His characteristics are—fine movement, a certain sombre austerity, an expression of vigour, which excludes perhaps that of grace, a character of design, the grandeur of which is in some sort gigantic. They may be reproached with a kind of exaggeration; but it cannot be denied that there is in this exaggeration an ideal majesty, which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... lived, Lucie, and the recollection of his injured wife forever haunted him; her misery, her untimely death, all weighed heavily on his conscience, and he sought to expiate his crime by a life of austerity, and the most constant and painful acts of self-denial and devotion. Yet the severest penance which he inflicted on himself was to renounce his child, to burst the ties of natural affection, that no earthly claims might interfere ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... for the austerity of her manners, the rigid discipline which she maintained in the convent, and the inexorable disposition which she showed toward those who, having committed a fault, ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... at Kom, and in the mood in which I had reached it, I might have devoted the rest of my life to following the lectures of Mirza Abdul Cossim, and acquired worldly consideration by my taciturnity, by my austerity, and strict adherence to Mahomedan discipline. But fate had woven another destiny for me. The maidan (the race-course) of life was still open to me, and the courser of my existence had not yet exhausted half of the bounds and curvets with which ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... Flats, and embracing two oceans, with the splendid mountains of Hottentot's Holland in the background. If the bronze rider, gazing with shaded eyes over the Africa that Rhodes loved, is typical of his life, the calm white austerity of the temple in the background seems symbolical of the peace which that restless soul has ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... refused nothing to others that was worthy of acceptance, while for himself he desired great power, the command of an army, and a new war in which his talents might be displayed. But Cato's ambition was that of temperance, discretion, and, above all, of austerity; he did not contend in splendor with the rich, or in faction with the seditious, but with the brave in fortitude, with the modest in simplicity,[272] with the temperate[273] in abstinence; he was more desirous to be, than to appear, virtuous; and thus, ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... thirst for truth was burning him, he yielded to the seductions of the wealthy youth of his time; though he had been early trained by his pious mother in the love of virtue and the hatred of iniquity, yet the apparent austerity of virtue seemed now to affright him, and the pleasures of life and the allurements of vice captivated his ardent disposition; and while he never seems to have plunged into the extravagances and disorders common to so many of his companions, nor to have been guilty of crimes which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... resolve of the rebellious but still noble-minded women. Roused to a new sense of power and responsibility, they embraced his rigid rule, and with the enthusiasm of their sex, that never halts midway in reform, became models of austerity. The better to signify to the world the spiritual change wrought in their temper, they migrated from the abode which they had sworn to make the symbol and palladium of their independence, and went to San Sisto, Saint Dominic taking his monks to repeople the convent across ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... his practice to contend with the trickery of Scarlett.—Mr. Common-Serjeant Denman is a man fitted by nature for the law. I never saw a more judicial-looking countenance in my life; there is a sedate gravity about it, both "stern and mild," firm without fierceness, and severe without austerity:—he appears thoughtful, penetrating, and serene, yet not by any means devoid of feeling and expression:—deeply read in the learning of his profession, he is yet much better than a mere lawyer; for his speeches and manners must convince his hearers ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... from Emerson himself than whimsical eccentricity or churlish austerity. But there was occasionally an air of bravado in some of his followers as if they had taken out a patent for some knowing machine which was to give them a monopoly of its products. They claimed more for each ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Greeks a numerous and opulent clergy was dedicated to the service of religion: their monks and bishops have ever been distinguished by the gravity and austerity of their manners; nor were they diverted, like the Latin priests, by the pursuits and pleasures of a secular, and even military, life. After a large deduction for the time and talent that were lost in the devotion, the laziness, and the discord, of the church and cloister, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... ponderous amiability. It was not often that this took a practical form, though it is on record that in an exuberant moment he once gave a small boy a halfpenny. More frequently it merely led him to soften the porcine austerity of his demeanour. Today, business having been uncommonly good, he felt pleased with the world. He had left his cash-desk and was assailing a bowl of soup at one of the side-tables. Except for a belated luncher at the end of the room the place ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... irrigation had to be brought from a mining ditch at great expense, and was of insufficient quantity. In this emergency Mulrady thought of sinking an artesian well on the sunny slope beside his house; not, however, without serious consultation and much objection from his Spanish patron. With great austerity Don Ramon pointed out that this trifling with the entrails of the earth was not only an indignity to Nature almost equal to shaft-sinking and tunneling, but was a disturbance of vested interests. "I and my fathers, San Diego rest them!" said Don Ramon, crossing himself, "were content with ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... upon returning to Switzerland, after our sojourn in Italy, was of a certain chill and austerity in the atmosphere, a lack of heartiness, in sharp contrast to the rich feast of beauty, the warm color and compelling charm of Italian towns. This impression was accentuated by the fact that it rained yesterday ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... tree may fall on the water-side, but this is by no means the case, and appears to be simply due, as Martin points out, to the fact that trees by the water-side usually slope towards the water. The austerity of labour alternates, it may be added, with the pleasures of the table. From time to time the Beavers remove the bark of the fallen trees, of which they are very fond, and ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... serve the comfort of the worshipper should be conspicuously absent. If any element of comfort is admitted in the fittings of the sanctuary, it should be at least scrupulously screened and masked under an ostensible austerity. In the most reputable latter-day houses of worship, where no expense is spared, the principle of austerity is carried to the length of making the fittings of the place a means of mortifying the flesh, especially in appearance. There are few persons of delicate tastes, in the matter ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Mr Burne with mock austerity; "but that is no reason why you should try and create a ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... the old Duxbury: the Duxbury of long, cold winters, privations, and austerity. Down by the shore to-day is the new Duxbury—a Duxbury of automobiles, of business men's trains, of gay society at Powder Point, where in the winter is the well-known boys' school—a Duxbury of ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... linen so as to escape observation; and the whole so fastened together as to admit of being readily taken off for his daily scourgings, of which yesterday's portion was still apparent in the stripes on his body. Such austerity had hitherto been unknown to English saints, and the marvel was increased by the sight—to our notions so revolting—of the innumerable vermin with which the haircloth abounded—boiling over with them, as one account describes it, like water ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... wage increases, regional peacekeeping commitments, and the containment of internal unrest in the underdeveloped north have placed substantial demands on the government's budget and have led to inflationary deficit financing, depreciation of the cedi, and rising public discontent with Ghana's austerity program. ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... council room of the conventual palace of the Dominicans, King Robert was seated with his brother Albany, whose affected austerity of virtue, and real art and dissimulation, maintained so high an influence over the feeble minded monarch. It was indeed natural that one who seldom saw things according to their real forms and outlines should view them according to the light in which ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... reason; no other poets have made their works so well balanced; no other poets have so well satisfied the thinking power; have so well satisfied the religious sense." More than any other English poet he prized the qualities of measure, proportion, and restraint; and to him lucidity, austerity, and high seriousness, conspicuous elements of classic verse, were the substance of true poetry. In explaining his own position as to his art, he says: "In the sincere endeavor to learn and practise, amid ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... young artist, caught by the romantic fever, who glories in the wealth of vocabulary discovered to him by the poets, and seeks often in vain for a thought stalwart enough to wear that glistering armour. Hence it is that the masters of style have always had to preach restraint, self-denial, austerity. His style is a man's own; yet how hard it is to come by! It is a man's bride, to be won by labours and agonies that bespeak a heroic lover. If he prove unable to endure the trial, there are cheaper beauties, nearer home, easy to be ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... about him,—and always had been even as a young man, which seemed to be in natural accordance with the fact that he had never seemed to seek female society, save as an amphytrion receiving all Ravenna within his hospitable doors. There was a kind of austerity about his bearing;—a something difficult to define, which would have prevented any girl from fancying that he was at all likely to want to make love to her; a something which made it as impossible ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... words, yet with an ingratiating manner. It was a manner that had been used, ages back, by the lordly driver of the present truck, when he had formed alliances with drivers of horse-drawn vehicles. He recognized it as such and turned to regard the courtier with feigned austerity. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... been of Irish race as his name is possibly identical {13} with the Irish name Faelchu. He is said by the Aberdeen Breviary to have left his native land to spread the Roman Faith in Scotland, where he was raised to the episcopal rank. He voluntarily took upon himself a life of great austerity to satisfy for his own sins and those of others. His evangelical labours were devoted to the northern parts of the country chiefly. He lived in a little house woven of reeds and wattles, for his attraction was towards everything poor ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... chooses his own verdict by a long course of behavior; austerity in the family begets fear; an affectation, whether of folly or resentment, is at last credited to nature; man is seldom allowed to escape from the trap ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... of the hanging of any 'appotigar,' or of any one of the Queen's women, 'the maidans,' spoken of collectively. So far, the search for the apothecary has been a failure. More can be learned from Randolph's letter to Cecil (December 31, 1563), here copied from the MS. in the Public Record Office. The austerity of Mary's Court, under ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... some forty years of age, stoutish, a trifle asthmatic, with a long visage expressive of much shrewdness, and bushy eyebrows, which lent themselves at will to a look of genial condescension, of pious austerity, or of stern command. His dark hair and reddish beard were carefully trimmed; so were the nails of his shapely, delicate hands. His voice, now subject to huskiness, had until a few years ago been remarkably powerful and melodious; ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... worldly amusement. The idea so prevalent in other sections that the people of the South are convivial and mercurial in temperament is erroneous. It would be more nearly correct to say that gravity, amounting almost to austerity, is a distinguishing mark of Southerners. In any Southern gathering representing the people as a whole there is little mirth. There is much more Puritanism in the South today than remains in New England. The Sabbath is no longer observed ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... mischievous boy looked out of an undertaker's window; but the smile, so full of wit, mischief, and even gaiety, is gone in an instant, quicker than I have ever seen a smile flash out of sight, and immediately the fine scholarly face sinks back into somnolent austerity which for all its aloofness and immemorial calm suggests, in some fashion for which I cannot account, a ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... but wives sometimes have a mode of declining such civilities without committing themselves to overt acts of war. To Miss Biggs Mr. Furnival could not bring himself to say anything civil, seeing that he hated her; but such words as he did speak to her she received with grim griffin-like austerity, as though she were ever meditating on the awfulness of his conduct. And so in truth she was. Why his conduct was more awful in her estimation since she had heard Lady Mason's name mentioned, than when her mind had been simply filled ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... classical and ecclesiastical antiquity. In addition to this, literary and theological studies were pursued, and the mysticism of pseudo-Dionysius was cultivated. The life, though simple and self-denying and hard, was not of extreme austerity. There was a division of the monks into two classes, similar to the division in vogue in later time in the West into choir-monks and lay-brothers. The life of the choir-monks was predominantly contemplative, [v.03 p.0470] being taken up with the church services and private prayer and study; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... anything that took shape before me, though when it came to people I was less credulous of their perfection because they pressed forward their not always certain credentials upon me. I reverenced them then too much for an imagined austerity as I admire them now perhaps not enough for their charm, for it is the charm of things and people only that engages and satisfies me. I have completed my philosophical equations, and have become enamored of people as having the same propensities as all ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... wonderful constitution of Alcibiades, who so easily could transform himself to so various fashions without any prejudice to his health; one while outdoing the Persian pomp and luxury, and another, the Lacedaemonian austerity and frugality; as reformed in Sparta, as voluptuous ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... its effect upon Raikes, and it was remarked, with the astonishment the occasion justified, that the miser, in the ensuing days, emerged from his customary austerity to the extent of reciprocal amenities in the passage of bread ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... smile softened her austerity, and she turned away to hide it. "To think," he wondered, "that a sense of humour should inhabit that!" He broke a roll and munched it gloomily, pondering this revelation. "And such humour ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... she found Pasmore unusually communicative. Despite his seeming austerity, he possessed a keen vein of humour of a dry, pungent order that was eminently entertaining. To-day he gave vent to it, and she found herself laughing and talking to him in a way that, twenty-four hours before she would ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... devotion that did not even shrink from death on his behalf. Even in his pure and polished oratory passion revealed itself chiefly in appeals to pity, not in the harsher forms of invective or of scorn. His mode of life was simple and restrained, but apparently with none of the pedantic austerity of the stoic. In an age that was becoming dissolute and frivolous he was moral and somewhat serious.[311] But his career is not that of the man who burdens society with the impression that he has a solemn mission ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... lash no back; Whilst Pixley has a pow that's easy struck, And though good Deacon Fitch (a Fitch for luck!) Has none, yet, lest he go entirely free, God gave to him a corn, a heel to me. He, also, sets his face (so like a flint The wonder grows that Pickering doesn't skin't) With cold austerity, against these wars On scamps—'tis Scampery that he abhors! Behold advance in dignity and state— Grave, smug, serene, indubitably great— Stanford, philanthropist! One hand bestows In alms what t'other one as justice owes. ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... told of a lady named Ch'en, who was a Buddhist nun celebrated for her virtue and austerity. Between the years 1628 and 1643 she left her nunnery near Wei-hai city and set out on a long journey for the purpose of collecting subscriptions for casting a new image of the Buddha. She wandered through Shantung and Chihli and finally reached Peking, and ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... moment than what his mission to Amboise was. But of one thing he was certain, the King was a man much maligned and little understood: harsh of word and stern of act, perhaps, but with a great, undreamed wealth of tenderness behind the apparent austerity. Of that the little coat of mail and tinselled mask bore witness. It was wonderful, he told himself, how the yearnings of the human heart found excuse for what the sterner brain condemned; surely that was where the human drew nearest to the ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... are too good," said Mrs. Avenel with great austerity, "and I beg you will not talk in that way. Good-night—I must get your ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... to drop all figurative expression, what hopes can we ever have of engaging mankind to a practice which we confess full of austerity and rigour? Or what theory of morals can ever serve any useful purpose, unless it can show, by a particular detail, that all the duties which it recommends are also the true interest of each individual? The peculiar advantage of the foregoing system seem to be, that it furnishes proper ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... assumed, and all those to whom we've been introduced would be delighted to know us in our own characters, at the end. But Leopold is a man, not a romantic girl, as you are. He has always had a reputation for pride and austerity, for being just before he would let himself be generous; and it may be that to one of his nature, a ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... blue-black against the ethereal blue of the distance, winged their way slowly homeward to the long avenue of dark trees leading to a farm in the valley. The charm of the place was clear and sane, its beauty simple almost to austerity. This the young girl welcomed. It washed her imagination free of the curious questionings, involuntary doubts and suspicions, which the house and garden at The Hard, steeped in tradition, thick with past happenings, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... repugnance nor in scorn Our spirit holds you, Nor would our pen abase you More than it must—to call you feminine! Exemption I am sure you would not claim, Being subject to the common influence; Shining on earth as do the stars in heaven. Your sov'reign beauty, ladies, our austerity Cannot depreciate, nor would do so, For we have not in view a superhuman kind, Such poison,[H] therefore, far from you be set, For here we see the one, the great Diana, Who is to you as sun amongst the stars. Wit, words, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... Champagne and vicar of a little annexed parish named Bue, he was remarkable for the austerity of his habits. Devoted in all his duties, every year he gave hat remained of his salary to the poor of his parishes; enthusiastic, and of rigid virtue, he was very temperate, as much in regard to his appetite as in relation ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... for the disease of death in a hind than for the same murrain in a minister of the Gospel—or a landed gentleman," said Gordon, touched in his tone a little by the austerity of his speeches as we ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
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