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More "Sensuality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quotation rose in his mind; he repeated the whole piece, one of the most perfect of the most perfect of poets; and a phrase struck him like a blow: Du, stolzes Herz, A hast es ja gewolit. Where was the pride of his heart? And he raged against himself, as a man bites on a sore tooth, in a heady sensuality of scorn. 'I have no pride, I have no heart, no manhood,' he thought, 'or why should I prolong a life more shameful than the gallows? Or why should I have fallen to it? No pride, no capacity, no force. Not even a bandit! and to be starving here with worse than banditti—with this trivial ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... make him happy." And so I pictured Sylvia upon her honeymoon, followed by an invisible ghost whose voice she would never hear, whose name she would never know. All that van Tuiver had learned from Claire, the sensuality, the ennin, the contempt for woman—it would rise to torment and terrify his bride, and turn her life to bitterness. And then beyond this, deeps upon deeps, to which my imagination did not go—and of which the Frenchwoman, with all her freedom ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... Anabaptists to madness. Under other circumstances the noble enthusiasm, with other surroundings the strong will, of Jan of Leyden might have left a different mark on the page of history. Dragged down in this whirlpool of fanaticism, sensuality, and despair, we can only look upon him as a factor of the historic judgment, a necessary actor in that tragedy of Muenster, which forms one of the most solemn ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... he may be right—who knows! So a year passed away in sadness, with a few bad turnings into sensuality, followed by repenting in verse. It was the anniversary of her death, and Dante was outlining angels to illustrate his sonnets wherein he apotheosized Beatrice. And behold! as he day-dreamed of his Beatrice sweet consolation came in double ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... great importance. Ibrahim explained to him who I was, and he immediately came to ask for the tribute he expected to receive as "blackmail" for the right of entree into his country. Of all the villainous countenances that I have ever seen, that of Legge excelled. Ferocity, avarice, and sensuality were stamped upon his face, and I immediately requested him to sit for his portrait, and in about ten minutes I succeeded in placing within my portfolio an exact likeness of about the greatest rascal that exists in ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... pursues the subject, and represents the internal conquests of self-mastery, the conquests of a man over his passions, his violence, his covetousness, his ambition, his despair, his sensuality. Sir Guyon, after conquering many foes of goodness, is the destroyer of the most perilous of them all, Acrasia, licentiousness, and her ensnaring Bower of Bliss. But after this, the thread at once of story and allegory, slender henceforth at the best, is neglected and often entirely lost. The ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the love between man and woman when that love reaches its zenith; when it is free from consciousness, reason and sensuality. Such a moment arrived for ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... as limited to the satisfaction of material wants, without torturing himself about imaginary need, and without consuming nerves, muscles, heart and brain in a daily struggle for what he could dispense with? And I asked myself if in that perfect inertness, in that immunity from all feelings of sensuality, hatred, ambition or rivalry must he not be a thousand times happier than we in civilized society who seek fortune and satisfy our caprices, our follies, in the midst of excitement and strong emotions, living in a continual fever of suspicion, ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... bashful and shrinking disposition, it does seem strange that they should fascinate one like myself of the Saxon race. To be sure the sight of the bared shoulders and necks of society belles when undressed in the decollete fashion of their ball gowns ravishes and gluts our sensuality, but a momentary glimpse of the Indian maid's brown knee flashing by during the excitement of the fandango is just as suggestive, and the inch of hand-made embroidery on the edge of their short skirts is as effective as priceless ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... last years of the reign of Louis XV. The former dominated the king by means of her intelligence, but the latter swayed the sovereign, already consumed by his sensual excesses, through her peculiarly seductive sensuality. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... entered into in haste and under superficial emotions, between a war-hero and the more complicated type of modern woman—the woman of brains and nerves, fastidious, intellectually passionate and at the same time swayed by a sensuality, which is neither acknowledged nor understood. Hence this woman's marriage with a man, who, sufficiently a hero to die magnificently (as a matter of truth he does not die and returns in the end to receive the Victoria Cross, but it was believed he was dead) was quite ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... longer apologize for himself by urging the stupidity and sensuality of negroes. It is upon the system, which thus transforms men into beasts, that the reproach rests in all its strength and bitterness. And even if the negroes were, beyond all doubt, our inferiors in intellect, ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... to the finer sensibilities of the heart! Fools, that expect your verdant Millennium, and nothing but Love and Abundance, brooks running wine, winds whispering music,—with the whole ground and basis of your existence champed into a mud of Sensuality; which, daily growing deeper, will soon have ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... mean nature behind it. Singing is such a personal thing, that one's mentality, one's inner nature, is bound to reveal itself. Each one of us has evil tendencies to grapple with, envy, jealousy, hatred, sensuality and all the rest of the evils we are apt to harbor. If we make no effort to control these natural tendencies, they will permanently injure us, as well as impair the voice, and vitiate the good we might do. I say it in all humility, but I am earnestly trying to conquer the errors in ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... I told you that I was writing a novel; I don't think I did. The idea of it is this: A young man has loved three women. The first charmed him by her exceeding beauty; he lives with her for a time. The second captivates him, or rather holds him through his senses; his love for her is merely a sensuality; then he falls in love with a fair young girl as pure as falling snow of any stain in deed or in thought; he is engaged to marry her—or, I don't know, I haven't made up my mind on that point, perhaps it would be better if he did marry her. Well, the woman whom he ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... of the sensitiveness with which Harrington's cultivated mind recoiled from the grossness of vulgar and ignorant infidelity. We called at the cottage of a little farmer, a tenant of his, somewhat notorious both for profanity and sensuality. Presuming, I suppose, on his young landlord's suspected heterodoxy, and thinking, perhaps, to curry favor with him, he ventured (I know not what led to it) to indulge in some stupid joke about the legion and the herd of swine. "Sir," said he, scratching his head, "the Devil, I reckon, must have ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... and though it is not all gospel with him, for now and again, when the moon shines and girls go skipping and singing down Florence streets—"Zooks, sir, flesh and blood, that's all I'm made of!" Fra Lippo with his outbreaks of frank sensuality is far nearer to Browning's kingdom of heaven than is the faultless painter; he presses with ardour towards his proper goal in art; he has full faith in the ideal, but with him it is to be sought only through the real; or rather it need not be sought at all, for one who captures ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... David about this time that women were getting a little out of hand, strained, over-inclined to laugh mirthless laughter, greedy for sensuality, sensation, sincerity, sweetmeats. Something. Even if they satisfied some fleeting passion or jealousy by marrying, they soon wanted to be de-married, separated, divorced, to don male costume, to go on the amateur stage and act Salome parts on Sunday afternoons ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... built cities and monuments of power. These temples, their palaces, their pyramids were the wonders of the ancient world. Their grand and somber architecture lasted for centuries. They were the wickedest of the nations of the earth, and effeminacy, pride and sensuality followed naturally from their material civilization unhallowed by high religious ideas. They were hateful conquerors and tyrants, and yet slaves. They were permitted to prosper until their vices wrought out their own destruction, and they became finally subservient to the posterity of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... artificial flowers, with paper leaves, in which dewdrops are simulated by drops of gum; and memorial wreaths of black and white beads rippling with bluish reflections. Cadine's rosy nostrils would dilate with feline sensuality; she would linger as long as possible in that sweet freshness, and carry as much of the perfume away with her as she could. When her hair bobbed under Marjolin's nose he would remark that it smelt of pinks. She said that she had given over using pomatum; that is was quite sufficient for ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... clothing she wore, made as it was in the suggestive fashion of the day, with no support to the form but a belt, and as scanty about her shoulders as it was about her shapely feet. It appears to have been her elegance and her manners, as well as her sensuality, which overpowered Buonaparte; for he described her as having "the calm and dignified demeanor which belongs ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... establishment—one of monks, another of nuns. The confessors of the women were chosen from the friars, and they were found to have abused their opportunities in the most infamous manner. With a hateful mixture of sensuality and superstition, the offence and the absolution went hand-in-hand. One of these confessors, so zealous for the pope that he professed himself ready to die for the Roman cause, was in the habit of using language so filthy ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... inimitably devout to women whom he respected; and his natural manner, known only in its perfection to women whom he did not respect. And under both of these he conveyed a curious and disagreeable impression of stern sensuality, as if the animal in him had worn ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... Jarvie." They sent him home to her, a beast who had been with wild beasts. They did it for the most part heedlessly, in jollity and jeering; but they did it not the less effectually. The wild beast of sensuality had him again; not one devil, but seven, had entered into him; and reigning king over the others, an insensate devil of cruel jealousy of his wife, of his gaoler, resenting her ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... says Camille Lemonnier, himself a well-known writer, "these pages are conspicuously chaste; Temptation takes the form of Mystical Sensuality, at first beaten back and then surging forwards victorious; then, as the fire of passion grows more intense, the lamp of the tabernacle dies gradually out; and Humanity, with the unchaining of instinct, breaks forth, cries and howls like a mad gorilla from his cage." Here ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... must fight against sensuality, which would make you gluttons, drunkards, and debauchees; against idleness, which would make you useless to others and a burden to them; against selfishness and vanity, which would make others detest you; envy, which would render you unhappy and hateful; ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Pestilence still stalks through the earth to slay and make desolate. Each day a hundred thousand human beings die; and how many of these perish as the victims of sins of ignorance, of selfishness, of sensuality. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... recurrent massacres of her subject races. Think of the heartless grind of the factories everywhere, where work assumed a very different and more unnatural shape than the ancient labour of the fields. Think of the sensuality of many rich, the brutality of many poor, the shallowness of many fashionable, the coldness and deadness of religion, the absence anywhere of any deep, true spiritual impulse. Think, above all, of the organised materialism of Germany, the arrogance, the heartlessness, the negation ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... on the other, the baser world of matter. This was the immortal Aphrodite, cradled in bliss in the pure radiance of the ideal world and yet unable to free herself from the gross clay of matter fouled by sensuality and the vehicle ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... at this very time living with a rich lady, a landowner, Darya Mihailovna Lasunsky, in a position between that of a guest and of a dependant. He was very polite and obliging, full of sensibility and secretly given to sensuality, he had a pleasant voice, played well on the piano, and had the habit of gazing intently into the eyes of any one he was speaking to. He dressed very neatly, and wore his clothes a very long time, shaved his broad chin carefully, and arranged ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... this window stood a soldier worn with the wars, who carried himself as though glad now to be at home again. He seemed to hear approaching feet, and he withdrew into the shadow as two others advanced. One of these was a handsome youth with an eager face, in which spirituality and sensuality contended. The other was older, of an uncertain age, and his expression was mocking and evil; he carried some sort of musical instrument, and to this he seemed to sing while the younger man looked up at the window. ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... public festivals celebrated in Egypt are disgraceful upon the pages of history, being accompanied with shameful practices. Egypt was noted for corrupt morals as far back as the times of Abraham. Asia Minor was no better; unrighteousness, sensuality and luxury prevailed. In Greece there was brutal savageness in its most hideous forms; in the age of its greatest refinement sin was dressed up in the finest style. The Olympic, Pythian and Isthmian games, ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... silently studied the people and the course of political action. She was quick and observant, and nothing escaped her notice. She came to Paris prepared to continue a firm partisan of the French Revolution; but she could not be blind to the national defects. She saw the frivolity and sensuality of the people, their hunger for all things sweet, and the unrestrained passions of the greater number of the Republican leaders, which made them love liberty more than law itself. She valued their cause, but she despised the means by which they sought to gain it. Thus, in laboring ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... of inhabitants who can read and write is greater than in New England. And whereas they found these islanders a nation of half-naked savages, living in the surf and on the sand, eating raw fish, fighting among themselves, tyrannized over by feudal chiefs, and abandoned to sensuality, they now see them decently clothed, recognizing the law of marriage, knowing something of accounts, going to school and public worship more regularly than the people do at home, and the more elevated of them taking part in conducting ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... going on was too terrible—the contending powers too visibly in presence of each other, for the practical, conscientious Norse mind to be content with the puny godships of a Roman Olympus. Nectar, Sensuality, and Inextinguishable Laughter were elements of felicity too mean for the nobler atmosphere of their Walhalla; and to those active temperaments and healthy minds,—invigorated and solemnized by the massive mould of the scenery around them,—Strength, Courage, ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... deliverance": he left a name blemished by "intemperate susceptibility, unscrupulousness in passion, inconceivable attacks on his enemies, still more inconceivable attacks on his friends, want of generosity, sensuality, incessant mocking." ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... lay low in a garret, considering himself, abandoning himself to sensuality in cocoa, vast buns, tobacco: rioting above all in the thought of the secret truth which ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... nymphs and shepherds, and ceased to invoke the idyllic muse. In his long portrait gallery there are plenty of virtuous people, and some people intended to be refined; but features indicative of coarse animal passions, brutality, selfishness, and sensuality are drawn to the life, and the development of his stories is generally determined by some of the baser elements of human nature. 'Jesse and Colin' are described in one of the Tales; but they are not the Jesse and Colin of Dresden china. They are such rustics as ate fat bacon and drank 'heavy ale ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... palates with ardent spirits. Nothing can exceed the unrestrained depravity of manners existing among them. Unchecked by any idea of shame they give way to every libidinous desire. The mother endeavours by the most scandalous arts to train up her daughter for an offering to sensuality, and she is scarcely grown up before she becomes the seducer of others. Laziness is so prevalent among them that were they to subsist by their own labour only, they would hardly have bread for two of the seven days ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... they should seduce man, and that he should fall, and propagate a race of sinful creatures like himself, and that all the shocking consequences should follow; that Cain should murder his brother; that the old world should be immersed in sin and sensuality, and then be drowned; and, though Noah was a preacher of righteousness a hundred and twenty years, that none should believe and be saved; likewise the arriving of the Sodomites to such an enormous pitch of wickedness, was ordained; and that they should burn in lust, ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... no sour ascetic life. I believe not only in the thorns on the rosebush, but in the roses which the thorns defend. Asceticism is the child of sensuality and superstition. She is the secret mother of many a secret sin. God, when he made man's body, did not give us a fibre too much, nor a passion too many. I would steal no violet from the young maiden's bosom; rather would I fill her arms with more fragrant roses. But a life merely of pleasure, or ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... man's imagination is when it comes to deal with what is beyond him, how little able he is to devise anything that he desires to do when he has escaped from life. The unsubstantial heaven of a Buddhist, with its unthinkable Nirvana, is merely the depriving life of all its attributes; the dull sensuality of the Mohammedan paradise, with its ugly multiplication of gross delights; the tedious outcries of the saints in light which make the medieval scheme of heaven into one protracted canticle—these ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... face—dull, that ought to be radiant; or the presence of only that sort of beauty, which in middle age, except the deeper nature should meantime come into play, would be worse than common-place—would be mingled with the trail of more or less guilty sensuality. Many a woman at forty is repulsive, whom common men found at twenty irresistibly attractive; and many a woman at seventy is lovely to the eyes of the man who would have been compelled to allow that she ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... and this pain, it is probable that vanity is more largely concerned than the senses, because it is only the things of the mind, and not mere sensuality, that produce such violent convulsions. The lower animals are familiar with lust, but not with the passionate ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... history of thirteenth-century Italy, defied approach. Above all, its profound, austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth. Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5] In particular, deistic France, arbiter elegantiarum, felt ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... influences of remote followers of Epicurus it led to the degeneration of ethical practice. "Beware of excesses," says Epicurus, "for they will lead to unhappiness." Beware of folly and sin, for they lead to wretchedness. Nothing could have been better than this, until people began to follow sensuality as the immediate return of efforts to secure happiness. Then it led to {225} corruption, and was one of the causes of the downfall of Greek as ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... dulled eyes and in her sallow-white face and in her thin body awoke and became alive. It was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the secret held back in its long, subtle, serious, and slender lines. Desmond's sensuality was woven with so fine a web that you would have said it belonged less to her body than to ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... spent in the theatre seemed to be a dream. The spell that held him had begun to work when he went behind the scenes; and, in spite of its horrors, the atmosphere of the place, its sensuality and dissolute morals had affected the poet's still untainted nature. A sort of malaria that infects the soul seems to lurk among those dark, filthy passages filled with machinery, and lit with smoky, greasy lamps. The solemnity and reality of life disappear, the most sacred things ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... doubting no more. He had never previously heard such a cry of joy at living in obedience without anxiety as to the morrow of death. He knew that Boccanera's youth had been somewhat stormy, traversed by acute attacks of sensuality, a flaring of the red blood of his ancestors; and he marvelled at the calm majesty which faith had at last implanted in this descendant of so violent a race, who had no passion remaining in him but ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... victory over the French, not that I deserved it, but I fully believe that he wished to punish them; and if what I have heard is true, it is not to be wondered at, for never were there greater disorder, sensuality, sins, and vices seen than now prevail in France; which it is horrible to hear described; and if God is provoked, it is not a subject of surprise, and no one can be astonished.' Many more conversations are said to have passed ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... misfortune belongs misconduct. Those causes which produce poverty like intemperance, idleness, and ignorance, are productive of degeneracy, also. They render the individual unfit to meet the responsibilities of life, and tend not only to incompetence but also to sensuality and even crime. Added to the various physical causes are such psychical influences as contact with degraded minds or with base literature or art, loss of religious faith, and loss of self-confidence as ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... successes as it were with drum and trumpet, because if you did not, people might begin to doubt that you had any. You like all that, and you like to feel there is nothing you do not know and no length you have not gone, and so you ring all the changes on all the varieties of intrigue and sensuality, and go over the gamut of sickly sentiment and nauseous license as an orchestra tunes its strings up every night! That is what all you people call love; I am content enough to have ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... esteem and wide circulation, while unhappily their character to me was utterly offensive. I shall only mention Heinse's Ardinghello and Schiller's Robbers. The first I hated for its having undertaken to exhibit sensuality and mystical abstruseness, ennobled and supported by creative art: the last, because in it, the very paradoxes moral and dramatic, from which I was struggling to get liberated, had been laid hold of by a powerful though an immature genius, and poured ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... derived from great dovecots and towers, which last once served for the defence of the manor-house or the little castle. When the fury of the religious wars followed upon that tidal wave of dilettantism and sensuality which swept over Europe from the south to the north, and which we call the Renaissance, and when Huguenots and Leaguers gave such frequent dressings of blood to the vineyards of Perigord, every house and church that was in any way fortified was used as a stronghold ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... often in them—where prayer would be a strange incongruity. A man will not pray over the counter of a public-house. A man will not pray over a sharp bargain. A man will not pray that God may bless his outbursts of anger, or sensuality and the like. A man will not pray when he feels that he is deep down in some pit of self-caused alienation from God. The possibility of praying in given circumstances is a sharp test, although a very rough and ready one, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... FREDERICK THE GREAT is the title of a curious piece in the last number of Frazer's Magazine. It is unique as a sample of kingcraft; and every line supplies a proof of the candor, hypocrisy, unscrupulousness, sense of duty, courage, sensuality, and intellect, of the great Prussian, to whom are partially due the literary merits ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... that for themselves already, here in England," said William, with a sneer at the fancied morals of the English monks and clergy. [Footnote: The alleged profligacy and sensuality of the English Church before the Conquest rests merely on a few violent and vague expressions of the Norman monks who displaced them. No facts, as far as I can find, have ever been alleged. And without facts on the other side, an impartial man will hold by the one fact which is certain, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... Bazmant fell asleep in the arms of sensuality; and when he awoke was obliged to take to flight: notwithstanding the bravery of his soldiers, the enemy had become ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... the physician Rondibilis to Panurge, "that you feel in you the pricking stings of sensuality, by which you are stirred up to venery. I find in our faculty of medicine, and we have founded our opinion therein upon the deliberate resolution and final decision of the ancient Platonics, that carnal concupiscence is cooled and quelled five ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... The former is a survey of the nations of Europe, the object being to discover a people wholly admirable. Merit is found in Italians, Swiss, French, Dutch, and English,—but never perfection; even the free and happy Swiss are disgusting in the vulgar sensuality of their pleasures; happiness is nowhere. One is not surprised to learn that Dr. Johnson contributed at least a few lines to a poem ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... a person with a narrow forehead, small grey eyes, and that peculiar expression of countenance which the vice of indulged avarice seems generally to produce. Though his lips denoted sensuality, their total want of firmness showed the astute Father Mendez that he would be easily moulded to his will. The marquis was perfectly well aware of the way in which the church was at times apt to ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... apparently grasped by none; and the female sank lower and lower, till the image of the parasitic woman of Rome (with a rag of the old Roman intensity left even in her degradation!)—seeking madly by pursuit of pleasure and sensuality to fill the void left by the lack of honourable activity; accepting lust in the place of love, ease in the place of exertion, and an unlimited consumption in the place of production; too enervated at last to care even to produce offspring, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... Mr. Moore is infinitely more insidious and malignant. It seems to be his aim to impose corruption upon his readers, by concealing it under the mask of refinement; to reconcile them imperceptibly to the most vile and vulgar sensuality, by blending its language with that of exalted feeling and tender emotion; and to steal impurity into their hearts, by gently perverting the most simple and generous of their affections. In the execution of this unworthy task, he labours with a perseverance ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... ungraceful swing; but it seemed to her that his bearing was merely the result of an empty self-sufficiency. There was, she felt, no force behind it. Gregory was smiling, and there was certainly a hint of sensuality in his face which suggested that the man might sink into a self-indulgent coarseness. Agatha remembered that she was still pledged to him and determinedly brushed ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... of it occur where he is writing of women, as in the Ode to Lydia (Book I. 25) and to Lyce (Book IV. 13). Both ladies seem to have been, former favourites of his, and yet the burden of these poems is exultation in the decay of their charms. The deadening influence of mere sensuality, and of the prevalent low tone of morals, must indeed have been great, when a man "so singularly susceptible," as Lord Lytton has truly described him, "to amiable, graceful, gentle, and noble impressions of man and of life," could write of ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... bacchanalian and epicurean, that of the Son was tobacchanalian and eclectic, allowing excess only in moderation, as it were, and countenancing nothing more violent than poetic license. However, we are led to believe that the tastes of his time called for a certain mild sensuality as the gustatio to a feast of reason, and had Omar Khayyam lived in our own day he would doubtless have agreed with a reverend Erlington and Bosworth Professor in the University of Cambridge who boldly asserts ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... even old age has its bloom, and the happiest enjoyment of this, also, was vouchsafed him. Only a few months have passed since for him the brethren of our lodge crowned their mysterious sphinx with roses, to show that, if the aged Anacreon undertook to adorn his exalted sensuality with the rose's light twigs, the ethical sensuousness, the tempered joy of life and wit which animated our noble friend also merited a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... in character likewise; in him, as in Socrates, the demigod and the satyr, the man and the ape, are struggling for the mastery. In Socrates, the true man conquers, and comes forth high and pure; in Rabelais, alas! the victor is the ape, while the man himself sinks down in cynicism, sensuality, practical jokes, foul talk. He returns to Paris, to live an idle, luxurious life; to die—says the legend—saying, "I go to seek a great perhaps," and to leave behind him little save a school of Pantagruelists—careless young gentlemen, whose ideal was to laugh ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... those handsome features, exactly as he had tasted the game-birds and champagne a half hour before. The same relish was in both enjoyments, only one was the epicureanism of a mind that found pleasure in dissecting a young heart, and the other, quite as important to him, was a delicious sensuality. ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... expensive couches and tables, to call in the assistance of butchers and cooks, or to fatten like voracious animals in private. For so not only their manners would be corrupted, but their bodies disordered; abandoned to all manner of sensuality and dissoluteness, they would require long sleep, warm baths, and the same indulgence as in perpetual sickness. To effect this was certainly very great; but it was greater still, to secure riches from rapine and from envy, as Theophrastus expresses it, or rather by their eating in common, and ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... some of these moveable prisons, and I must confess that I never beheld such an assemblage of ill-looking faces as were collected within them. In the countenances of some of the prisoners unbridled passion and degrading sensuality were so plainly and so odiously portrayed, that one shuddered to reflect that such features could be an index of the human mind. Most of them were Creole Indians; but there were a few Europeans ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... and so proved his idealism true after all. He doesn't know, and I don't know. But there it is. He's haunted by the possibility of it all his days. He's a man now ruled by an obsession. He thinks of one thing and one thing only, day and night. His sensuality has fallen away from him because women are dull—sterile to him beside that perfect picture of the woman lost. Lost! he may recover her! He doesn't know. The thought of death obsesses him. What is there in it? Is she behind there or no? ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... with the tongue, grinding the teeth, biting the nails, shrugging corrugations, pulling buttons, or twisting garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, etc.) are relics of past forms of utilities now essentially obsolete. Ancient modes of locomotion, prehension, balancing, defense, attack, sensuality, etc., are all rehearsed, some quite fully and some only by the faintest mimetic suggestion, flitting spasmodic tensions, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... certain guilt; but having wholly subdued them, he thence attains heavenly bliss. v. 94. Desire is never satisfied with the enjoyment of desired objects; as the fire is not appeased with clarified butter; it only blazes more vehemently. v. 97. To a man contaminated by sensuality, neither the Vedas, nor liberality, nor sacrifices, nor strict observances, nor pious austerities, ever procure felicity." The control over every kind of sensual indulgence is enjoined upon the king. vii. 44. Day and night ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... the same race as those who occupied the other larger West India Islands. Unlike the fierce Caribs who inhabited some of the smaller Antilles, the Arawaks were of a gentle and meek disposition. They were inclined to idleness and sensuality. Columbus lauded their kindliness and generosity; the possession of these traits, however, did not prevent them from fighting bravely ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... great fact that our REDEEMER came to republish His own two primval ordinances,—the spiritual observance of the Sabbath and the sanctity of Marriage,—is quietly ignored. A youth utterly degraded by sensuality[29], and blinded by unbelief[30], is a terrible picture truly. Dr. Temple therefore boldly gives the lie direct to History, sacred and profane; and insists that "side by side with freedom from idolatry, there ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... dim fancies, this thought visits the mind of common men. It is soon obscured by the mists of sensuality, the dust of routine, and he thinks it was only some meteor or ignis fatuus that shone. But, as a Rosicrucian lamp, it burns unwearied, though condemned to the solitude of tombs; and to its permanent life, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... thing he has placed there. I f the Grecian religion had gone into the folly of self-mortification, I suppose the devotees of Flora would have shut themselves up in a nasty inn, and have punished their noses for the sensuality of having smelt to ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... in the language, are closely affiliated in the Hindoo myth {HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} a reddish colour of the skin, want of symmetry and ungainliness of form, strength in hugging with the fore paws or arms, the faculty of climbing, shortness of tail(?), sensuality, capacity of instruction in dancing and in music, are all characteristics which more or less distinguish and meet in bears as well as in monkeys. In the Ramayanam, the wise Jamnavant, the Odysseus of the expedition ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... frequently met with, was the finest product of natural manhood. Of the channels of information which reach us from Brook Farm, and we believe we have had access to them all, none contains the slightest evidence of sensuality, the least trace of the selfishness of the world, or even any sign of the extravagances of spiritual pride. There is, on the other hand, a full acknowledgment of the ordinary failings of unpretentious good people. Nor do we mean to say that they were purely in the natural ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... complain of the lot of man nor of the mutability of the world. Sensuality contaminates the body depresses the understanding deadens the moral feelings of the heart and degrades man from ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... from the characteristics which had marked them as citizens. They were ready to form cliques and quarrel in the name of Christ, and they still showed the same quarrelsome mood in the time of St. Clement. They found it hard to hate the sensuality which in their earlier days they had regarded as divine. They were puffed up with eloquence and philosophic speculation, and forgot that there is no "sweetness and ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... habits. A higher civilization, yet to come, will combine the most exquisite culture of heart and mind with true simplicity and naturalness of living. Excessive meat eating, strong spices and condiments, alcohol, coffee, tea, overwork, night work, fear, worry, sensuality, corsets, high heels, foul air, improper breathing, lack of exercise, loveless marriages, race suicide, all of these and many other evils of hypercivlization have contributed their share in creating the universal degeneracy of civilized nations commented ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... admitted into any public employment, unless the House should be first satisfied of his vital godliness. We know what was the end of this training. We know that it ended in impiety in filthy and heartless sensuality, in the dissolution of all ties of honour and morality. We know that at this very day scriptural phrases, scriptural names, perhaps some scriptural doctrines excite disgust and ridicule, solely because they are associated with the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... did he not uniformly require faith as the condition of obtaining the "evidence," as this Barrister calls it—that is, the miracle? What a shameless perversion of the fact! He never did reason thus. In one instance only, and then upbraiding the base sensuality of the Jews, he said: "If ye are so base as not to believe what I say from the moral evidence in your own consciences, yet pay some attention to it even for my works' sake." And this, an 'argumentum ad hominem,' a bitter reproach ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... entirely just to speak of beauty in matters of scent and taste, to talk not only of beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of beautiful beer and beautiful cheese! The balance as between asceticism and sensuality comes in, it seems to me, if we remember that to drink well one must not have drunken for some time, that to see well one's eye must be clear, that to make love well one must be fit and gracious and sweet and disciplined from top to toe, ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... the roadhouse was but the beginning. All at once Vandover rushed into a career of dissipation, consumed with the desire of vice, the perverse, blind, and reckless desire of the male. Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, debauchery, he knew them all. He rubbed elbows with street walkers, with bookmakers, with saloonkeepers, with the exploiters of lost women. The bartenders of the city called him by his first name, the policemen, the night detail, ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... another curious aspect. It is a very tolerable thermometer by which to measure the downward progress of nations. Pagan Rome, in times of comparative purity, had her laws against idolatry; but as her higher classes advanced in refinement and sensuality, and the plebeians became debased and brutalized, the whole religious ideas of the nation degenerated into idolatry, associated with a despotic miracle-working priesthood, and soon followed by a political despotism. It is curious to witness how exactly it takes on ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... feeling, but they served at least to keep it alive, while the false platonism and ultra-refined sentiment were simply moral protests against the coarse vices of the time. The prudery which reached a satirical climax in "Les Precieuses Ridicules" was a natural reaction from the sensuality of a Marguerite and a Gabrielle. Mme. de Rambouillet saw and enjoyed the first performance of this celebrated play, nor does it appear that she was at all disturbed by the keen satire which was generally supposed to have been directed toward her salon. Moliere himself ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... explains in what manner the volatile effluvia from the intestines stimulate and promote the operations of the animal economy: he affirmed, the last Grand Duke of Tuscany, of the Medicis family, who refined upon sensuality with the spirit of a philosopher, was so delighted with that odour, that he caused the essence of ordure to be extracted, and used it as the most delicious perfume: that he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with business, found immediate ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... spoke, thrust his hands into his pockets, and frowned at the silvery surface of the river. "Love!" he ejaculated. "Rot! It is not love they mean. But don't let us desecrate a night like this with any idea that lowers us to the level of a beastly French novel reeking with sensuality." ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... and yet there was only one point of real beauty in the entire countenance. The mouth was perfect. But the man with a perfect mouth is usually one whom it will be found expedient to avoid. Without a certain allowance of sensuality no man is genial—without a little weakness there is no kind heart. This Frenchman's mouth was not, however, obtrusively faultless. It was perfect in its design, but, somehow, many people failed to take note of the fact. It is so with the "many," one finds. The ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... after they have held sway for years, are easily discernible. Sensuality, arrogance, vanity, coldness, benevolence, sympathy, and others are easily determined. But, in order to be successful in persuasion, you need to be able to trace all of the ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... But modern society sorely needs some plain speaking on these subjects—abundance of bread and idleness, facilities for divorce, the filth which newspapers lay down on every breakfast-table, the insidious sensuality of much fiction and art, the licence of the stage. The opportunities for secret profligacy in great cities conspire to loosen the bonds of morality. I would venture to ask public teachers seriously to consider their duty in this ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Christians among the higher classes, either altogether overlook or deny, or at least greatly extenuate the corruption and weakness here in question. They acknowledge indeed that there is, and ever has been in the world, a great portion of vice and wickedness; that mankind have been ever prone to sensuality and selfishness, in disobedience to the more refined and liberal principles of their nature; that in all ages and countries, in public and in private life, innumerable instances have been afforded of oppression, of rapacity, of cruelty, of fraud, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... VIII., he was in the mid-path of life, and was lost, as he allegorically describes it at the beginning of the "Inferno," in a wild and savage wood. He was hindered from ascending the sunny hill of heavenly aims by the speckled panther of sensuality, the gaunt, gray wolf of avaricious selfishness, and the fierce lion of wrath and ambitious pride. But he was restored to hope and effort by a vision of Beatrice, which seems to have come to him before his Easter communion, and fixed in his mind the purpose ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... is terribly true. In devising brainless amusements; in pursuing them with enormous vigor, and taking them with eager seriousness, our English people are the wonder of the world. They always were. And it is just as well; for otherwise their sensuality would become morbid and destroy them. What appals me is that their amusements should amuse them. They are the amusements of boys and girls. They are pardonable up to the age of fifty or sixty: after that they are ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... perfect of poets; and a phrase struck him like a blow: Du, stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt. Where was the pride of his heart? And he raged against himself, as a man bites on a sore tooth, in a heady sensuality of scorn. "I have no pride, I have no heart, no manhood," he thought, "or why should I prolong a life more shameful than the gallows? Or why should I have fallen to it? No pride, no capacity, no force. Not even a bandit! and to be starving here with worse than banditti—with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the rule. Now Self aspires to get on a higher place among sages, but body pulls Self down to the pavement of masses. Now Self proposes to give some money to the poor, but body closes the purse tightly. Now Self admires divine beauty, but body compels him to prefer sensuality. Again, Self likes spiritual liberty, but body confines ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... centuries of preaching such as yours, to repair one millionth part of the damage done by your bad passions to a single fellow-creature? Such a hateful excuse is verily to carry the Urim with its oracular gems into the very sty of sensuality, and to debase your religion into 'a procuress to the lords of hell.' I have done; but let me say, Hazlet, that your self-justification is, if possible, more ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the poetic duel between Sordello and Eglamor at Palma's Court of Love. But why all this stress and fury? On the pianoforte the delicate episode sounded gratefully; with the thick riotous orchestration came a disillusioning transformation. There was noise without power, there was sensuality that strove to imitate the tenderness of passion; and she had fancied it a cloudy garden of love. Alixe raised an involuntary hand ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... a lesson for the heart! Oh, is there a more fearful consummation of error in the beginning of life than a wholly discordant marriage! This mating of higher and lower natures—of delicacy with coarseness—of sensuality with almost spiritual refinement—of dove-like meekness with falcon cruelty—of the lamb with the bear! It makes the very heart bleed to think of the undying anguish that is all around us, springing from this most frightful cause ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... Island and forced evacuation of New York, and indeed of New Jersey, Sir William Howe buried himself in self-indulgent inactivity for six months in New York; while a portion of his army sought quarters and plunder, and committed brutal acts of sensuality, in the chief places of New Jersey. Loyalty seems to have been the prevalent feeling of New Jersey on the first passing of ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... in his existence, that he had never stopped to wonder if his domestic relations might have been pleasanter had he gone about the business of selection as carefully as he picked and chose the tobacco for his factory. Even the streak of sensuality in his nature did not run warm as in the body of an ordinary mortal, and his vices, like his virtues, had become so rarefied in the frozen air of his intelligence that they were no longer recognizable as belonging to ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... They spoke of Christ as a Tyburn bird, as digging for roots, as vexed by an aunt, and as sitting in the beer-house among the scum of society. They sang hymns to the devil. They revelled in the most hideous and filthy expressions, chanted the praises of lust and sensuality, and practised a number of sensual abominations too loathsome to be described. At one service held in Fetter Lane, Count Zinzendorf, said Rimius, had declared that the seventh commandment was not binding on Christians, and ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... rather than good. On the face itself, instead of joy or virtue, at the best, sadness, probably pride, often sensuality, and always, by preference, vice or agony as the subject of thought. In the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, and the Last Judgment of Tintoret, it is the wrath of the Dies Irae, not its justice, in which they delight; and their only passionate thought of the coming of Christ in the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... individual. Overwrought attachment to satisfactions of the palate, betrayed by constant thinking of viands and pleasures of the table, and by avidity in taking nourishment, betokens a dangerous, if not a positively sinful, degree of sensuality. Then, to continue eating or drinking after the appetite is appeased, is in itself an excess, and mortal sin may be committed even without going to the last extreme. Lastly, it is easy to yield inordinately to this passion by attaching undue ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... marriage involves the mightiest issues of life and is the most holy and sacred right recognized by man, and it is the Balm of Gilead for many ills. Masturbation or prostitution soon blight the brightest prospects a young man may have. Manhood is morality and purity of purpose, not sensuality. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... pretended that such stories were the commonest things on earth, and that to be scandalized by them was infantile. Sophia, thrust suddenly into a strange civilization perfectly frank in its sensuality and its sensuousness, under the guidance of a young man to whom her half-formed intelligence was a most diverting toy—Sophia felt mysteriously uncomfortable, disturbed by sinister, flitting phantoms of ideas which she only dimly apprehended. Her eyes fell. Gerald ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... forms, more fiend-like than human, photographed on those sheets of paper. Crimes of worse than brutal violence, savage cruelty, crimes of treachery and cowardly cunning and conspiracy, breach of trust, tyrannical extortion, groveling intemperance, sensuality gross and shameless—the heart sickens at the record of a week's crime! It is a record from which the Christian woman often turns aside appalled. Human nature can read no lessons of humility more powerful than those contained ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... them to disgusting diseases, in which they themselves revered the finger of Heaven." Some of these ancient tribes are said to have been cannibals, and their horrible outrage in serving up to Cyaxares human flesh for game, may be taken to confirm the account Their sensuality was unbridled, so much so that even polygamy was a licence too limited for their depravity. The Huns were worthy sons of such fathers. The Goths, the bravest and noblest of barbarians, recoiled in horror from their physical ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... they got to, what has been done? How do I come into the midst of it all?" The vastness of street and house he was prepared for, the multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the systematised sensuality of a class of ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... doctrine be true, it is wholly unnecessary for any of you to impose any restraint upon your passions or wills. Are you tempted to indulge in sensuality, or to defraud your neighbor, and even to assassinate him? And does the inquiry arise in your mind whether the act to which you are tempted is according to the will of God? You have only to do it, and the result proves that it is decreed. So says Mr. Barnes: "The ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... I have discovered what true pleasure is. After beholding the egotism of sensuality and of intellect, I have found the happy self-sacrifice of goodness. Pierre, M. Antoine, and Mother Denis had all kept their Carnival; but for the first two, it was only a feast for the senses or the mind; while for the third, it was a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... he gave a light gesture of indifference—"I have the feelings of a modern man,—the 'Kultur' of a perfect super-German! Yes, that is so! Sentiment is the mere fly-trap of sensuality—the feeler thrust out to scent the prey, but once the fly is caught, the trap closes. Do you understand? No, of course you don't! You are ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... calls sons. The flood came not because the generation of Cain was corrupt, but because the generation of the righteous who had believed God, had obeyed his Word, and had possessed the true worship, now had lapsed into idolatry, disobedience to parents, sensuality, oppression. Even so the last day shall be hastened, not by the profligacy of Gentile, Turk and Jew, but by the filling of the Church with errors through the pope and fanatical spirits, so that those very ones who occupy the highest place in the Church exercise themselves in sensuality, ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... each are attained are so contrary to each other, that they seem, in my opinion, incompatible, and as impossible to exist together, as to unite in the mind at the same time the most sublime ideas and the lowest sensuality. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... Pythagoreans. The cold breath of a harshly abstract, a too incorporeal philosophy, had blown, like an east wind, on that last depressing day in the prison-cell of Socrates; and the venerable commonplaces then put forth, in which an overstrained pagan sensuality seems to be reacting, to be taking vengeance, on itself, turned now sick and suicidal, will lose none of their weight with Plato:—That "all who rightly touch philosophy, study nothing else than to die, and to be dead,"—that ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... imagination and the senses. The brush of the same painter depicted Bacchus wedding Ariadne and Mary fainting on the hill of Calvary. Careless of any peril to dogmatic orthodoxy, and undeterred by the dread of encouraging pagan sensuality, the artists wrought out their modern ideal of beauty in the double field of Christian and Hellenic legend. Before the force of painting was exhausted, it had thus traversed the whole cycle of thoughts and feelings that form the content of the modern mind. Throughout this ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... conduct, intelligible and straightforward thinking for an unfettered dreamland, compounded of fairy beauty, flashes of mystical and intuitive understanding intermixed with claptrap magic, a high-flown commercialism and an etherealized sensuality. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... enumerations in the greatest detail of gifts made to the gods, together with fulsome praises of the kings, written either by themselves or by others, which we are half inclined to regret the lapse of ages has spared from destruction. At the same time morals fall off. Sensuality displays itself in high places. Intrigue enters the charmed circle of the palace. The monarch himself is satirized in indecent drawings. Presently, the whole idea of a divinity hedging in the king departs; and a "thieves' society" is formed for rifling the royal ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... increased my affection for her who had inflicted it. It needed all my affection and all my natural gentleness to prevent me from seeking a renewal of the same treatment by deserving it, for I had found in the pain and even in the shame of it an element of sensuality which left more desire than fear of receiving the experience again from the same hand. It is true that, as in all this a precocious sexual element was doubtless mixed, the same chastisement if inflicted by her ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... damnation. And this infection of nature doth remain, yea in them that are regenerated; whereby the lust of the flesh, called in the Greek, phronema sarkos, which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh, is not subject to the Law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized, yet the Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... fearful risk. Alas! how many have repented through a long life of wretchedness. Can a true woman love a man who lacks principle—who will sacrifice honour for a few paltry dollars—who will debase himself for gain—whose gross sensuality suffocates all high, spiritual love? No! no! It is impossible! And she who unites herself with such a man, must either shrink, grovelling, down to his mean level, or ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... untimely frosts, destroy in a moment what with long and painful effort has been provided. Pestilence still stalks through the earth to slay and make desolate. Each day a hundred thousand human beings die; and how many of these perish as the victims of sins of ignorance, of selfishness, of sensuality. ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... the seeming! I will write against it, You seem to me as Dian in her orb; As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown; But you are more intemperate in your blood Than Venus, or those pamper'd animals That rage in savage sensuality. ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... however, and not of truth, is the moving principle of his mind; and he is guided in his fantastic delineations by no rule but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination. He luxuriates equally in scenes of Eastern magnificence; or the still solitude of a hermit's cell—in the extremes of sensuality or refinement. ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... been molded to such myriad varieties. It has in full consciousness of its power sacrificed all earthly happiness, toiled and died for rulers, for ideas of which it had no idea, for vague war-cries—it has existed only for sensuality, or beauty, or food—for religion or for ostentation, according to different climate or age or soil—it has groveled for ages in misery or roamed free and proud—and between the degraded slave and the proud free-man there is, as I think, a very terrible difference indeed. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... devotion—a sentiment which they pretend to have received from Mahomet himself by tradition. The fact is, the prophet was very fond of women. The Catholics would seem to think a priest better with absolutely no wife. This is a mere struggle between sensuality and asceticism. There is no love or affection in it. I showed Mohammed an empty bottle. He took a piece of paper and wrote: "The bottle is empty of wine, God fill it again." Such is ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... happiness, delectation, delight; amusement, recreation, diversion; will, choice, preference, desire; voluptuousness, sensuality. Antonym: displeasure. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... failing in other characters. The Greeks may have retrograded from a want of coherence between the many small states, from the small size of their whole country, from the practice of slavery, or from extreme sensuality; for they did not succumb until "they were enervated and corrupt to the very core." (27. Mr. Greg, 'Fraser's Magazine,' Sept. 1868, p. 357.) The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... was the elaborate work of one man—one dull, heartless bigot, living, far away, a life of laborious ease and solemn sensuality; and, in reality, almost as much removed from these fellow-creatures of his, whom he called his subjects, as if he had been the inhabitant of another planet. Has history many more instructive warnings against ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... theatre as if it were plague-stricken. Such a show of religion as this the hope of gain and the fear of loss will produce, at a week's notice, in any abundance which a government may require. But under this show, sensuality, ambition, avarice, and hatred retain unimpaired power, and the seeming convert has only added to the vices of a man of the world all the still darker vices which are engendered by the constant practice of dissimulation. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... greatly celebrated still among his countrymen, I do not say much. His Books, like himself, are what I call unhealthy; not the good sort of Books. There is a sensuality in Rousseau. Combined with such an intellectual gift as his, it makes pictures of a certain gorgeous attractiveness: but they are not genuinely poetical. Not white sunlight: something operatic; a kind of rosepink, artificial ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... old age has its bloom, and the happiest enjoyment of this, also, was vouchsafed him. Only a few months have passed since for him the brethren of our lodge crowned their mysterious sphinx with roses, to show that, if the aged Anacreon undertook to adorn his exalted sensuality with the rose's light twigs, the ethical sensuousness, the tempered joy of life and wit which animated our noble friend also merited a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... she began to think for herself, the dawning of a great light has flooded the world. We are the mothers of men. Show me the mothers of a country and I will tell you of the sons. If men would ever rise above their sensuality and materialism, they must have mothers whose pure souls, brave hearts and clear intellects have touched them deeply before their birth and equipped them ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... vertue, than to any other supply, voluptuousnes being more strong, sinnowie, sturdie, and manly, is but more seriously voluptuous. And we should give it the name of pleasure, more favorable, sweeter, and more naturall; and not terme it vigor, from which it hath his denomination. Should this baser sensuality deserve this faire name, it should be by competencie, and not by privilege. I finde it lesse void of incommodities and crosses than vertue. And besides that> her taste is more fleeting, momentarie, and fading, she hath her fasts, her ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... risen on the European world. Peter the Great, half hero, half savage, had roused the inert barbarism of Russia into a titanic life. His daughter Elizabeth had succeeded to his throne,—heiress of his sensuality, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... been said and written about the sensuality of Mohammed's Religion; more than was just. The indulgences, criminal to us, which he permitted, were not of his appointment; he found them practised, unquestioned from immemorial time in Arabia; what he did was to curtail them, restrict them, not on one but on many sides. ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... a sort of asexual love of perfect men and women, asceticism which permits sex only as a sort of necessary evil and sensuality which proclaims the pleasure of sex as the only joy and scoffs at inhibition influence the lives of us all. The effect of the forbidden, the tantalizing curiosity aroused and the longing to rise above the level of lust make the sex adjustment the most difficult ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... or intrinsically a she-fiend like Valerie or Lisbeth. She does not do harm for harm's sake, nor even directly to gratify spite, greed, or other purely unsocial and detestable passions. She is a type of feminine sensuality of the less ambitious and restless sort. Given a decent education, a fair fortune, a good-looking and vigorous husband to whom she had taken a fancy, and no special temptation, and she might have been a blameless, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... doubt not they are all spent wisely and profitably; but what are their hours of recreation? Those hours that with us are passed in the enjoyment of all that art can win from nature; when, if the elaborate repast be more deeply relished than sages might approve, it is redeemed from sensuality by the presence of elegance and beauty. What is the American pendant to this? I will not draw any comparisons between a good dinner party in the two countries; I have heard American gentlemen say, that they could perceive no difference between them; ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... relation between sensuality and religion, so often commented upon and denied, again proven, and always misinterpreted, thus receives a satisfactory explanation. Some singular manifestations of it, of significance in religious history, are presented by the records of insane delusions. They confirm ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... years of Mithridates.] His whole history is in fact one long record of sensuality, treachery, and murder. From his earliest years he had breathed, as it were, an atmosphere of assassination. His father had been assassinated when he was eleven years old. His guardians and even his own mother had then plotted to assassinate him. They ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... and harvests. And what is there in the world to distinguish virtues from dishonors, or the valor of Caesar from the softness of the Egyptian eunuchs, or that can make anything rewardable but the labor and the danger, the pain and the difficulty? Virtue could not be anything but sensuality if it were the entertainment of our senses and fond desires; and Apicius had been the noblest of all the Romans, if feeding and great appetite and despising the severities of temperance had been the work and proper employment ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... Greeks may have succeeded in the Beautiful, and even in the Moral, we cannot concede any higher character to their civilisation than that of a refined and ennobled sensuality. Of course this must be understood generally. The conjectures of a few philosophers, and the irradiations of poetical inspiration, constitute an occasional exception. Man can never altogether turn aside his thoughts from ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... likely outran the feeling, but they served at least to keep it alive, while the false platonism and ultra-refined sentiment were simply moral protests against the coarse vices of the time. The prudery which reached a satirical climax in "Les Precieuses Ridicules" was a natural reaction from the sensuality of a Marguerite and a Gabrielle. Mme. de Rambouillet saw and enjoyed the first performance of this celebrated play, nor does it appear that she was at all disturbed by the keen satire which was generally supposed to have been directed toward her salon. Moliere himself ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... expressing, he is here at his very best. There was nothing spiritual in love as Gounod knew it—it was purely animal, though delicately animal; and Marguerite remains, and will remain, as the final expression of the most refined and voluptuous form of sensuality. What he had done in "Faust" he attempted to do again, with sundry differences, in "Romeo and Juliet"; and here the method which had served him so faithfully and so well in "Faust" utterly broke down. In "Faust" there were virtually ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... without both losing their original identity. You may place the bit of contentment in the mouth of ambition, so to speak, and jog along in your sterile course between the vast wheat fields groaning under the thousand-toothed plough and the gardens of delight swooning with devotion and sensuality. But cross ambition with contentment and you get the hinny of indifference or the monster of fatalism. We do not say that indifference at certain passes of life, and certain stages, is not healthy, and fatalism not powerful; but both we believe are factors ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... the consideration of our end." And it is manifest that he no longer felt more pleasure than sorrow in eating, drinking, repose, and in generating, but in not feeling hunger, nor thirst, nor fatigue, nor sensuality. From this may be understood what is according to us the perfection of firmness; not in this, that the tree neither bends nor breaks, nor is rent, but in that it does not so much as stir, and its prototype keeps spirit, sense, and intellect, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... this, Paganel maintained, not without a show of reason, that sensuality, and especially hunger, was the first cause of cannibalism among the New Zealanders, and not only among the Polynesian races, but also among the savages ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... were to be spent upon learning, and not learning to be applied to means. And as for the privateness or obscureness (as it may be in vulgar estimation accounted) of life of contemplative men, it is a theme so common to extol a private life, not taxed with sensuality and sloth, in comparison and to the disadvantage of a civil life, for safety, liberty, pleasure, and dignity, or at least freedom from indignity, as no man handleth it but handleth it well; such a consonancy it hath to men's conceits in the expressing, and to men's ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... was that court where Daniel was? Half shambles and half pigsty. Luxury, sensuality, lust, self-seeking, idolatry, ruthless cruelty, and the like were the environment of this man. And in the middle of these there grew up that fair flower of a character, pure and stainless, by the acknowledgment of enemies, and in which not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... come, will combine the most exquisite culture of heart and mind with true simplicity and naturalness of living. Excessive meat eating, strong spices and condiments, alcohol, coffee, tea, overwork, night work, fear, worry, sensuality, corsets, high heels, foul air, improper breathing, lack of exercise, loveless marriages, race suicide, all of these and many other evils of hypercivlization have contributed their share in creating the universal degeneracy ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... innumerable minstrelsies of nature, as well as from the higher art of man, that soothe, elevate, and solemnise. It is true, indeed, that there are grosser appetites of the body which many pervert so as to enslave the spirit; thus abusing by gluttony, drunkenness, and every form of sensuality, what God the merciful and wise has intrusted to man to be used for wise and merciful ends. But even here there is already perceptible a marked difference between those appetites and the more refined tastes alluded ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... fed them with direct and conscious falsehoods. "Voltaire," he informs them, "declares there is no God;" he was "an antitheist, that is one who deliberately and avowedly opposed and hated God; who swore in his blasphemy that he would dethrone him;" and "advocated the very depths of the lowest sensuality." With regard to many statements of a similar kind, equally at variance with truth, in Dr. Cumming's volumes, we presume that he has been misled by hearsay or by the second-hand character of his acquaintance with free-thinking literature. An evangelical preacher is not obliged to ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... any relation at all of cause and effect exists there. This latter doubt is justified by the fact that one of the most regular symptoms among savage as well as among civilized peoples is the most sudden and excessive sensuality, which then with equal suddenness transforms into penitential paroxysms, world-renunciation, and will-renunciation, both symptoms perhaps explainable as disguised epilepsy? But nowhere is it MORE obligatory to put aside explanations around no other type has there grown ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of which a number are extant, are pictures of a strong-built, bull-necked, fat, gross man, with a snub nose, a vulgar face, a look of sensuality and ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... delivered from it. Oh, papa, looking back upon that home of horror, that den of infamy, I understand in what hell consists—not in consuming fire, but in the company of devils! Oh, sir, if you could once place yourself in my position and feel what it was for me to leave that polluted atmosphere of sensuality, treachery, and hatred, and to come into this pure air of refinement, truth, and love, you would understand how it is that I can feel ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... head, for all the world like a percussion copper cap. Well, I crooks her little fingers, and crumps them well up together, As humanity pints out, and burnt her nostrums with a feather; But for all as I can do, to restore her to her mortality, She never gives a sign of a return to sensuality. Thinks I, well there she lies, as dead as my own late departed mother, Well, she'll wash no more in this world, whatever she does in t'other. So I gives myself to scramble up the linens for a minute, Lawk, sich ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... the most complete, the most ideal personification of SENSUALITY—not of vulgar, ignorant, non intelligent, mistaken sensuousness which is always deceit ful and corrupted by habit or by the necessity for gross and ill-regulated enjoyments, but that exquisite sensuality which ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... Sensuality was not encouraged in Canada by the leaders of society, as was notoriously the case in the best circles of England and of France. Dull and devoid of intellectual light as was the life of the Canadian, he had his ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... age is to be followed by a dreamy spiritualism, raising men above the observance of vulgar duties, but not above the practice of the grossest vices. It is not uncharitable to mark such tendencies, where we see canonized Rousseau, the very embodiment of sensuality, egotism, and misanthropy; and progress so taught to be the law of individual man, that, whether going to commit his crimes at the brothel, or to expiate them on the gallows, his tendencies are still and ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... repulsive, forbidding, demoniac! You speak of woman as being the noblest subject of contemplation for man, but interpreted by your book and your experiences this seems in the last analysis to lead you right into sensuality, and what I should call illicit connections. Look at your story of Doris! I do want to know what you feel about that story in relation to right and wrong. Do you consider that all that Orelay adventure was put right, atoned, explained by the fact that Doris, by her mind ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... Then he was charged with having poignarded his mistress. This he also publicly refuted. The fact is that he knew better how to make money than friends, and he raised up enemies wherever his thirst for gold led him. Avarice was his master-passion; and, second to this, gross sensuality. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... taste is obtained from a somewhat similar collection of stories, "Der Geist der Romane im letzten Viertel des 18ten Jahrhunderts," Breslau and Hirschberg, 1788, in which the author (S.G. Preisser?) claims to follow the spirit of the period and gives six stories of revolting sensuality, with a thin whitewash of ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... cried, delighted. "Better Seneca for you than sensuality; Virgilius than venery. When you are as ripe as I, you may trifle awhile if you like with lightness." Here I, listening, sniggered, for it was blown about the city that Messer Brunetto had his passions or fancies or vagaries, call ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... whereas, they found these islanders a nation of half-naked savages, living in the surf and on the sand, eating raw fish, fighting among themselves, tyrannized over by feudal chiefs and abandoned to sensuality, they now see them decently clothed, recognizing the law of marriage, knowing something of accounts, going to school and public worship more regularly than the people do at home, and the more elevated of them taking part ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... limbs, his feet, for he rode without stirrups or saddle, reaching almost to the ground; his complexion was almost as dark as that of a Mulatto; his features very handsome, the eyes particularly so, but filled with an expression which was bold and bad; and there was a disgusting look of sensuality about the mouth. He addressed a few words to the Mahasni, with whom he seemed to be well acquainted, inquiring who I was. The old man answered, "O Jew, my sultan understands our speech, thou hadst better address thyself to him." The lad then spoke to me in Arabic, but almost instantly dropping that ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... title of a curious piece in the last number of Frazer's Magazine. It is unique as a sample of kingcraft; and every line supplies a proof of the candor, hypocrisy, unscrupulousness, sense of duty, courage, sensuality, and intellect, of the great Prussian, to whom are partially due the literary merits ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... resemblances, probably helped by an equivoque in the language, are closely affiliated in the Hindoo myth {HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} a reddish colour of the skin, want of symmetry and ungainliness of form, strength in hugging with the fore paws or arms, the faculty of climbing, shortness of tail(?), sensuality, capacity of instruction in dancing and in music, are all characteristics which more or less distinguish and meet in bears as well as in monkeys. In the Ramayanam, the wise Jamnavant, the Odysseus ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... sky overhead was hard and brazen. On the lawn stood a graceful mountain ash, and beneath it were two figures. The first was that of a man, and evidently the master of the place. His appearance and manner chiefly indicated pride, haughtiness, and also sensuality. He had broken a spray from the ash-tree, and with a condescending air was in the act of handing it to a lady, in the portraiture of whom Dennis had truly displayed great skill. She was very beautiful, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... In the sensuality of Nero there may still be found some trace of a higher nature; "What an artist the world has lost!" he ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... to, what has been done? How do I come into the midst of it all?" The vastness of street and house he was prepared for, the multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the systematised sensuality of a ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... back to the matter in hand, however. Believe me, without further instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany; the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. I have no time to do this to-night (I have done it elsewhere before now);[206] but I proceed to apply the principle to ourselves in a ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... there is a great work to do, which wants every laborer,—to show that Art's highest vocation is, to be the handmaid to religion and purity, instead of to mere animal enjoyment and sensuality. This is what the Pre-Raphaelites are really doing in various degrees, but especially Hunt, who takes higher ground than mere morality, and most manfully advocates its power and duty as an exponent of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... out[675] fine names to cover our sensuality withal, but no gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial and to count them nothing considered with his devotion to his art. His art rebukes him. That never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor the wish to reap ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... vinous trait we found, however, in the person of a beggar. He was sitting on Grandstone's steps as we emerged. Aged hardly fourteen, he had turned his young nose toward the rich fumes coming up from the kitchen with a look of sensuality and indulgence that amused me. The maid, on a hint of mine, gave him a biscuit and the remainders of our bottles emptied into a bowl. A smile of extreme breadth and intelligence spread over his face. Opening his bag, he laid by the biscuit, and extracted a morsel of iced cake: at the same time ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... or slushy, green things born of unconscious jealousy, or unpleasant things born of false pieties, or hard views born of tired experience, or worldly products of incredulity, or directly evil suggestions, or the repulsions of satiated sensuality, or the bitter fruits of melancholia, or the foreshadowings of insanity, or the mere dislike of the lower moralities for the higher, or the uneasiness felt by the ordinary in the presence of the rare, or the revolt felt by the conventional ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... Luke thrice made with his own hand the portrait of Our Lady?... That holy evangelist ought certainly to have known the will of his Lord and Master better than you, my opponent, who wish to interpret the Scripture according to your sensuality." Discours des Guerres de Provence (Arch. curieuses, iv. 501, 502). Of course, the author never dreamed that his ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... fine and sensitive instincts of a gentleman were in him, and though in the very depths of his own conscience he knew himself to be as much of a social actor as Miraudin was a professional one,—though he was aware that his passions were as sensual, and therefore as vulgar, (for sensuality is vulgarity), there was a latent pride in him which forbade him to set himself altogether on the same level. And now as he walked away haughtily, his fine aristocratic head lifted a little higher in air than usual, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... of men, who disguise themselves like masquers to deceive the world. For, whilst they give the common people to understand that they are busied about nothing but contemplation and devotion in fastings and maceration of their sensuality—and that only to sustain and aliment the small frailty of their humanity—it is so far otherwise that, on the contrary, God knows what cheer they make; Et Curios simulant, sed Bacchanalia vivunt. You may read it in great letters in the colouring of their red snouts, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... has another curious aspect. It is a very tolerable thermometer by which to measure the downward progress of nations. Pagan Rome, in times of comparative purity, had her laws against idolatry; but as her higher classes advanced in refinement and sensuality, and the plebeians became debased and brutalized, the whole religious ideas of the nation degenerated into idolatry, associated with a despotic miracle-working priesthood, and soon followed by a political despotism. It is curious to witness how exactly it takes ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... among the higher classes, either altogether overlook or deny, or at least greatly extenuate the corruption and weakness here in question. They acknowledge indeed that there is, and ever has been in the world, a great portion of vice and wickedness; that mankind have been ever prone to sensuality and selfishness, in disobedience to the more refined and liberal principles of their nature; that in all ages and countries, in public and in private life, innumerable instances have been afforded of oppression, of rapacity, of cruelty, of fraud, of envy, and of malice. They ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... whole code of love. We have to treat with contempt the woman who abjectly accepts the act, and her own passivity therein, as the whole duty of love. We have to understand that the art of love has nothing to do with vice, and the acquirement of erotic personality nothing to do with sensuality. But we have also to realise that the art of love is far from being the attainment of a refined and luxurious self-indulgence, and the acquirement of erotic personality of little worth unless it fortifies and enlarges the whole personality in ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... happy privilege is forfeited for ever, when the pointed significancy of the confessor's questions, and the direct knowledge which he plants in the mind, have awakened a guilty familiarity with every form of impurity and unhallowed sensuality. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... such as hers had been was the prostitution of love, and now she deserved to be loveless for the rest of her life. Vanity and sensuality had been her substitutes for love. She had dealt in travesty and had pretended, even to herself, that she was following reality. It was amazing how she had managed to ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... stronger than himself. The companionship of Hayward was the worst possible thing for Philip. He was a man who saw nothing for himself, but only through a literary atmosphere, and he was dangerous because he had deceived himself into sincerity. He honestly mistook his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for the artistic temperament, and his idleness for philosophic calm. His mind, vulgar in its effort at refinement, saw everything a little larger than life size, with the outlines blurred, in a golden ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... turn, read Celsus. That oracle of the ancients makes an admirable panegyric on water; in short, he says in plain terms that those who plead an inconstant stomach in favor of wine, publish a libel on their own viscera, and make their constitution a pretense for their sensuality." ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... stars, moving in their courses, the recurring seasons, furnish proofs of their existence; and there is the general opinion of mankind.' I fear that the unbelievers—not that I care for their opinion—will despise us. You are not aware that their impiety proceeds, not from sensuality, but from ignorance taking the garb of wisdom. 'What do you mean?' At Athens there are tales current both in prose and verse of a kind which are not tolerated in a well-regulated state like yours. The oldest of them relate the origin ...
— Laws • Plato
... gravity, and acting as umpires in all cases of doubt between the parties. They, in fact, led a glorious life during the three months they remained at the village; that period was to them a continued carnival. The best fare the country afforded—the best attire that money could procure—all that sensuality, all that vanity could desire—their means permitted them to enjoy. Their lands not having been hunted on during the war, the beaver multiplied at an extraordinary rate, and now swarmed in every direction. Every individual belonging to the tribe might then have acquired an ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... Digestions, explains in what manner the volatile effluvia from the intestines stimulate and promote the operations of the animal economy: he affirmed, the last Grand Duke of Tuscany, of the Medicis family, who refined upon sensuality with the spirit of a philosopher, was so delighted with that odour, that he caused the essence of ordure to be extracted, and used it as the most delicious perfume: that he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... ask of Me? Give Me, if thou wilt, a list of all thy desires, all the wants of thy soul. Tell Me, simply, of all thy pride, sensuality, self-love, sloth; and ask for My help in ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... as the perverse delirium of an unbridled sensuality. It was certainly the gross act of a madman, but there was perhaps more politics in his madness than perversity; for it was an attempt to introduce into Rome the dynastic marriages between brothers and sisters which had been the constant tradition of the Ptolemies and the Pharaohs of Egypt. ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... also understood nothing of this world of mysterious tombs, with its moral teachings thousands of years old, or of the great spiritual revelation with which the land of the Pharaohs is impregnated. Both alike—Jeremiah, unmoved by the cruelty and hardness of Jehovah, Herodotus, oblivious to the sensuality and immorality of his own gods, who, according to Xenophon, were adepts at thieving and lying—shook their heads in dismay before the Egyptian symbols. But Plato, on the contrary, was able to appreciate the harmonious ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... who made sensuality beautiful, ugliness seductive, and the sin-stained soul attractive, renounced all and followed the Monk of San Marco—sensuality and asceticism at the last are one. When the procession headed for the Piazza Signoria, where the fagots were piled high, Sandro stood afar ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... never to be recalled without a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The King cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... absorbed on some object which will divert his thoughts intellectually or ideally; and by slight yet constant pressure, exercised not by fits and starts, but day after day, directly and indirectly, his father must form an antipathy in him to brutish, selfish sensuality. Above all, there must be no toying with passion, and no books permitted, without condemnation and warning, which are not of a heroic turn. When the boy becomes a man he may read Byron without danger. To a youth ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... his cream without enthusiasm, pausing at times and turning his head away. In fact, he persisted only out of an incorrigible sensuality, and finally withdrew a pace or two, leaving creamy traces still upon the saucer. With a multitude of fond words his kind mistress drew his attention to these, whereupon, making a visible effort, he ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... greatness are but pleasing dreams, And shadows soon decaying. On the stage Of my mortality, my youth has acted Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length By varied pleasures—sweetened in the mixture, But tragical in issue. Beauty, pomp, With every sensuality our giddiness Doth frame an idol—are inconstant friends When any troubled passion makes us halt On the unguarded castle ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a moral man, certainly so far as to exercise self-restraint and live in an ordered way. Unless this is so, he will be unable to give his principal energies to thought and work—that is, he will not be a good typical engineer. If sensuality appear at all largely in this central body, therefore,—a point we must leave open here—it will appear without any trappings of sentiment or mysticism, frankly on Pauline lines, wine for the stomach's sake, and it is better to marry than to burn, a concession ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Yin-Yang School, the Mo-Di School, Medicine, War, Law, Miscellaneous, so that nine directions in all are represented. Quiescence is the Taoism for non-activity, while Action is the Taoism for care of the body, as inaugurated by We Be Yang. The Devil-King of Chaos, i.e., sensuality, whose seat is supposed to be in Kidneys. "Red garments," colors, here all have an allegorical meaning. Death, i.e., Yama. The Evening Star is the star of metal; Sun Wu Kung also personifies a metal, hence the Evening Star appears as his apologist. As regards Li Dsing and Notscha see ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... over our passions, and over the external senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind's approximation to God." Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... with an immodesty which appeared to him sublime, he ended by falling on his knees before her as the early Christians did before those pure and holy martyrs whom the persecution of the emperors gave up in the circus to the sanguinary sensuality of the populace. The brand disappeared; the ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... city, he is esteemed brave; but a singular reversion takes place if the rencontre be between poor men. It is then a diabolical act, a murder, which nothing short of the gallows can serve for punishment. The creatures whom he had made mere objects to serve his sensuality were before him; he traced the gloomy history of their unfortunate sires; he knew that Ellen and Clotilda were born free. The cordon that had bound his feelings to the system of slavery relaxed. For the first time, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... the control of the forces of nature has been carried to the highest pitch of development may furnish a background to the darkest of passions. It may serve as a stage upon which callous indifference, greed, rapacity, gross sensuality, play their parts naked and unashamed. That some men sunk in ignorance and subject to such passions live in huts and have their noses pierced, and others have taken up from their environment the habit of ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... silent and unpeopled now! How often has the train of captives looked, with sinking hearts, upon the distant city, and beheld its population pouring out, to hail the return of their conqueror! What riot, sensuality and murder, have run mad in the vast palaces now heaps of brick and shattered marble! What glare of fires, and roar of popular tumult, and wail of pestilence and famine, have come sweeping over the wild plain where nothing is now heard but the wind, and where the solitary ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... it are more prominent, and savage elements are introduced. It was more adapted to foster than to check lust and cruelty. To Astarte, maidens sacrifice their chastity. There was the same double ritual, made up of gross sensuality on the one hand, and of ascetic practices by the priesthood on the other, that belonged to the service of Mylitta at Babylon. Human sacrifice by fire was another horrible feature. Children, especially, were offered to El ("god"; ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Likewise it was ordained, that they should seduce man, and that he should fall, and propagate a race of sinful creatures like himself, and that all the shocking consequences should follow; that Cain should murder his brother; that the old world should be immersed in sin and sensuality, and then be drowned; and, though Noah was a preacher of righteousness a hundred and twenty years, that none should believe and be saved; likewise the arriving of the Sodomites to such an enormous pitch of wickedness, was ordained; and ...
— A Solemn Caution Against the Ten Horns of Calvinism • Thomas Taylor
... coming through the parted portieres from the kitchen. Harry was very fond of roasted chicken. He inhaled that and the delicate perfume of Ida's garments and hair. He regarded her glowing beauty with affection which had no taint of sensuality. Harry had more of a poetic liking for sweet odors and ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... on a luetic basis is accepted there as a tragic element of human fate. On the height of true art the question of decency or indecency has disappeared, too. The nude marble statue is an inspiration, and not a possible stimulus to frivolous sensuality, if the mind is aesthetically cultivated. The nakedness of erotic passion in the drama of high aesthetic intent before a truly educated audience has not the slightest similarity to the half-draped chorus of sensual operetta before a gallery which wants to be tickled. But who would ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... silently like stalled oxen, appointed some one to read aloud in the refectory; and the Fathers, obeying the same civilised instinct, had contrived in their theology intelligible points of attachment for religious emotion. A refined mind finds as little happiness in love without friendship as in sensuality without love; it may succumb to both, but it accepts neither. What is true of mere sensibility is no less true of mere fancy. The Arabian Nights—futile enough in any case—would be absolutely intolerable if they contained no Oriental manners, no human passions, and no convinced epicureanism behind ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... unthrifty and wastifull spending, voluptuousness of life and palpable sensuality brought Pericles, Callias, the sonne of Hipponicus, and Nicias not only to necessitie, but to povertie and beggerie. Who, after their money waxed scant, and turned to a very lowe ebbe, they three drinking a poysoned potion one to another (which was the last cuppe that ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... basket-woven flasks from Italy, absolutely littered the board. Drinking-glasses of every size and hue filled up the interstices, and the thirsty German flagon stood side by side with the aerial bubbles of Venetian glass that rest so lightly on their threadlike stems. An odour of luxury and sensuality floated through the apartment. The lamps that burned in every direction seemed to diffuse a subtle incense on the air, and in a large vase that stood on the floor I saw a mass of magnolias, tuberoses, and jasmines grouped together, stifling each other with ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... decree abolished the Saturnalia, and exiled the dancing teachers, but the many acts of the Senate to secure a better standard were useless against the foreign inhabitants of the Empire accustomed to sensuality and licence. ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... hateful to me; I had never done so more than the times related, that is as far as I now can recollect, frightened as said, by my godfather telling me, that it sent men mad, and made them hateful to women. So although boiling with sensuality, I was still all but a virgin, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... about his bree, His tap-lip lang by inches three - A slockened sort 'mon,' to pree A' sensuality - A droutly glint was ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... counsel, Bazmant fell asleep in the arms of sensuality; and when he awoke was obliged to take to flight: notwithstanding the bravery of his soldiers, the enemy had become ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... industry; but the noise of giddy mirth, boisterous and unmeaning laughter, or fierce and angry contention. If there be stillness, it is not the peace and quiet of well-ordered society, but the gloomy and deathlike stillness of indolence, sensuality, and beastly degradation. Now, who does not know that children are likely to be much influenced by the aspect and character of the society by which they are surrounded? Who does not know that they are likely to imbibe the spirit of the nation in which they live, whether on the one ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... estrangement of Radha and Krishna caused by Krishna's love for other cowgirls, Radha's anguish at Krishna's neglect and lastly the rapture which attends their final reunion. Jayadeva describes Radha's longing and Krishna's love-making with glowing sensuality yet the poem reverts continually to praise of ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... all he may be right—who knows! So a year passed away in sadness, with a few bad turnings into sensuality, followed by repenting in verse. It was the anniversary of her death, and Dante was outlining angels to illustrate his sonnets wherein he apotheosized Beatrice. And behold! as he day-dreamed of his Beatrice sweet consolation came in double form. First he saw a gentle lady who looked very much like ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... the warmer tones of his replies; a new pain ordered his comments. The situation, too, appealed to him; his instinct responded to the obvious implications of the position in the exact degree of his habit of mind. The familiar, professional gallantry took possession of him, directing the sensuality to which he ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... nothing selfish in it; he was not a friend or protector; but he was her father, an unhappy wretch, going into eternity, depraved and thoughtless. Could a life of sensuality be a preparation for a peaceful death? Thus meditating, she passed the still ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... more to say to you, which I scarcely know how to communicate. Somebody here has loaded your character with very heavy imputations. You are said to be addicted to gaming, sensuality, and the lowest vices. How much grief this intelligence has given to all who love you, you will easily imagine. To find you innocent of these charges would free my heart from the keenest solicitude it has hitherto felt. I leave to you ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... unrelieved by any eminence of genius or virtue, or by the stir of great public interests, presented little more than a dull monotony of sensuality and indolence, on a ground of inhumanity. It is no wonder that Zachary Macaulay, from his experience in Jamaica as the superintendent of an estate, formed in quiet sternness that resolution to devote his life to uprooting a social system whose presiding divinities ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Of Temperance, pursues the subject, and represents the internal conquests of self-mastery, the conquests of a man over his passions, his violence, his covetousness, his ambition, his despair, his sensuality. Sir Guyon, after conquering many foes of goodness, is the destroyer of the most perilous of them all, Acrasia, licentiousness, and her ensnaring Bower of Bliss. But after this, the thread at once of story and allegory, slender henceforth at the ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... to Mrs. Winscombe, to himself. His entire attitude toward her, his observations, had been upset, disarmed, by her unexpected air of soft melancholy. In her lavender wrap she resembled a drooping branch of flowering lilac. She seemed very young; her air of sophistication, her sensuality of being, had vanished. Traces of her illness on shipboard still lingered darkly under her eyes. Asleep, he suddenly thought, her face would be very innocent, purified. This came to him involuntarily; there was none of the stinging of the senses ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... knows how to set matters to rights, the affairs of the heart had always appeared to me as the most important. I was never weary of reflecting upon the transient nature of attachments, the mutability of human character, moral sensuality, and all the heights and depths, the combination of which in our nature may be considered as the riddle of human life. Here, too, I sought to get rid of that which troubled me, in a song, an epigram, in some kind of rhyme; which, since they referred to the most ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the negroes, though with many variants, became largely standardized into the predominant plantation type. The traits which prevailed were an eagerness for society, music and merriment, a fondness for display whether of person, dress, vocabulary or emotion, a not flagrant sensuality, a receptiveness toward any religion whose exercises were exhilarating, a proneness to superstition, a courteous acceptance of subordination, an avidity for praise, a readiness for loyalty of a feudal sort, and last but not least, a healthy human repugnance ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... not bow willingly to what is infirm and wrong in human nature. If it yields to us, it must yield to what is divine in us. The wickedness of my neighbor cannot submit to my wickedness; his sensuality, for instance, to my anger against his vices. My faults are not the instruments that are to arrest his faults. And therefore impatient reformers, and denouncing preachers, and hasty reprovers, and angry parents, and irritable relatives ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... wicked world—Magic for Devotion—Sensuality for Worship—breaks in upon our vision, as the scene changes from the Halls of Montsalvat to Klingsor's palace. Klingsor, an impure knight, who has been refused admittance to the order of the "Sangrail," ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... always be an abiding memory in this place. If you will bear it about with you in your hearts, not only will you be kept from lip service, slackness, half-heartedness in your daily duties,—and from the graver faults of youth at which his noble soul would have revolted,—from dishonesty, sensuality and impurity in every form,—but you will be able, each in his sphere, to realise more fully the ideal of goodness and truth, so that at the last you, too, may hear the voices whispering as they have now spoken to him,—'Well ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... years of the reign of Louis XV. The former dominated the king by means of her intelligence, but the latter swayed the sovereign, already consumed by his sensual excesses, through her peculiarly seductive sensuality. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... pulling buttons, or twisting garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, etc.) are relics of past forms of utilities now essentially obsolete. Ancient modes of locomotion, prehension, balancing, defense, attack, sensuality, etc., are all rehearsed, some quite fully and some only by the faintest mimetic suggestion, flitting spasmodic tensions, gestures, or ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 7. He was the first who bought a dishonourable peace from the enemies of the state, agreeing to pay a considerable annual tribute to the Goths, whom it was his duty to repress. He was regardless of every national calamity, and was lost in debauchery and sensuality. The Pagans were allowed a power of persecuting the Christians through all parts of the state. 8. These calamities were succeeded by a pestilence from heaven, that seemed to have spread over every part of the earth, and continued raging for several ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... accord. He was the coldest friend and the violentest enemy I ever knew: I felt it too much not to know it. He at first seemed to despise wealth: But he delivered himself up afterwards to luxury and sensuality: And by that means he ran into a vast expence, and stuck at nothing that was necessary to support it. In his long imprisonment he had great impressions of religion on his mind: But he wore these out so entirely, that scarce any trace of them was left. His great ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... I found here some older and some more recent works of poetry, enjoying high esteem and wide circulation, while unhappily their character to me was utterly offensive. I shall only mention Heinse's Ardinghello and Schiller's Robbers. The first I hated for its having undertaken to exhibit sensuality and mystical abstruseness, ennobled and supported by creative art: the last, because in it, the very paradoxes moral and dramatic, from which I was struggling to get liberated, had been laid hold of by a powerful though ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... suspended by cold New England winters and New England religions, moral and social influences; the Ophites of old and the Cairene gypsy showed the boy as warmed to life in lands whose winters are as burning summers. Elsie Venner is not sensual, and sensuality is the leading trait of the human-serpent nature. Herein lies an error, just as a sculptor would err who should present Lady Godiva as fully draped, or Sappho merely as a sweet singer of Lesbos, or Antinous only as a fine young man. He who would harrow hell and rake out the ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... quite so tall as his visitor, he appeared to be taller. His face was long and angular; the round, clear, blue eyes, the finest feature of it, the narrowness of the forehead the worst. The mouth-corners were drawn down, and the lips hardened to a line by constant compression. No trace of sensuality. How came this man, grey with age, to marry a girl whose appeal to the senses was already so obvious? The eyes and prominent temples of the idealist supplied the answer. Deacon Hooper was a New Englander, trained in the ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... which had been preached by Pope Boniface VIII., he was in the mid-path of life, and was lost, as he allegorically describes it at the beginning of the "Inferno," in a wild and savage wood. He was hindered from ascending the sunny hill of heavenly aims by the speckled panther of sensuality, the gaunt, gray wolf of avaricious selfishness, and the fierce lion of wrath and ambitious pride. But he was restored to hope and effort by a vision of Beatrice, which seems to have come to him before his Easter communion, and fixed in his mind the purpose of writing about Beatrice—in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... the brutal lust of man. No doubt man's animal propensities have had much to do with the existence of this form of the family. Nevertheless, while male sensuality is at the basis of polygyny, it would be a mistake to think that sensuality is an adequate explanation in all cases. On the contrary, we find many other causes, chiefly, perhaps, economic, operating also to ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... not prevent the introduction of the flowing poison. Gain-seeking and corrupt men will, for profit and sensuality, defeat my wishes, but nothing will induce me to derive a revenue from the vice and ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... relish. They may be termed a kind of spiritual sensuality, wherein the soul letting itself go too far, by reason of the sweetness it finds in them, falls imperceptibly into decay. The crafty enemy presents such sort of interior elevations and raptures for baits to entrap the soul, to fill it with vanity and ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... seized upon the maiden as for an instant she caught the gaze of mingled malice and sensuality they bent upon her; and seizing Henri's hand, she flew over the ground toward La Tour with the fleetness of a ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... men upon our streets who are solid bestiality and villainy done up in flesh and skin. Each feature is as eloquent of rascality as an ape's of idiocy. Experts skilled in physiognomy need no confession from impish lips, but read the life-history from page to page written on features "dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, branded by remorse; the body consumed with sloth and dishonored with selfish uses; the bones full of the sins of youth, the face hideous with secret vices, the roots dried up beneath and the branches cut off above." It is as natural ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... sense of sublimity in it, neither in mere foolishness, but with a resolute choice, such as I can completely account for on no acknowledged principle of human nature. For in the worst conditions of sensuality there is yet some perception of the beautiful, so that men utterly depraved in principle and habits of thought will yet admire beautiful things and fair faces. But in the temper of which I am now speaking there is no preference ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... precisely the impression he made upon me. It was not exactly spirituality that was obvious, though the screen of the flesh seemed almost transparent, because there was in his face an outrageous sensuality; but, though it sounds nonsense, it seemed as though his sensuality were curiously spiritual. There was in him something primitive. He seemed to partake of those obscure forces of nature which the Greeks personified in shapes part human and part beast, the satyr ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... resourceful mind that possibly the best way of securing this girl's attachment to him, would be by a vivid appeal to her senses. His prestige was at stake, and in this dilemma men have been known to go to even greater lengths than when driven by sensuality alone. He did not underestimate the vigour of her passions, and knew that in this direction there was hope ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
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