"Prurient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of woman was to open to her new avenues of business. A very sad book was written a few months ago, "Dr. Sanger's work on Prostitution." It is a very dreadful book; not calculated, I think, to excite any prurient feeling in any one. In ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the brigadier if he did not think an establishment had the beneficial effect of sustaining truth, by suppressing heresies, limiting and curtailing prurient theological fancies, and otherwise setting limits to innovations. My friend did not absolutely agree with me in all these particulars; though he very frankly allowed that it had the effect of keeping TWO truths from falling out, by separating them. Thus, Leapup maintained one ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... world's greatest sham of a people ... the Judas among nations, who this time, for a change, betrays Germanism for thirty pieces of silver. Against us stands sensual France, the harlot (Dirne) among the peoples, to be bought for any prurient excitement, shameless, unblushing, impudent and cowardly [!] with her worthless myrmidons.—"War Devotions," by PASTOR J. RUMP, quoted ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... interested in itself and not in its subject. If any remnant of inspiration or value clings to such a performance, it comes from a surviving taste for something in the real world. Thus the literature that calls itself purely aesthetic is in truth prurient; without this half-avowed weakness to play upon, the coloured images evoked would have had nothing to marshall ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... less mixed than their sentiments. They had invented a composite jargon of expressions from all classes of society and every country under the sun—pedantic, slangy, classical, lyrical, precious, prurient, and low—a mixture of bawdy jests, affectations, coarseness, and wit, all of which seemed to have a foreign accent. Ironical, and gifted with a certain clownish humor, they had not much natural wit: but they were clever enough, and they manufactured their goods in imitation ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... behind the scenes and shown how it is done—or not done; and then it will attend the next play and go on adoring with the blindest infatuation. Were it not for this astounding gift of resilience one might deplore the prurient curiosity that wants to peep into the hollow image of Isis and get at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... early age—twenty-eight, and youth always feels acutely, and expresses strongly. Some of his attacks are evidently aimed at Nero, but his principal object is to denounce the vices of the times. Hence, indolence and prurient literature are stigmatised. He ridicules the extremes of extravagance, and of that parsimony by which it is usually accompanied. "Am I on a festive day to have a nettle dressed for me, and a smoked pig's cheek with a hole in its ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... to have had recourse to strong stimulants to rouse a flagging imagination. What is exquisitely fanciful and airy in Hawthorne is too often replaced in his rival by an attempt to overpower us by dabblings in the charnel-house and prurient appeals to our fears of the horribly revolting. After reading some of Poe's stories one feels a kind of shock to one's modesty. We require some kind of spiritual ablution to cleanse our minds of his disgusting images; whereas Hawthorne's pure and delightful ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... That the discussion and recommendation of checks to over-population after marriage is perfectly lawful, and that there is in the advocacy and recommendations contained in the book 'Fruits of Philosophy' nothing that is prurient or calculated to inflame the passions. 5th. That the physiological information in the said book is such as is absolutely necessary for understanding the subjects treated, and such information is more fully ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... so doing, you not only prevent the undesirable secrecy, but you build normally on modesty; you lay foundations for a true sense of shame, disgust, and disgrace; and in doing so, set up one of the strong defenses against perversions and prurient allurement ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... is not to be seriously thought that from those days to this there was ever any doubt as to its significance and its purpose, which is to pander to prurient appetites and arouse libidinous passions. Always, too, from those days to this, its performers have been the most ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... extinguished like a candle in foul air." It was on this principle that Johnson encouraged parents to carry their daughters early and much into company: "for what harm can be done before so many witnesses? Solitude is the surest nurse of all prurient passions, and a girl in the hurry of preparation, or tumult of gaiety, has neither inclination nor leisure to let tender expressions soften or sink into her heart. The ball, the show, are not the dangerous places: no, it is the private friend, the kind consoler, the companion of the ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... contempt of Henry Fielding—is the justice of that ridicule he was moved to visit it withal. To him, a scholar and a gentleman and a man of the world, Pamela was a new-fangled blend of sentimental priggishness and prurient unreality. To him the pretensions to virtue and consideration of the vulgar little hussy whom Richardson selected for his heroine were certainly not less preposterous than the titles to life and ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... A contagious prurient eruption. There are two kinds of itch, that which appears between the fingers, and under the joints of the knees and elbows; and that which seldom is seen in these places, but all over the other parts of the body. The latter is seldom thought to be the itch, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Despite prurient opposition it is making rapid headway. It is entering very largely into the instructive and the entertaining departments of the world's curriculum. Millions of dollars are annually expended in the production of films. Companies of trained and practiced actors are brought ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... little figure was the woman that people who knew her only from her books, called bold, prurient even! Simply because she was great-hearted—intellectual. He was overcome by the ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... remain," said Saxham, wrung by pity, "to be tortured by such prurient prattlers? Why did you not get up ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... roof. "May the importation of Ganymedes into Ireland, be soon discontinued," was the public toast, which disguised under the transparent gauze of a mythological allusion, the infamies of which he was believed to be the patron. The prurient page of Churchill was not quite so scrupulous, and the readers of the satire entitled "The Times," will need no further key to the horrible charges commonly received on both sides of the channel, against ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... eye saw everything; that kindly, sympathetic spirit comprehended always the soul of things; and no life, however common, rugged, or coarse, was to him empty. If he added always something of his own nobility of heart, if he did not pry out with prurient eyes the meannesses of life around him, the picture he drew was none the less true,—was, indeed, it seems to me, all the more true. Therefore I say that his early death was a loss to American literature, or, to speak more accurately, to that too ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... perform for them most tragically the sinful service of Gallehault. Then it struck him that the great Gallehault of modern life—El Gran Galeoto—was the impalpable power of gossip, the suggestive force of whispered opinion, the prurient allurement of evil tongues. Set all society to glancing slyly at a man and a woman whose relation to each other is really innocent, start the wicked tongues a-babbling, and you will stir up a whirlwind which will blow them giddily into each other's arms. Thus the old theme might ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... take for his hero an educated gentleman who expresses contempt for the licence and indecencies of modern life, it is ten to one that the critics, who confess themselves on other occasions as sick of prurient tales, will pronounce this hero to be a prig. In like manner, let a politician evince concern for the moral character of the nation and it is ten to one his colleagues in the House of Commons and his critics in the Press, and everywhere the very men ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... live for ever in the hearts and minds of her readers. In the present redundant age of novel writers and novel-readers, and when one would suppose the supply must far exceed the demand from the amount of puerile and often at the same time prurient literature in the department of fiction that daily flows from the press, it is refreshing to turn to the vigorous and, above all, healthy moral tone of this lady's works. To the present generation they are as if they had never been, and to the question, "Did you ever read ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... V. be curious &c. adj.; take an interest in, stare, gape; prick up the ears, see sights, lionize; pry; nose; rubberneck*[U . S.]. Adj. curious, inquisitive, burning with curiosity, overcurious; inquiring &c. 461; prying, snoopy, nosy, peering; prurient; inquisitorial, inquisitory[obs3]; curious as a cat; agape &c. (expectant) 507. Phr. what's the matter? what next? consumed with curiosity; curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought it back. "curiouser and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... verses addressed to various amiable individuals of the other sex, it appears, notwithstanding all this gossamer-work, that Johnny's affections are not entirely confined to objects purely etherial. Take, by way of specimen, the following prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady east ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... of the Congregational church in Concord, preached a sermon in which he came out against the woman's rights convention held there last January, bringing the stale charge of "free-love" against its advocates—a charge that always leaps to the lips of men of prurient imagination—with much similar clap-trap of the Fulton type. Rev. Mr. Sanborn of the Universalist church replied to him the next Sunday evening, an immense audience being in attendance, and completely disproved the baseless allegations ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... to Ingres' Odalisque, supine, Defying prurient modesty turned she, Displaying in her beauty candidly Wonder of curve and ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... be said about his writings. They are uncommonly clean for his day. Only here and there is coarseness encountered. In an age when nastiness was written as well as spoken, and when most travelers felt called upon to satisfy a curiosity for prurient observations, Smith preserved a tone ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Aphrodite set up in a hall of the Louvre, to be admired in her naked perfection by every passing tourist, criticised and compared with famous living models by loose-talking art students, and furtively examined by prurient and disapproving old maids from distant countries. He prized her, and he had risked his life, not to mention the just anger of a government, to get possession of her. If he could feel so much for a piece of marble, it was not likely that he should feel less keenly where ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... advertisements, almanacs, pamphlets and circulars filled with details of the character and symptoms of various diseases, scattered broadcast through the land. We will not contaminate our pages in giving samples in extenso of this prurient and abominable literature, but a few of the typical advertisements to be met in even respectable newspapers, can hardly be omitted if the exposure ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... the work. Nevertheless, he went, and stayed years, living on half-frozen prairies and deserts under open tents, on fat mutton, sheep's tails particularly, tea, and boiled millet, eating only once a day because Mongols do, and in all things, except lying, stealing, and prurient talk, making himself a lama. As he could not ride, he rode for a month over six hundred miles of dangerous desert, where the rats undermine the grass, and at the end found that that difficulty has disappeared for ever. As he could not talk, he "boarded out" with a ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... upon me as you have upon Captain Farnsworth," he said, with an insulting leer and in a tone of prurient innuendo. "I am not susceptible, my dear." This more for Farnsworth's benefit than to insult her, albeit he was not in a mood ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... society. It is not at all needful to 'see life,' or to know the secrets of wickedness, in order to be wise and good. 'Simple concerning evil' is a happier state than to have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Many a young man has been ruined, body and soul, by a prurient curiosity to know what sort of life dissipated men and women led, or what sort of books they were against which he was warned, or what kind of a place a theatre was, and so on. Eyes are greedy, and there is a very quick telephone ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... description in simple words of the mechanism and marvel of reproduction, for half-knowledge generates a prurient curiosity about the other sex, thus defeating the very end you have so ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... flew across and across the table with wonderful rapidity, and the flow of assertion increased with the captain, and that of assentation with his lieutenant. At length, the little man with the epaulet commenced a very prurient tale. Mr Farmer cast a look full of meaning upon myself, when Captain Reud addressed me thus, in a sharp, shrill tone, that I thought impossible to a person who told such pleasant stories, and who could spin so prettily upon a quart bottle. "Do you hear, younker, you'll ship your ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... came to the Solomons to get married—" she began wrathfully. "Well, there are better men in Hawaii, that's all. Really, you know, the way you harp on that one string would lead an unprejudiced listener to conclude that you are prurient-minded—" ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... The "Noisy Nymph," the Echo of our times, The gossip, with an eager ear for crimes, Lurks, half-admiring, all-recording there, Watching Narcissus with persistent stare, And ready note-book. Nothing but a Voice? No, but its babblings travel, and rejoice A myriad prurient ears with noisome news, Fit only for the shambles and the stews. These hear, admire, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... other hand the relation between man and woman was regarded as in itself mysterious and holy. It appears that where marriage is solemnized by the church and blessed by the priest, it may at the same time be surrounded with customs and ideas of a frivolous, superficial, and even prurient character. We believed that two who love should be united in secret, before the public acknowledgment of their union, and should taste their apotheosis alone with nature. The betrothal might or might not be discussed and approved ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... in whole or in part, is, to the inexperienced at least, attended with an irritating titillation, like that which attends on the healing of a wound—a prurient impatience, in short, to know what the world in general, and friends in particular, will say to our labours. Some authors, I am told, profess an oyster-like indifference upon this subject; for my own part, I hardly believe in their sincerity. ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... an experiment on these two souls, with the terrible curiosity of a surgeon engaged in vivisection.[54] It was, however, much less difficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept so unwholesome and prurient a situation. They forgot all the evil that was in it, in the charm of the account of Wolmar's active, peaceful, frugal, sunny household. The influence of this was immense.[55] It may be that the overstrained scene where Saint ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... soon began to arrive. There were among them some amusing characters, so well supported as to give rise during the evening to many entertaining scenes; but to me this was the group and this the incident of the evening. Not a group or an incident for prurient curiosity or frivolous jest, but for an earnest and reverent recognition of that beautiful law imposed on Nature by her Great Author, by which the feeble delight in receiving, and the strong in giving support—that law by which a pure and self-abnegating affection is made the source of life ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... makes them the more insidious—the more dangerous. I would rather give my boy Jonson, Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher, whose very improper things 'are called by their proper names,' than let him dive in the prurient innuendo of these ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Comic scene, (The flattering reflex of a sensual age) Shown prurient Folly's rank licentious mien, Refined, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... established between the sexes. Polygamy, divorce, and concubinage with bondmaid's have been perpetuated, as we have seen, by Islam for all time; and the ordinances connected therewith have given rise, in the laborious task of defining the conditions and limits of what is lawful, to a mass of prurient casuistry defiling the books of Mohammedan law. Contrast with this our Saviour's words, "He which made them at the beginning made them male and female.... What therefore God hath joined together let not man put ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... Geoffrey's on them, the shameless pictures of her in his arms, the sickening details, the letters of the outraged matrons, the "Mothers of ten," and the moral-minded colonels—all, all! She heard the prurient scream of every male Elizabeth in England; the allusions in the House—the jeers, the bitter attacks of enemies and rivals. Then Lady Honoria would begin her suit, and it would all be dragged up afresh, and Geoffrey's fault would be on every lip, till he was ruined. For herself she did ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... bashful shrunk From the stern survey of the soldier-monk, Though rather more than full three-quarters drunk; But threading through the figure, first in rule, I paused to see thee plunge into La Poule. Ah, what a sight was that? Not prurient Mars, Pointing his toe through ten celestial bars— Not young Apollo, beamily array'd In tripsome guise for Juno's masquerade— Not smartest Hermes, with his pinion girth, Jerking with freaks and snatches down to earth, Look'd half so bold, so beautiful ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... against it, and who shows his honesty and his greatness most by confessing that his struggles are ineffectual; that, Titan as he may look to the world, his strength is misdirected, a mere furious weakness, which proclaims him a slave in fetters, while prurient young gentlemen are fancying him heaping hills on hills, and scaling Olympus itself. They are tired of that notion, however, now. They have begun to suspect that Byron did not scale Olympus after all. How much more pleasant a leader, then, must Shelley ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... effort. I found this brown room of the Commons-house, with its green benches, and grilled galleries, so agreeable to my mood, that I went again the next morning, and listened to more records, till they tired me: for what I had was a prurient itch to hear secret scandals, and revelations of the festering heart, but these cylinders, gathered from a shop, divulged nothing. I then went out to make for Woolwich, but in the car saw the poet's note-book in which I had written: and I took it, went back, and was writing an hour, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... humanity, gather into idiot groups upon the polluted canvas, and scenic affectations encumber the streets with preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused intellect; the base school of landscape[23] gradually usurps the place of the historical painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry,—the Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the confectionery idealities of Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps, and on the north the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and ditchwater. And thus Christianity ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... where Mike had loved many solicitors' wives, and then on the impurity of the society girl and the prurient purity of her ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... about the confessional, discovered satisfactorily enough, that he was what Campian would have called "in love:" though I should question much the propriety of the term as applied to any facts which poor prurient Campian discovered, or indeed knew how to discover, seeing that a swine has no eye for pearls. But he had found out enough: he smiled, and set to work next vigorously to discover who ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... of those whose regret at the loss of that manuscript arises from some better motive than the mere disappointment of a prurient curiosity, I shall here add, that on the mysterious cause of the separation, it afforded no light whatever;—that, while some of its details could never have been published at all[1], and little, if any, of what it contained personal ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... them all the tattle they can pick up, and some left-off suit of finery. The same proneness to adulation which made them lick the dust before one idol makes them bow as low to the rising Sun; they are as lavish of detraction as they were prurient with praise; and the protege and admirer of the editor of the ——- figures in Blackwood's train. The man is a lackey, and it is of little consequence whose ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... A wider proverb for worse prostitution;— When all the ills of conquered states shall cling thee, Vice without splendour, Sin without relief[fw][475] Even from the gloss of Love to smooth it o'er, But in its stead, coarse lusts of habitude,[476] Prurient yet passionless, cold studied lewdness, Depraving Nature's frailty to an art;— When these and more are heavy on thee, when 90 Smiles without mirth, and pastimes without Pleasure, Youth without Honour, Age without respect, Meanness and Weakness, and a sense of woe 'Gainst which thou wilt ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... quite beyond his own enduring. Lucy's horrified shriek brought him more fully to his senses, and the screams of the children who scattered in every direction, crying as they ran on, only to creep back after a moment drawn by that prurient curiosity which is the one natural tie left between the buzzard ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... with natural law, children would have no sexual notions or feelings before the occurrence of puberty. No prurient speculation about sexual matters would enter their heads. Until that period, the reproductive system should lie dormant in its undeveloped state. No other feeling should be exhibited between the sexes than that brotherly ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... what we are here for! The prostitution of powers to obviously unworthy aims and ends is the saddest thing in humanity. It is like elephants being set to pick up pins; it is like the lightning being harnessed to carry all the gossip and filth of one capital of the world to the prurient readers in another. Men take these great powers which God has given them, and use them to make money, to cultivate their intellects, to secure the gratification of earthly desires, to make a home for themselves here amidst the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... mild refrigerant juice, it is preferred where an acrimonious state of the fluids prevails, indicated by prurient eruptions upon the skin, or in what has been called the ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... away In the third-floor-back of my skull I feel a light, airy, prurient, menacing tickling, Dainty as the pattering toes of nautch girls On a polished cabaret floor. Suddenly, With a crescendo like an approaching express train, The fury bursts upon me.... My brain explodes. Pinwheels of violet fire ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... were genial and even courtly; he turned easily from an invective against Strafford to a chat with Lady Carlisle; and the grace and gaiety of his social tone, even when the care and weight of public affairs were bringing him to his grave, gave rise to a hundred silly scandals among the prurient royalists. It was this striking combination of genial versatility with a massive force in his nature which marked him out from the first moment of power as a born ruler of men. He proved himself at once the subtlest of diplomatists and the grandest of ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... definitions, marking the distinction between rightful concealment as concealment, and concealment for the purpose of deception. "There are things which men have a right to keep secret," he says, "and if a prurient curiosity prompts others officiously to pry into them, there is nothing criminal or dishonest in refusing to minister to such a spirit. Our silence or evasive answers may have the effect of misleading. That is not our fault, as it was not our design. Our purpose ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... That they were immoral seems never to have been suspected until Beza became a Protestant, and it was desirable to find means to sully his reputation. The discovery of the hidden depths of iniquity in the reformer's youthful productions it was reserved for the same prurient imaginations to make that afterward fancied that they had detected obscene allusions in the most innocent lines of the Huguenot psalter. At the age of forty-two years, Beza, after having successively discharged with great ability the functions of professor ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... that it is for the common interest that they should not be gratified. This may be so, though I do not believe it. But whether it be so or not, of one thing I am certain,—and that is that the half-hearted dallying with things sexual is wholly an evil; that the prurient sniffing and sniggering round the subject is more fraught with peril to a community, more debasing to the emotional currency, more blighting to the higher sexual feelings of the race, than the most shameless public repudiation of all moral restraints. Evil cures itself in the sunlight; ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... is a mere childish prejudice reinforced by outworn superstitions. The religious terror excited by certain formidable free-thinkers and anti-social philosophers in earlier days went much deeper than this, and was quite free from that mere prurient itch of perverted sensuality which inspires the Puritans ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... to which the fabric is to be converted, it is no part of our purpose to deal, further than to warn the public not to lend an ear to the all too prurient purity of the amateur moralist; but considering the character of the work now carried on in Soho, no doubt with ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... with Sir Philip's romance in our mind, the characters cannot but appear one and all offensive. In every case Day has indulged in brutal caricature. The courtly characters are represented from the point of view of a prurient-minded bourgeoisie; the rustic figures are equally gross in their vulgarity; while the traitor Dametas, who serves as a link between the two classes, is an upstart parasite, described with a satiric touch not unworthy of Webster as 'a little hillock made great with others' ruines.' ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... had drawn down such sudden thunder from the serene heavens of public virtue': he was comically puzzled to comprehend why the reviewers were scandalised. He trampled with sarcasm and scorn upon canting critics, and retorted that the prurient prudery of their own minds suggested the impurities which they found in works of pure art. There is nothing, he insists, lovelier, as there is nothing more famous in later Hellenic art, than the statue of Hermaphroditus, yet his translation ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the "calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion," and elsewhere of Keats' "prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady east of Temple Bar.... It is a better and a wiser thing," it commented, "to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, pills ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... lighted at a dinner; but he was not a man to be disconcerted at a novelty. Had he been a European of the same origin and habits, awkwardness would have betrayed him fifty times, before the dessert made its appearance; but, being the man he was, one who overlooked a certain prurient politeness that rather illustrated his deportment, might very well have permitted him to pass among the oi polloi of the world, were it not for a peculiar management in the way of providing for himself. It is true, he asked every one near him to eat of every thing he ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... history and essay, the disreputable literature was bestowed. Nor was its reception more openly hospitable when arrayed in English garb. Translators there were, who strove to render into the manly, wholesome Anglo-Saxon tongue, the produce—witty, frivolous, prurient, and amusing—of Gallic imagination. But either the translations shared the interdict incurred by the objectionable originals, or the plan adopted to obtain their partial acceptance, destroyed pith and point. Letters from plague-ridden shores are fitted for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... Poet's wife, worrying up the matter against her, and fairly tormenting the poor woman's memory. Now the facts about the marriage are just precisely as I have stated them. I confess they are not altogether such as I should wish them to have been; but I can see no good cause why prurient inference or speculation should busy itself in going behind them. If, however, conjecture must be at work on those facts, surely it had better run in the direction of charity, especially as regards ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... lamps and rags which they suspend to a tree entitled Shajarat al-Sitt—the Lady's tree—an Acacia Albida which, according to some travellers, is found only here and at Sayda (Sidon) where an avenue exists. The people of Kasrawan, a Christian province in the Libanus, inhabited by a peculiarly prurient race, also hold high festival under the far-famed Cedars, and their women sacrifice to Venus like the Kadashah of the Phoenicians. This survival of old superstition is unknown to missionary "Handbooks," but amply deserves the study of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... and he has equally warm admirers among the foreign literati. A Walt Whitman club is to be established in his honor at Philadelphia. Yet it is not long since Mr. Whitman was made the target of the "prurient prudes," who carry on the Comstockian movement of the Vice Society, and was ordered to expunge some of his writings. Mr. Whitman defied them, and his literary prestige has sustained him; but Mrs. Elmina Drake Slenker, of Western Virginia, a woman of humble surroundings, has been ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... portrait had already been hawked about in the daily papers,—like those of the swell society set—and, like the latter, freely commented upon by bummers and bawds. She has the excuse of necessity for the sale of her picture, while her sisters in society are driven solely by a prurient itch for notoriety to exploit themselves in the public prints. It does not necessarily follow, as the sassiety sheets would have us believe, that every woman is unchaste whose portrait is found in a cigarette package—I have seen Queen Victoria's, Mrs. ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... sin, what a mortal sin. Now I do not consider that sexual matters concern the theologian alone, and I deny altogether that he is competent to deal with them. In his hands, also, undoubtedly, they sometimes become prurient, as they can scarcely fail to become on the non-natural and unwholesome basis of asceticism, and as they with difficulty become in the open-air light of science. But we are bound to recognize the thoroughness with which the Catholic theologians dealt with these matters, and, from their own point ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is alarming to witness,—in its present completed state! And Quack and Dupe, as we must ever keep in mind, are upper-side and under of the selfsame substance; convertible personages: turn up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he himself can become a quack; there is in him the due prurient insincerity, open voracity for profit, and closed sense for truth, whereof quacks too, in ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the masses, and which is absolutely pure. When I came out with Tit-Bits there was not a single popular paper containing fun or jokes or anything of the kind—except the illustrated ones—but what relied more or less upon prurient matter to tickle the fancies of prurient minds. Besides, my idea is that, just at present, the Board Schools tend to a certain hardness and narrowness of character, which is perhaps softened down by the development by these papers of the lighter side of human nature. Tit-Bits, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... dreams do little harm to the rich. Those who consider Chartism as synonymous with devil-worship, should bless and encourage them, for the very reason for which we working men ought to dread them; for, quickened into prurient activity by the low, novel-mongering press, they help to enervate and besot all but the noblest minds among us. Here and there a Thomas Cooper, sitting in Stafford gaol, after a youth spent in cobbling shoes, vents his treasures of classic ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... stood a satire in prurient lust vppon his gotishe feet, his mouth and his nose ioyning together like a gote with a beard growinge on either sides of his chin, with two peakes and shorte in the middeste like Goates hayre, and in like manner ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna
... books are the next in our classification. The category is too large. The books that be "curious" (not in the booksellers' sense of "prurient" and "disgusting,") are innumerable. All suppressed and condemned books, from "Les Fleurs du Mal" to Vanini's "Amphitheatrum," or the English translation of Bruno's "Spaccia della Bestia Trionfante," are more or less rare, and more or less curious. Wild books, like William ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... the cloister have fallen before the cries of a rising womanhood. The barriers of prurient puritanism are being demolished. Free woman has torn the veil of indecency from the secrets of life to reveal them in their power and their purity. Womanhood yet bound has beheld and understood. A public whose thoughts and opinions had been governed by men and by women engulfed in the old order has ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... that 'The Scarlet Letter' is the badge of Hester Prynne's shame, we ought to add that we recollect no tale dealing with crime so sad and revenge so subtly diabolical, that is at the same time so clear of fever and of prurient excitement. The misery of the woman is as present in every page as the heading which in the title of the romance symbolizes her punishment. Her terrors concerning her strange elvish child present retribution ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... virtuous and venomous opinion the undersigned begs to differ. The play is simply superb, in spite of the faults of the translation. It is shocking only to the most prurient of prudes; and in point of morality is infinitely better than Frou-Frou. And then it is played as it ought to be. Miss MORANT is magnificent, Mr. LEWIS is immensely funny, and Messrs. CLARKE and HASKINS are equal to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... had been fanaticised by the secret societies as well as by Garibaldi himself, that infuriated enthusiast, who could not write four lines nor utter four words without enshrining therein the treasons of the black race, that prurient sore of Italy; or the venom of the Vatican, that nest of vipers; or the lies of Pius IX., that pest, that monster, twice accursed, as priest and as king. So when these people were made prisoners, they expected nothing better than the hardest treatment and the most terrible ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... intensely and strangely refined. Yet I have been taken seriously throughout my career. My lectures have been gravely discussed. My plays have been solemnly criticised by the amusing failures in literature who love to call themselves 'the gentlemen of the press.' My poems have been boycotted by prurient publishers; and my novel, 'The Soul of Bertie Brown,' has ruined the reputation of a magazine that had been successful in shocking the impious for centuries. Bishops have declared that I am a monster, and monsters ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... but an exhilarating and altogether delightful outward manifestation of an inner sense of harmony, joy and well being. Under the stress of morbid feeling, or the overstrain of religious excitement, coarsely organized natures see or create something gross and prurient in things intrinsically sweet and pure, and it happens that when the dance has fallen to their shaping and direction, as in religious rites, then it has received its most objectionable development and perversion. But the grossness of dances devised ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... I worked for a long time at a 'Death of Messalina.' That was in Rome. I had a splendid inspiration for Messalina's face. But my hand was paralyzed when I thought of the idiotic comments such a picture would occasion in England. One fellow would say I had searched through history in a prurient spirit for something sensational; another, that I read a moral lesson of terrible significance; ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... The same train of thought latently underlies the feelings of most Protestants too, though it is true any one would now shrink from expressing it with such frankness and horrible gusto. But what else means the minute morbid anatomy of death beds, the prurient curiosity to know how the dying one bore himself in the solemn passage? How commonly, if one dies without physical anguish, and with the artificial exultations of a fanatic, rejoiceful auguries are drawn! if he dies in physical suffering, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... chief object of interest in prophetic representation. To nourish the faith and hope of the church, to invigorate her in her present struggles by the assurance of final victory—this, and not the gratification of a prurient curiosity respecting the exact dates of "times and seasons," is the main design of prophecy. That it has other subordinate ends need not be denied. It challenges for itself the attribute of omniscience, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... discoursed acridly to Prout of boys with prurient minds, who perverted their few and baleful talents to sap discipline and corrupt their equals, to deal in ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... ist gegen ihn gesuendigt worden.' Liberty is good, but Unity is its only sure foundation. It is the way to the Unity of Government and People that the thoughts both of The Prince and the Discorsi lead, though the incidents be so nakedly presented as to shock the timorous and vex the prurient, the puritan, and the evil thinker. The people must obey the State and fight and die for its salvation, and for the Prince the hatred of the subjects is never good, but their love, and the best way to gain it is by 'not interrupting the ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... Parliament of Paris. Berruyer seems to have had few admirers. He delighted to revel in the details of the loves of the patriarchs, the unbridled passion of Potiphar's wife, the costume of Judith, her intercourse with Holophernes, and other subjects, the accounts of which his prurient fancy did not improve. His imaginative productions caused him many troubles. The Jesuits disavowed the work, and, as we have said, its author was deposed from ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... of morbid sentiment rolls on. Lion-kings die, and the Sword-swallower's gone The way of all such horrors, slowly slain By efforts to please curious brutes, for gain. What next, and next? Stretch some one on the rack And let him suffer publicly. 'Twill pack The show with prurient pryers, and draw out The ready shillings from the rabble rout Of well-dressed quidnuncs, frivolous and fickle Who'll pay for aught that their dull sense will tickle. Look on, crass crowd; your money freely give To see Sensation's victims die to live; For Science ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... escapade was not forgotten by the malicious. No sooner had he become conspicuous in his profession and in politics, than the story of his intercourse with Miss Culling was told in coffee-rooms with all the exaggerations that prurient fancy could devise or enmity dictate. The old tale of a secret marriage—or, still worse, of a mock marriage—was caught from the lips of some Hertford scandal-monger, and conveyed to the taverns and drawing-rooms of London. In taking Sir Robert Booth's daughter to Church, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... or pathologic in analysis, or enmeshed in sensualism. In this sense, Balzac is a great realist. There is no danger of any novelist—any painter of life—doing harm, if he but gives us the whole. It is the story-teller who rolls some prurient morsel under his tongue who has the taint in him: he who, to sell his books, panders to the degraded instincts of his audience. Had Balzac been asked point-blank what he deemed the moral duty of the novelist, he would probably have disclaimed any other ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... truly encyclopaedic Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften. The eminence of the writers of these books and the mental calibre needed to read them suffice to show that we are not concerned, as a careless observer might suppose, with a matter of supply and demand in prurient literature, but with the serious and widespread appreciation of serious investigations. This same appreciation is shown not only by several bio-sociological periodicals of high scientific quality, but by the existence ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... through; and I sought up others of a similar character, and in seeking for them I met books also of adventure, but by no means of a harmless description, lives of wicked and lawless men, Murray and Latroon—books of singular power, but of coarse and prurient imagination—books at one time highly in vogue; now deservedly forgotten, and most difficult ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... reason why she should not think and speak as unhesitatingly as men, when her sex was as vitally interested as theirs. And therefore, with her characteristic consistency, she did so. But while her language may seem coarse to our over-fastidious ears, it never becomes prurient or indecent. In her Dedication she expresses very distinctly her disgust for the absence of modesty among contemporary Frenchwomen. Hers is the plain-speaking of the Jewish law-giver, who has for end the good of man; and not that of an Aretino, who rejoices ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... The other new novice was Brother Nicholas whom, had Mark not been the fellow-member of a community, he would have disliked immensely. Brother Nicholas was one of those people who are in a perpetual state of prurient concern about the sexual morality of the human race. He was impervious to snubs, of which he received many from Brother George, and he had somehow managed to become a favourite of the Reverend Father, so that he had been appointed guest-master, ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... I indite a volume to be entitled Adventures in Paris it will contain not a line to feed any prurient fancy, but will embrace the record of many little journeys between the Coiffeur and the Marche des Fleurs, with maybe an excursion among the ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... than a village, curiously held in subjection by village superstitions and village ethics, narrow conceptions of life and conduct; but the last twenty years have seen a remarkable enlargement of the human spirit, a reassertion of the natural rights of man as against the figments of prurient and emasculate conventions, to which there is no parallel since the Renaissance. Voices have been heard and truths told, and multitudes have listened gladly that aforetime must take shelter either in overawed silence or in utterance so private ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... to each man what he is himself. One who suspects hypocrisy in the world is rarely transparent; the man constantly on the watch for cheating is generally dishonest; he who suspects impurity is prurient. This is the principle to which Christ alludes when he says, "Give alms of such things as he have; and behold all ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... let the reader of these lines, first, get a correct mental attitude toward what is about to be said. Banish all prurient curiosity, put aside all thought of shame or shock, (these two will be hardest for young women to overcome, because of their training in false modesty and prudishness) and endeavor to approach the subject in a reverent, open-eyed, ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... they roll a prurient skin, They graze and wallow, breed and sleep; And oft some brainless devil enters in, And drives them to ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... has the reading world taught itself to like best the characters of all but divine men and women. Let the man who paints with pen and ink give the gas-light, and the flesh-pots, the passions and pains, the prurient prudence and the rouge-pots and pounce-boxes of the world as it is, and he will be told that no one can care a straw for his creations. With whom are we to sympathise? says the reader, who not unnaturally imagines that a hero should be heroic. Oh, thou, my reader, whose ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... initial chapters, has depicted him under certain conditions (in which, it is material to note, he is always rather the tempted than the tempter), with an unvarnished truthfulness which to the pure-minded is repugnant, and to the prurient indecent. Remembering that he too had been young, and reproducing, it may be, his own experiences, he exhibits his youth as he had found him—a ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... supposed, date from after his fiftieth year, when the good Kadijah died. All his "ambition," seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his "fame," the mere good opinion of neighbors that knew him, had been sufficient hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurient heat of his life all burnt out, and peace growing to be the chief thing this world could give him, did he start on the "career of ambition"; and, belying all his past character and existence, set-up as a wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could now no longer enjoy! For ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... than ludicrous; and they can and will correct themselves. But the frightful results of Comstockery, as applied to life and to real purity, cannot be so lightly passed over. And let it not be forgotten that an indictment of Comstockery is an indictment of ourselves, for the prurient, hypocritical, degrading thing can exist not one instant after we have ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... what you say, Mr. Fenton; but we can only draw our first inferences from appearances. It is not from any idle or prurient desire to become acquainted with the cause of your emotion that I speak, but simply from a wish to serve you, if you will permit me. It is distressing to witness ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... critic, by some dark and prurient affinity of his imagination, saw nothing of the awful truths so clearly though briefly expressed, and finally came to the conclusion that the moral of the whole fiction was "that the Gospel has not set the relations of man and woman where they should be, and that a new gospel is needed to supersede ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... draperies in which ecclesiastical old women have swaddled the fair limbs of the marble. But in your prudery there is reason. So there is in the state censorship of the Press. The page may contain matter dangerous to bonos mores. Out with your scissors, censor, and clip off the prurient paragraph! We have nothing for it but to submit. Society, the despot, has given his imperial decree. We may think the statue had been seen to greater advantage without the tin drapery; we may plead that the moral were better might we recite the whole fable. Away ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... from affectation, extravagance, nastiness, or balderdash. It never sinks into such tawdry stuff as Bulwer, Disraeli, and even Dickens, could indite in their worst moods. Trollope is never bombastic, or sensational, or prurient, or grotesque. Even at his worst, he writes pure, bright, graceful English; he tells us about wholesome men and women in a manly tone, and if he becomes dull, he is neither ridiculous nor odious. He is ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... that the abolition of the office will not cause the ill-results announced by the managers, who regard the existence of the Censor as valuable to them, because it frees them from responsibility and enables them to gratify the taste of the prurient prude, the person who revels in and blushes at the ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... form of stimulation is the lot of most city children. Such things would have no serious results to the housewife if they did not arouse expectations that marriage does not fulfill at all. This is the great harm of prurient clothes, literature, art, and stage,—it ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... bringing them up on the commons. While you have your own private house you can, for the most part, control their companionship and their whereabouts; but by twelve years of age in these public resorts they will have picked up all the bad things that can be furnished by the prurient minds of dozens of people. They will overhear blasphemies, and see quarrels, and get precocious in sin, and what the bartender does not tell them the porter or hostler or ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... pathetically asked the executioner: "Mr. Hangman, I beseech you, do spare me." We are all familiar through Thackeray's "History of the Georges" with the chronique scandaleuse of the Hanoverian dynasty. No doubt the Hohenzollern also have had their chronique scandaleuse and have also attracted the prurient curiosity of memoir writers. The Court of Berlin in the days of the polygamist King, Frederick William II., the successor of Old Fritz, was the most dissolute Court of Europe, as Berlin is to-day ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... which it had even consecrated virtues; and, on the other hand, an other of a which promised nothing but delights of a spiritual order; a paradise which, whatever material or imaginative adjuncts it might have, certainly disclosed none; which presented no one thing to gratify the prurient curiosity of man's fancy, or the eager passions of his sensual nature; which must, in fact, have been about as inviting to the soul of a Heathen as the promise of an eternal Lent to an epicure! Surely these were resistless seductions. ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... indolence,—ball-room amours, combats of curled knights, pilgrimages of disguised girl-pages, romantic pieties, charities in costume,—a mass of disguised sensualism and feverish vanity—impotent, pestilent, prurient, scented with a venomous elixir, and rouged with a deadly dust of outward good; and all this done, as such things only can be done, in a boundless ignorance of all natural veracity; the faces falsely ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and as a whole, because to look might seem to imply a doubt of what the tumblebug has decreed. Besides, as long as the tumblebug has reasons which he declines to reveal, his reasons stay unanswerable, and you are plainly a prurient rascal who ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... by its usual signals, that were quickly followed by my dear lover's emanation of himself, that spun out, and shot, feelingly indeed! up the ravished indraught: where the sweetly soothing balmy titillation opened all the juices of joy on my side, which extatic-ally in flow helped to allay the prurient glow, and drowned our pleasure for a while. Soon, however, to be on float again! for Charles, true to nature's laws, in one breath, expiring and ejaculating, languished not long in the dissolving trance, but recovering spirit again, soon gave me to feel that the true mettle ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... a great blemish upon the Upanishads, that while there are subtle, and in some respects sublime, utterances to be found here and there, the great mass is fanciful and often puerile, and in many instances too low and prurient to bear translation into the English language. This is clearly alleged by Mr. Bose, and frankly admitted ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... commentators, and so, for the first time, I turned to their works. I do not wish to rail at my forerunners as Carlyle railed at the historians of Cromwell, or I should talk, as he talked, about "libraries of inanities...conceited dilettantism and pedantry...prurient stupidity," and so forth. The fact is, I found all this, and worse; I waded through tons of talk to no result. Without a single exception the commentators have all missed the man and the story; they have turned ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... of detail—for all that I curbed it lest I should seem to know too much—delighted her prurient soul. Had she been more motherly, this same knowledge that I exhibited should have made her ponder what manner of life I had led, and should have inspired her to account me no fit companion for her daughter. ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... healthy influence. Narrow and prejudiced he sometimes was in his opinions; but he hated whatever was mean and low in character. It is with beautiful things and with noble things that he teaches us to sympathize. Here are no incitements to passion, no prurient suggestions of sensual delights. The air which breathes through all his fictions is as pure as that which sweeps the streets of his mountain home. It is as healthy as nature itself. To read one of ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... we feel the charm and the terror and the mystery of her absolute and royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, with how much truth or sincerity those may guess who would care to know, that his friend's first "confounded book" of thin prurient jingle ("we call it a mellisonant tingle-tangle," as Randolph's mock Oberon says of a stolen sheep-bell) had been the first cause of all his erratic or erotic frailties: it is not impossible that spirits of another sort may remember that to their own innocent ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... unequal conflict with diseased perfidious Art; cannot escape from it in the lowest hut, in the remotest island of the sea. Ruin and death must strike down the loved one; and, what is most significant of all, death even here not by necessity, but by etiquette. What a world of prurient corruption lies visible in that super-sublime of modesty! Yet, on the whole, our good Saint-Pierre is musical, poetical though most morbid: we will call his Book the swan-song of ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the young may carefully select what pictures to show them; but the student of English literature moves through the rooms and galleries, gazing, judging, approving, condemning, comparing. Genius may have soiled its canvas with what is prurient and vile; lascivious groups may stand side by side with pictures of saints and madonnas. To leave the figure, it is wise counsel to read on principle, and, armed with principle, to accept and imitate the good, and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... of saints, allusions to the devil and hell, had disappeared. Ecclesiastical sinners were transformed into students and professors, nuns and abbesses into citizens' wives. Immorality in short was secularized. But the book still offered the same allurements to a prurient mind. Sixtus V. expressed his disapproval of this recension, and new editions were licensed in 1582 and 1588 under the revision of Lionardo Salviati and Luigi Groto. Both preserved the obscenities ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... from the rubbish-heap of fiction by virtue of its intense sincerity and its frequent flashes of fine descriptive writing. The question of sex dominates it, and those of us who still think that such problems are merely sustenance for the prurient-minded may cast it impatiently aside. But others who like to watch a clever man feeling his way towards the light, and regard a novel as neither a bait nor a bauble, can be confidently advised to read it. They may be irritated, but they will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... is a little less apt to be risque; the possibility of masculine continence is more often taken for granted; solicitation on the streets is rare; few American publishers of repute dare to issue the semi-prurient style of novel at present so rife in England; the columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stage is distinctly healthier, and adaptations of hectic ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... affair; especially to the Edinburgh "Address," and affords new proof of the singularly dark and feeble condition of "public judgment" at this time. No idea, or shadow of an idea, is in that Address but what had been set forth by me tens of times before, and the poor gaping sea of prurient blockheadism receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and runs to buy my books (it is said), now when I have got quite done with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me L10,000 a year and bray unanimously ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... is responsible for the slimy life of that prurient sheet, the Coyote, paid us a sneaking visit Saturday. If he had given us notice of his intentions, we would have prepared ourselves and torn his leprous hide from his dehauched and whiskey- poisoned frame, and polluted our fence with it, but he did ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... Nouvelles is a book of great interest and value, despite serious defects due to its time generally and to its place in the history of fiction in particular. Its obscenity, on which even Sir Walter Scott, the least censorious or prudish-prurient of men, and with Southey, the great witness against false squeamishness, has been severe,[81] is unfortunately undeniable. But it is to be doubted whether Sir Walter knew much of the fabliaux; if he had he would have seen first, that this sort of thing had become an almost indispensable fashion ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... indecency of matters that are familiar, undeniable, and unchangeable facts of life. Don't look on woman as mere female, but as human being. Remember that she has a mind and a heart as well as a body. In a sentence, don't join in the prurient clamor of "purity" hypocrites and "strong" libertines that exaggerates and distorts the most commonplace, if the most important feature of life. Let us try to be as sensible about sex as we are trying to be about all the other phenomena ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... of pickings from other people's pockets. Visible in many ways is the decadence of the Daily Press since We left it. The Mentor of Young Democracy has abandoned philosophy, and stuffs the ears of his TELEMACHUS with the skirts of CALYPSO'S petticoats, the latest scandals of the Court, and the prurient purrings of abandoned womankind in places where you accept the unaccustomed cigar, and drink the unfamiliar champagne. All the more need, then, that there should be a Voice which, like that of the Muezzin from the Eastern minaret, shall ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... shriek,—gobbling,—staring,—chattering,—giggling,—trampling out every vestige of national honor and domestic peace, wherever it sets the staggering hoof of it; incapable of reading, of hearing, of thinking, of looking,—capable only of greed for money, lust for food, pride of dress, and the prurient itch of momentary curiosity for the politics last announced by the newsmonger, and the religion last rolled by the chemist into electuary for ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... an adjournment of the inquest; for, whatever might be his sentiments towards Odette Rider, he was, it seemed, more anxious to perform his duty to the State, and it was very necessary that no prurient-minded coroner should investigate too deeply into the cause and the circumstances leading up to Thornton Lyne's death, lest the suspected criminal ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... unnatural to admit of stage presentation. Incest, when treated in the manner of Sophocles (Walpole justified himself by the example of "Oedipus"), or even of Ford, or of Shelley, may possibly claim a place among the themes which art is not quite forbidden to touch; but when handled in the prurient and crudely melodramatic fashion of this particular artist, it is merely offensive. "The Mysterious Mother," indeed, is even more absurd than horrible. Gothic machinery is present, but it is of the slightest. The scene of the action ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... visibly touched by depression and ill-fortune, and hammering out the old grammar-grind. Had any writer, any poet, ever agonised thus? The people who discoursed glibly about love, and wove their sorrows into elegies, what sort of prurient curs were they? It was all too bad to think of, to speak of—a mere staggering among the mudflats ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... than fame." You should have seen him blush; but afterwards He made a stalwart knight. O Vivien, For you, methinks you think you love me well; For me, I love you somewhat; rest: and Love Should have some rest and pleasure in himself, Not ever be too curious for a boon, Too prurient for a proof against the grain Of him ye say ye love: but Fame with men, Being but ampler means to serve mankind, Should have small rest or pleasure in herself, But work as vassal to the larger love, That dwarfs the petty love of one to one. ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... crowds of men and men-women—whose prurient curiosity had driven them to follow the great on-to-Richmond, with hopes of a first view of the triumphant entry of the Grand Army—soon forgot their uncomfortable and terrified scramble to the rear. They easily changed ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... hands gleefully. From the moment the curtain rose, Tadeo had been heedless of the music. He was looking only for the prurient, the indecent, the immoral in actions and dress, and with his scanty French was sharpening his ears to catch the obscenities that the austere guardians of the fatherland ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... I have watched you and your crew, how you preach up selfish ambition for divine charity and call prurient longings celestial love, while you blaspheme that very marriage from whose mysteries you borrow all your cant. The day will come when every husband and father will hunt you down like vermin; and may I ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... lastly, with regard to prurient and polluted talk and unclean stories. Against these a Christian man will do well firmly and resolutely to set his face. Such things defile the mind. They are injurious both to him that hears and to him that speaks, in that they tend to engender a mental atmosphere in which ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... alive. Some comments upon the story suggested that it was impossible for a man to spend the night on the prairie with a woman whom he loved without causing her to forget her marriage vows. It is not sentimental to say that is nonsense. It is a prurient mind that only sees evil in a situation of the sort. Why it should be desirable to make a young man and woman commit a misdemeanor to secure the praise of a critic is beyond imagination. It would be easy enough to do. I did it in The Right of Way. I did it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the open plain and trust to their speed, they are safe; but they have a prurient curiosity that sometimes betrays them to their ruin. When they have scud for some distance and left their pursuer behind, they will suddenly stop and turn to gaze at the object of their alarm. If the pursuit is not followed up they will, after a time, yield to their inquisitive hankering, and return ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... woman, with a delight circling purely in the mind, with a serene melodious joy, like that given them by an exquisite picture, statue, or landscape. Dante tells us, in his Vita Nuova, that he carried about with him a list of the loveliest ladies in Florence. To attach any prurient association to the act, would be blasphemy; it can only be understood by reference to that sweet, poetic, religious worship of lovely forms, which seems to rise through contemplation of beauty to adoration of God. One ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... venerable personages who indulge in an extensive curiosity, I should never arrive at the end of my subject. Lawyers and physicians are eternal questionists; the clergy are curious, especially on agricultural affairs; the first nobles in the land take in the "John Bull" and the "Age" to gratify the most prurient curiosity. The gentlemen of the Stock Exchange live only from one story to another, and are miserable if a "great man's butler looks grave," without their knowing why. So general indeed is this passion, that one half of every Englishman's time is spent in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... and played lots, For Washington, Wesley and good Dr. Watts; His prurient plots pained Wesley and Watts, But Washington said he "enjoyed ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various
... those they select, and consequently the press of the present day teems with works which are not only valueless, so far as imparting information is concerned, but actually deleterious in their moral tendency, and calculated to vitiate and enervate the mind. Such publications as pander to a prurient taste find a large circulation with a portion of society who read them for the same reason that the inebriate seeks his bowl, or the gambler the instruments of his vocation—for the excitement they produce. The influence ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... quality of demoralizing novels such as have been produced from the impure brain and unclean imaginations; the subtle, clever, and fascinating undermining of the white-winged angel of purity by modern sophists, whose prurient and vicious volumes were written to throw a halo of charm and beauty about the brilliant courtesan and the splendid adulteress; the mixing up of lust and love; the making of corrupt passion to stand in the garb of a deep, lasting, and holy affection—these are some of ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... philanthropy who was not wrong in heart somehow or other. Individuals so distinguished, are usually unhappy in their family relations—men not benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost hostile to them, yet lavishing money and labor and time on the race—the abstract notion." The prurient love of notoriety actuates some. There is much luxury in sentiment, especially if it can be indulged at the expense of others, and if there be added some share of envy or malignity, the temptation to indulgence is almost irresistible. But certainly they may be justly ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various |
