"Dissoluteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that comprised his "chambers" to which he could point with pride. The floors were littered with papers; the walls were greasy and bedecked with malodorous notations, documents and pictures; the windows were smoky and useless; the clerk's desk bore every suggestion of dissoluteness. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... chain, if at all. It flies high enough, at any rate, to take a bird's-eye view of all manner of things which in the temple, the palace, or the market-place, have come to be taken as axiomatic. It eyes them with an extraordinary 'dissoluteness'—if you will give that word its literal meaning. It sees that some accepted virtues carry no reflection of heaven; it sees that heaven, on the other hand—so infinite is its care—may shake with anger ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... great system of temporal supremacy, and looked rather to a vile profit from the sale of episcopal confirmations, or of exemptions to monasteries. The corruption of the head extended naturally to all other members of the Church. All writers concur in stigmatizing the dissoluteness and neglect of decency that prevailed among the clergy. Though several codes of ecclesiastical discipline had been compiled by particular prelates, yet neither these nor the ancient canons were much regarded. The bishops, indeed, who were to enforce them, had most occasion ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... you to notice that frequency of divorce always goes along with the dissoluteness of society. Rome for five hundred years had not one case of divorce. Those were her days of glory and virtue. Then the reign of vice began, and divorce became epidemic. If you want to know how rapidly ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... Hester, I can fully endorse what you say. I have indeed turned away in disgust from fashionable resorts when I have seen young men of the most vicious habits contaminating the very air with their dissoluteness, flirting and dancing with the pure-minded girls who would have shrunk away in loathing could they hare seen the same young men at a later ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... satirical turn, his love of the world, and his contempt of all that was great and good, he strongly resembles his reputed son; whilst the levity of Lady Walpole's character, and Sir Robert's laxity and dissoluteness, do not furnish any reasonable doubt to the statement made by Lady Louisa Stuart, in the introduction to Lord Wharncliffe's 'Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.' Carr, Lord Hervey, died early, and his half-brother succeeded him in his title ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... bitter feeling between Hoppner, who was an intense Whig, and Lawrence, who knew no politics, but was all things to all men. "The ladies of Lawrence show a gaudy dissoluteness of taste, and sometimes trespass on moral as well as professional chastity," and "Lawrence shall paint my mistress and Phillips my wife," were the two rapier phrases Hoppner thrust at his rival. But it is recorded that thenceforth Lawrence's commissions from fair ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... winking at a great deal which the Doctor would have counted grievous sin, still were uneasy at the lad's growing dissoluteness of habit. Would the prayers of the good people of Ashfield ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... it, it will be scandalized; and if we do not, it will accuse us of hypocrisy and gloom; if we are well-dressed it will impute to us some bad motive; and if we are ill-dressed it will call us mean; it will style our gaiety dissoluteness and our mortification gloom. It will exaggerate our failings and publish our faults; and if it cannot find fault with our actions it will attack our motives. Whatever we do the world will find fault. If we spend a long time at confession it will ask ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... that as all creation addicts itself to adultery, and Gloucester's bastard son had treated his father more kindly than his daughters had treated him (altho Lear, according to the development of the drama, could not know how Edmund had treated Gloucester), therefore, let dissoluteness prosper, the more so as, being a King, he needs soldiers. He here addresses an imaginary hypocritically virtuous lady who acts ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... sailors and soldiers; when they come to navigate the ocean and to follow the plow; when they love to be jostled and crowded by all sorts of men in the thoroughfares of trade and business; when they love the treachery and the turmoil of politics; when they love the dissoluteness of the camp and the smoke and the thunder and the blood of battle better than they love the enjoyments of home and family, then it will be time to talk about making the women voters; but until that time the question is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... superfluity, redundancy, redundance, overplus, surplus, surplusage, residue, remainder exuberance, rampancy; overdoing, exorbitance, immoderation; debauchery, dissoluteness, intemperance, immoderation. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... religion, and had teachers in the West. Philo speaks in several places of its doctrines.[59] Whatever its moulding influences, Essenism represented the spirit of the age, and it spread far and wide. At Alexandria, above all places, where the life of luxury and dissoluteness repelled the serious, ascetic ideas took firm hold of the people, and the Therapeutic life, i.e., the life of prayer and labor devoted to God, which corresponded to the system of the Essenes, had ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... Lord Carlisle was one of the English fine gentlemen who were wellnigh ruined by the awful debauchery and extravagance which prevailed in the great English society of those days. Its dissoluteness was awful: it had swarmed over Europe after the Peace; it had danced, and raced, and gambled in all the Courts. It had made its bow at Versailles; it had run its horses on the plain of Sablons, near Paris, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... indeed satisfactory, daughter. But when you proceeded to point out to these plebeians how much of their misery arose from their own idleness, and ignorance, and dissoluteness, and abasement before those higher in station, and jealousy of the best among ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... us to let our thoughts run upon whatsoever things are pure, if we would inherit the Kingdom of God; and the divine Plato tells us that we have within us a many-headed beast and a man, and that by dissoluteness we feed or strengthen the beast in us, and starve the man; and finally, following the divine Plato among the sages at a humble distance, comes the prosaic and unfashionable Paley, and says in his precise way: that 'this vice has a tendency, which other species of vice have not so directly, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... execution. With what becoming severity does the bold Caricature lay open to public censure the intrigues of subtle Politicians, the 243chicanery of corrupted Courts, and the flattery of cringing Parasites! Hence satirical books and prints, under temperate regulations, check the dissoluteness of the great. Hogarth's Harlot's and Rake's Progress have contributed to reform the different classes of society—nay, it has even been doubted by some, whether the Sermons of a Tillotson ever dissuaded so efficaciously from lust, cruelty, and intemperance, as the Prints of an Hogarth. Indeed ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... wedlock. But in Love there is such self-control and decorum and constancy, that if the god but once enter the soul of a licentious man, he makes him give up all his amours, abates his pride, and breaks down his haughtiness and dissoluteness, putting in their place modesty and silence and tranquillity and decorum, and makes him constant to one. You have heard of course of the famous courtesan Lais,[139] how she set all Greece on fire with her charms, or rather was contended for by two seas,[140] and how, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... be a place eminently adapted to study and education, being situated in a populous, yet a cheap country, and exposing the minds and manners of young men neither to the levity and dissoluteness of a capital city, nor to the gross luxury of a town of commerce, places naturally unpropitious to learning; in one the desire of knowledge easily gives way to the love of pleasure, and in the other, is in danger of yielding ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... which all history is an illustration. It is one which has been illustrated in the history of modern states, not less vividly than in the history of antiquity. And it will continue to be illustrated, on the same grand scale, in those terrific evils which the dissolution, or the dissoluteness of the larger whole creates, whenever the appointed teachers of a nation, the inductors of it into its highest learning, lag behind the common mind in their interpretations, and leave it to the people to ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... past the artist has always been an outcast; it is only latterly he has become domesticated, and judging by results, it is clear that if Bohemianism is not a necessity it is at least an adjuvant. For if long locks and general dissoluteness were not an aid and a way to pure thought, why have they been so long his characteristics? If lovers were not necessary for the development of poet, novelist, and actress, why have they always had lovers—Sappho, George ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... may here look forward and face the well-known fact that the unseemliness in talk of rough, rustic boys flavoured the great President's conversation through life. It is well to be plain about this. Lincoln was quite without any elegant and sentimental dissoluteness, such as can be attractively portrayed. His life was austere and seems to have been so from the start. He had that shy reverence for womanhood which is sometimes acquired as easily in rough as in polished surroundings and often quite as steadily maintained. The testimony ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... This was the first act of our comedy. Let us pass to the second. Your extravagant follies—your grandfather would have said, your dissoluteness—soon changed our respective situations. Mme. Fauvel, without ceasing to worship you—you resemble Gaston so closely—was uneasy about you. She was so frightened that she was forced to come ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... scared consciences of oriental princes in such matters, quite as little, perhaps, had the two other counts in his London impeachment. One imputed savage cruelty to him; the other, with a Johnny-rawness that we find it difficult to comprehend, profligacy and dissoluteness of life. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... paramour, sometimes by a warlike baron on a kinsman still a stripling. We read of bishops of ten years old, of bishops of five years old, of many popes who were mere boys, and who rivalled the frantic dissoluteness of Caligula, nay, of a female pope. And though this last story, once believed throughout all Europe, has been disproved by the strict researches of modern criticism, the most discerning of those who reject it have admitted ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... southern peninsula of Greece—the ancient Peleponnesus and the modern Morea, and enjoying the advantage of two ports was alike distinguished for its wealth and progress in the arts, and for its luxury and dissoluteness of morals. Here the apostle had labored a year and six months, and gathered a flourishing church embracing some Jews, but consisting mostly of Gentiles. Acts 18:1-11; 1 Cor. 12:2. These Gentile converts, having ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows |
