"Seduction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fortunes of Ernest on this fatal evening, as he yielded, step by step, to the seduction to which he was now exposed for the first time in his life? Long after Steinfort left the gambling house, he continued to play. His luck turned. He had soon lost all his winnings, and the money set apart for his bridal presents. Still ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... moral nor immoral) like any other bodily function, but it may easily become immoral per accidentem, i.e., from the special circumstances under which it takes place, and whereby it acquires the character of an act of injustice or treachery, such as seduction of a friend's wife or daughter."[918] A very influential Socialist writer asks: "Is chastity a virtue, and is there such a vice as unchastity?" and he answers his question by quoting the above statement of Bax.[919] ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... surrounded it with walls. The public revenues were easily increased by proper attention on the part of the fiscal authorities. I provided for the education of the young and the maintenance of the old; and for the general public I had games and spectacles, banquets and doles. As for rape and seduction, tyrannical violence or intimidation, I abhorred the very ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... some more difficult to arrive at than others, but always possible. And, until that moment, when Sally had told him that she knew he was a gentleman, he had placed her no differently to the rest. Cheap, sordid seduction, there had been none of that in his mind; but he had tacitly admitted within himself that if their acquaintance were to drift—she willing, he content—into that condition of intimacy, then what harm would be done? She was a little type-writer; ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... which had now become somewhat prominent. He seemed satisfied with this, and then opened the other packet, which was a series of drawings executed by a first-rate artist in the most admirable style delineating the seduction of a beautiful young boy of about fifteen by another handsome youth a few years older. Every scene in the progress was illustrated by an appropriate and admirably drawn portrait of the two characters, commencing with taking ...
— Laura Middleton; Her Brother and her Lover • Anonymous
... case spoken of by Lefebvre and reported to the Belgium Academy: A girl, born in Luxemborg, well developed sexually, having hair on the pubis at birth, who menstruated at four, and at the age of eight was impregnated by a cousin of thirty-seven, who was sentenced to five years' imprisonment for seduction. The pregnancy terminated by the expulsion of a mole containing a well-characterized human embryo. Schmidt's case in 1779 was in a child who had menstruated at two, and bore a dead fetus when she was but eight years and ten months old. She ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... They are peculiarly susceptible in the evening, after the strain of the day's labor, when they are hunting for fun and excitement in theatres, dance-halls, and moving-picture shows. In summer they are themselves hunted on excursion steamers, and at the parks and recreation grounds. The seduction and exploitation of young women has become a distinct occupation of certain worthless young men, commonly known as cadets, who live upon the earnings of the women they procure. Three-fourths of the prostitutes ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... particular interested me. The Pine-chafer emits a musical note. The female is as gifted as the male. Does the lover make use of his faculty as a means of seduction and appeal? Does the female answer the chirp of her innamorata by a similar chirp? That this may be so under normal conditions, amidst the foliage of the pines, is extremely probable; but I can make no assertion, as I have never heard anything of the kind either among the pines ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... evidence, gained later, confirmed them in their belief that sedition was reaching a dangerous height in England. They overrated the existing danger, though if sedition had remained unchecked it might soon have become dangerous; for France was attacking the state by secret seduction as well as by open arms. Extraordinary precautions were taken to meet a peril which was specially terrible because its extent was unknown. Measures of repression were eagerly welcomed by parliament; judges and magistrates exercised their powers with harshness, and juries were often biassed ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... competence to take the parliamentary oath, and the ultimate event proved that he was right and they were wrong. Now what were the crimes of the three other members, who were completely and absolutely expelled? Captain Verney was found guilty of procuration for seduction, Mr. Hastings was found guilty of embezzlement, and Mr. De Cobain was pronounced guilty of evading justice, while charged with unnatural offences. Mr. Jabez Spencer Balfour might also have been expelled, if he had not accepted the Chiltern Hundreds. Now all these real delinquents were Christians, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... loved mistress declared that I had spent ten times, I am certain she did oftener than that, for neither closed an eye, nor ceased from the most loving embraces. She exerted all the wonderful powers of seduction for which she was so distinguished. Never mortal man could have passed a more intoxicating night of pleasure. We heard movements in the house before we parted with mutual tears coursing down ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... Boldrewood with some material there cannot be any doubt, but the fictitious bushranger is far from being in any respect a mere copy of the real one. In Starlight's relations with women, for instance, there is nothing but what is manly and honourable, whereas one of Gardiner's exploits was the seduction of a settler's wife, a beautiful woman whom he induced to elope with him to a remote district in Queensland. And, further, none of the sensational incidents connected with his capture—his escape under a legal technicality from the death-penalty suffered by some of his associates, his imprisonment ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... sweet, meaningless smile of a half-awakened child. Her consciousness had not yet fully returned, and her glance, curiously clear and liquid, rested on his without intelligence. The woman in her was never more apparent, her seduction never more potent. Her will dormant, her bounding energies at low ebb, she looked a thing to nestle, soft and yielding, ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... the memory retained only the dark shadows of the past? so that the mind could turn with zest and interest to the joys of the moment? Instead of that, memory tempted the soul, by a kind of magical seduction, to dwell only upon what was sweet and beautiful in the past, thereby emphasising and heightening the sense of dissatisfaction with the present. Was it true that the very days that were then passing, those sober, uneventful days, would at some future time be touched by the same ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... commit the punishment proper for his son to the judgment of others. All thought that he deserved outlawry except Bikk, who did not shrink from giving a more terrible vote against his life, and declaring that the perpetrator of an infamous seduction ought to be punished with hanging. But lest any should think that this punishment was due to the cruelty of his father, Bikk judged that, when he had been put in the noose, the servants should hold him up on ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... of a courtier with an air of distinction. Feeble, irresolute, in the ordinary conduct of life; he yielded to no one in courage and firmness, on occasions of difficulty and danger. A stranger to intrigue, inaccessible to seduction, he was in the camp, as in the palace, a man of ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... heart, Yet bleeding from th' oppressor's blow, Which could bestow its better part Upon the offspring of a foe! They, the mean delvers of the soil, The wielders of the felling axe,— Because we will not stoop to toil, Nor to its burdens bond our backs; Because we scorn Seduction's wiles, Her lying words and forged smiles, They, the foul slaves of lust and gold, Say that our blood and hearts are cold.(3) But ere the morrow's dawning light Has climbed yon eastern craggy height, One, whose fierce eye ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... She had spoken of riding. There would be places to go. The bailes out at the Quemado; weddings far out in the chaparral. Many Americans attended these affairs in a spirit of adventure, and the ride was always delightful. There was a seduction in the desert winds, in the low-vaulted skies with their decorative schemes ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... motives questioned, his sincerity misunderstood and aspersed. Alone must he endure all this,—along cling to the majestic ideal of right as it rises to his own soul. And thus he must wage a bitter conflict with fear and with seduction,—with sophistries of the heart, and reluctance of ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... at the corners, is of a vivid red; blood abounds there, and supplies the living, thinking oxide which gives such seduction to the lips, reassuring the lover whom the gravity of that majestic face may have dismayed. The upper lip is thin, the furrow which unites it with the nose comes low, giving it a centre curve which ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... him looking over her select and severe library, taking therefrom the "Polite Letter-Writer" and the "Elegant Extracts," Mrs. Crane divined at once that Jasper Losely was meditating the effect of epistolary seduction upon the widow ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by this wigwam on stilts looked most inviting just then, and we yielded to the seduction. We got off, and throwing ourselves at full length on the grass, allowed our horses to graze close to us, without taking ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... invests its possessor, they would dress decorously from mere self-love, if not from principle. The designing would assume modesty as an artifice; the coquet would adopt it as an allurement; the pure as her appropriate attraction; and the voluptuous as the most infallible art of seduction." ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... innocence, and, in addition, a force of character which brought her safely through the risks she ran. While she was still in her solitary lodging, a theatrical manager, named Dodd, attempted to use his position as a cover for seduction. She had several interviews with him alone, and the story goes that, in the last, she snatched up a basin of hot water and dashed it in his face. But she was not to go unprotected for long; for within two months of her arrival in London ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... endured,—persecutions which patience overcame, which the power of God subdued. Here are traced the causes of dissension in the Church; the schisms and heresies which arose; the errors which the pride and passions of bad men gave birth to; the obstinacy of the wicked,—the seduction of the innocent,—the labors and sufferings of the just; the conflicts which took place between light and darkness,—between truth and error; the triumph, at one time of the city of God, at another, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... on a woman's hand connecting the Fate Line with the Mount of Venus, is an almost certain indication of her seduction (5, Plate XIV.). ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... the metaphysical conception on the other represent the Scylla and Charybdis, between which to sail is indeed difficult, and so far by few satisfactorily accomplished; it cannot be denied that with the increase of knowledge the seduction of the second has lately notably increased" ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... of the seduction of Danae, the mother of Perseus, by Jupiter, in the form of a shower of gold, has been thus explained by some of the ancient writers. Acrisius, hearing of a prediction that Danae, his daughter, should bring forth a child that would kill him, caused her to ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Crushes the Judaizers.—He was not, however, the man to allow such seduction to go on among his converts without putting forth the most strenuous efforts to counteract it. He hurried, when he could, to see the churches which were being tampered with; he sent messengers to bring them back to their allegiance; above all, he wrote letters to ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... his debut in the ecclesiastical career, had been distinguished by a veritable seduction and capturing of souls, by a success which had been a perfect triumph and indeed almost a scandal. After taking the catechism classes for a year in the parish of B——, the archbishop had appointed him to other work, putting ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... fight continued it increased in bitterness. Cheetham pounded Burr harder than ever, accusing him of seduction and of dancing with a buxom wench at a "nigger ball" given by one of his coloured servants at Richmond Hill. Jefferson was quoted as saying that Burr's party was not the real democracy, a statement that the American Citizen printed in capitals and kept standing ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... at Christmas? What seduction hath Yule Tide for these phantastic fellows, that it lures them from their warm fireplaces? Is it that the cool snow is grateful after the fervours of their torrid zone, where even the pyrometer would fail to record ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... with the exception of Mr. Bullock, to be. In this we have consulted nature and history, rather than the prevailing taste and the general manner of authors. The amusing novel of "Ernest Maltravers," for instance, opens with a seduction; but then it is performed by people of the strictest virtue on both sides: and there is so much religion and philosophy in the heart of the seducer, so much tender innocence in the soul of the seduced, that—bless the little dears!—their very peccadilloes make ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... When it came to the art of pleasing and attracting women, we have the word of Cardinal de Retz for it, that he was not always successful. Perhaps it is only inferior minds who possess the art and the genius of seduction. ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... a sense of obligation, but principally from a broadening hope of extended concession. I had already selected him as a singularly eligible guardian for Alf's bullocks; and I knew that if I could once get him to accept the trust, nothing short of dynamite would shift him. But the seduction of a direct-action, single-cylinder purpose is a contract not to be taken by any of your mushroom mental firms; and this was a large order. Of course, the diplomatic flunkey-touch of nature has served as a letter of introduction to the man; now I would follow up the national phase of ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... far-seeing eyes is what places me beyond redemption in the minds of others. I have spent some sleepless nights in his fine home, kept awake by the seductions of social life tugging at my heart-strings. So one night I stole away from this seduction and slept with some drunken hoboes in the tall soft grass, where I could have no doubt about being welcome. I might as well doubt the grass as those pals, who without question hailed me as an equal. I, having the only swell 'front,' tackled ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... command, to attempt to form a marriage beset with difficulties with Mademoiselle de Marignan, a rich heiress of one of the greatest families of Provence, he displayed, like a wrestler, all kinds of stratagems and daring schemes of policy in the small theater of Aix. Not only cunning, seduction, and courage, but every resource of his nature was used to succeed, and he succeeded; but he was hardly married before fresh persecutions beset him, and the stronghold of Pontarlier gaped to enclose him. A love, which his "Lettres a Sophie" has rendered immortal, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... more struggles; he surrendered himself to the charming seduction, and as his advances were respectful, but ardent and incessant, he found himself at the end of a fortnight Mrs. Woffington's ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... play, was published in 1915. Gloomy and terrible, but strong and restrained, it is built on a theme of seduction, remorse, and forgiveness in death, woven about the legendary figure of Galdra-Loftur, who lived in Iceland at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It ends with an intensely dramatic scene in the old ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... been disturbed. Mrs. Winscombe had resumed the animation vanished at noon. She wore green and white, with plum-coloured ribbons, and a flat shirred cap tied under her chin. The fluted, clear lawn of her elbow sleeves was like a scented mist. He was again conscious of the warm seduction, the rare finish, of her body, like a flushed marble under wide hoops and dyed silk. She was talking to Myrtle about the Court. "I am in waiting with the Princess Amelia Sophia," she explained; "I ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... merits. The greater portion of this force is proceeding in relieving an important frontier post, and in several incidental operations against hostile tribes of savages, rendered indispensable by the subserviency into which they had been seduced by the enemy—a seduction the more cruel as it could not fail to impose a necessity of precautionary severities against ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Madison • James Madison
... marbles—glassies, commonies, and a larger browny adapted to the purpose of "pugging," by reason of the violence with which it seems to respond to the impact of your thumb. Then there are baseballs of graded excellence and seduction. And tops. Time is needed for the choosing of a top. First you stand tiptoe with nose just above the glass and make your trial selection. Pay no attention to the color, for that's the way a girl chooses! Black is good, without womanish taint. ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... Penny,' he laughed as he caught me in his arms. 'We're going to celebrate. Dress up in that lacy black thing—you are seduction itself in it.' ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... first, they wouldn't have started away. He made a plausible excuse; but his real reason had been the fear that not even the secret would keep them with him any very great length of time, and so he had meant to hold it in reserve as a last seduction. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... live to be women, die like sheep with the rot; so fast that soon there would be none left, if a fresh supply were not obtained equal to the number of deaths. But a fresh supply is always obtained without the least trouble; seduction easily keeps pace with prostitution or mortality. Those that die are, like factory children that die, instantly succeeded by new competitors for misery and death." There is no hour of a summer's or a winter's night, in which there may not be found in the streets a ghastly wretch, expiring under ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... honestly say that during that entire time every attention was paid to my physical comfort. Luxuries were showered upon me. But I was almost continuously subjected to some form of mental torture or moral assault. Most elaborately staged attempts at seduction were made upon me with drugs, with women. Hypnotism was resorted to. Viewplates were faked to picture to me the complete rout of American forces all over the continent. With incredible patience, and laboring under great handicaps, in view of the vigor of the American ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... his glory. He had already tainted it by many acts of violence, and by an exclusive devotion to personal ends, in defiance of justice and liberty. Henceforward and under the disastrous inspirations of a mad ambition, victory itself was to become a fatal seduction which by inevitable degrees draws us on to ruin. Great and terrible lesson of Divine justice on the morality of nations! Starting from the violation of the peace of Amiens, and in spite of the glory of the sun of Austerlitz, the history of the glory of the conqueror includes in ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... accomplish this work. The people were first gained, and, through them, their distracted representatives. Under the influence of King William, Holland had rejected the allurements of every seduction, and had resisted the terrors of every menace. With Hannibal at her gates, she had nobly and magnanimously refused all separate treaty, or anything which might for a moment appear to divide her affection or her interest ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... I had known her a long, long time. There was something about her that was not seduction; but far, far above it. Somewhere I had seen her, had known her. She was looking and she was waiting for me. There was something about her that was super feminine. I thought it then, and I ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... laying it waste with fire and sword, no troops scarcely being opposed to his sudden invasion. He received the ambassador with mortifying haughtiness, bidding him return to his master, and inform him that he never would forgive the seduction of his daughter, in revenge for which he had taken a solemn oath to overturn the kingdom of Sind, raze the capital, and feast his eyes with the blood of the old sultan and his son. On receipt of this ungracious reply to his proposals, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... "Squirrel," etc. Then follow the secret language of an imaginary order; her first verses, written at the age of thirteen; scraps of poetry, original and extracted, in French, Italian, and English; a long fragment of a wild romantic story of a girl's seduction by an infidel nobleman. A clever sketch in water-colour of William Lamb and of herself, after their marriage, is followed by verses on the birth of her son, "little "Augustus," August 23, 1807. The last stanza of a poem, which has nothing to commend ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... was one of the prettiest women in Innsbruck. She had golden hair, large violet eyes, a smile that would melt a Loyola, and diamonds that set every woman's mouth watering. With such inducements to seduction, how could Madame Mildau help delighting in balls and fetes, and in promenading constantly before the public? She revelled in a universal admiration—she aimed at a monopoly—and she lived wholly and solely to exact homage. To be deprived of any single ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... the experienced, for some two hundred pages. The situations and the other characters—the Professor Porpora himself; Count Zustiniani, dilettante, impresario and of course gallant; his prima donna and (in the story at least) first mistress, La Corilla; her extravagances and seduction of the handsome Anzoleto; his irresolution between his still existing affection for Consuelo, who passes through all these things (and Zustiniani's siege of her) "in maiden meditation, fancy-free"—all ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... voice, its tenderness and seduction, startled her in the solitude of her room. She had not known she could speak like that. She dropped her face into her hands, and in the rapture of her own daring and in the recollection of the excitement ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... a watch was kept over the stage. "The Maid's Tragedy," which turns upon the seduction of Evadne by a licentious and profligate king, was prohibited during the reign of Charles II., as admitting certain unfavourable applications. The ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practise the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils!—such an attachment of a small or weak, towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... Negro too. Slavery did de white race a whole lot a good but it wasn't lastin' good. It did de Negro good, dat will be lastin' good forever. De Negro women protected de pure white woman from enticement and seduction of de white man in slavery time. My grandpap say he never heard of a bad white woman befo' freedom. I leave it wid you if dere's any dese times? Dat was worth more to de South, my grandpap say, dis santification of de white ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... her mother; and they had been so forcibly impressed, that she feared shame, more than the poverty to which it would lead. Her incessant importunities to prevail upon my father to screen her from reproach by marrying her, as he had promised in the fervour of seduction, estranged him from her so completely, that her very person became distasteful to him; and he began to hate, as well as despise ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... in the art of writing not surpassed in any work of imagination known to us. Another ground for the seeming actuality of the story, to those who have any knowledge of the class to which its heroine belongs, is the cause to which she attributes her fall. This was not seduction; for she confesses, what hardly one in a thousand of her sisters in shame will fail to confess, if they speak the truth, that she was not seduced;—and neither was it poverty; for her father was well-to-do, and she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... which still, in the midst of an infidel nation, composes Thy people; with them I will turn all my desires toward the holy Zion. The singularity of my manners will be regarded as a weakness; but blest weakness, O my God! which will give me strength to resist the torrent of customs, and the seduction of example. Thou wilt be my God in the midst of Babylon, as Thou wilt one ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... The young man, whose judgment was as precocious as his eloquence, saw that his time was coming, but was not come, and was deaf to royal importunities and reproaches. His Majesty, bitterly complaining of Pitt's faintheartedness, tried to break the coalition. Every art of seduction was practised on North, but in vain. During several weeks the country remained without a government. It was not till all devices had failed, and till the aspect of the House of Commons became threatening, that the King gave way. The Duke of Portland was declared First Lord of the Treasury. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by men who are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption, and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freedmen and slaves. Whatever, in connection with my professional practice, or not in connection with it, I see or hear, in the life of men, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge as reckoning that all such should be kept secret. While ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... the woman he took both death and hell, although it did not bear these names, but bore the name of fruit. The sleep of death and fiends' seduction; death and hell and exile and damnation—these were the fatal fruit whereon they feasted. And when the apple worked within him and touched his heart, then laughed aloud the evilhearted fiend, capered about, and gave thanks ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... was, "The serpent beguiled me." But she coveted that which God kept back. How many Edens are lost because we desire that which is forbidden! Is not this the spring of the so-called social evil? We may say what we like against seduction, and our words cannot be too strong, but the woman desiring when God had said, "Thou shalt not," is the true reason of ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... gladdened and disposed to benevolence by good cheer. He was not without suspicion as to the reason why he was so feasted, but he had laid down his conditions beforehand, and if they were faithfully observed he willingly yielded to the means of seduction brought to bear upon him. Moreover, he himself had arranged the ceremonial in a kind of contract formerly made with his worshippers and gradually perfected from age to age by the piety of new generations.[**] Above all things, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... while Dmitri Fyodorovitch is in debt to me, and not a little, but some thousands of which I have documentary proof. The whole town is echoing with his debaucheries. And where he was stationed before, he several times spent a thousand or two for the seduction of some respectable girl; we know all about that, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, in its most secret details. I'll prove it.... Would you believe it, holy Father, he has captivated the heart of the most honorable of young ladies of good family and fortune, daughter ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... It was only a momentary seduction, a boy's misstep through ignorance, which will never be repeated; Eugen has given me his word of ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... measures for that purpose. One of them, however, M. Dolomieu, had cause to repent his mission, which occasioned him to be badly treated by the Sicilians. M. Poussielgue had done all he could in the way of seduction, but he had not completely succeeded. There was some misunderstanding, and, in consequence, some shots were interchanged. Bonaparte was very much pleased with General Baraguay d'Hilliers' services in Italy. He could not but praise his military and political conduct at Venice when, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... criminal case, should have been conducted by the Attorney-General against Sir William Wilde; but that was not the way it presented itself. The action was not even brought directly by Miss Travers or by her father, Dr. Travers, against Sir William Wilde for rape or criminal assault, or seduction. It was a civil action brought by Miss Travers, who claimed L2,000 damages for a libel written by Lady Wilde to her father, Dr. Travers. The letter complained ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... and distaste, he was silent. And all at once she threw herself half across the joined arms of their chairs, catching his shoulders with her hands, so that her half-clothed body rested on his bosom, and its scented warmth assailed his senses with the seduction whose ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... varieties of loveliness and was a seduction to men and women, nor could the gazer satisfy himself with the sight of her charms; for she was as the poet hath ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... Empress Catherine, conferred on these men of letters, and on the ideas for which they stood, a prestige which carried great weight with the bourgeoisie. Humbler people, too, were as amenable as the great to the seduction of theories which supplied simple keys to the universe [Footnote: Taine said of the Contrat Social that it reduces political science to the strict application of an elementary axiom which renders all study unnecessary (La Revolution, vol. i. c. iv. Sec. iii.).] and ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... the foregoing considerations, there are others equally important. Although Greece was involved for years in war and ancient Troy was destroyed and all its inhabitants slaughtered because of the seduction of one woman; and Semiramis, through her beauty, got all her successive husbands in chancery; and poor, susceptible Samson, from firing Philistine vineyards and killing lions bare-handed, and the Philistines ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... sultan, though anxious for war, would not spend a penny in order to wage it; and it was not easy to corrupt some of the great vassals ordered to march at their own expense against a man in whose downfall they had no special interest. Nor were the means of seduction wanting to Ali, whose wealth was enormous; but he preferred to keep it in order to carry on the war which he thought he could no longer escape. He made, therefore, a general appeal to all Albanian warriors, whatever their religion. Mussulmans and Christians, alike attracted ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the change ended there our army would be still more a militia than it is now. It would be the Prussian Landwehr. But those entitled to their discharge are to be enticed by higher pay, promotions, bounties, and retiring pensions—in short, by all means of seduction, to re-enter for long periods, for ten, or fifteen, or perhaps twenty years. It is hoped that thus a permanent regular army may be formed, with an esprit de corps of its own, unsympathising with ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... deeds which he perpetrated was to be numbered the seduction of a young lady, whose heart was broken by the detection of his perfidy. The fruit of this unhappy union was a daughter. Her mother died shortly after her birth. Her father was careless of her destiny. She was consigned to the care of a hireling, ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... faux pas with my frail mother convinced me that he was capable of any act of lechery. I also felt assured that he lusted after me with all the ardor of his lascivious passions, and I well know that he waited but for an opportunity to attempt my seduction.—I hated the man, both for his adultery with my mother, and his vile intentions towards myself—and I determined to punish him for his lewdness and hypocrisy—yes, punish him through the medium of his own bad passions, and in a manner that ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... he had inspired no great passion, but a multitude of caprices. But now he had begun to feel that it is one love and not twenty that makes a life memorable, he wished to redeem his life from intrigues, and here was the very chance he was waiting for. But habit had rendered him cowardly, and this seduction frightened him almost as much as marriage had done. To go away with her, he felt, was equivalent to marrying her. His life would never be the same again. The list would be lost to him for ever, no more lists for him; ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... pressed on by the hindmost rank, who seeing no danger but from the hunters, goad on those before them till the whole are precipitated and the shore is strewn with their dead bodies. Sometimes in this perilous seduction the Indian is himself either trodden under root by the rapid movements of the buffaloe, or missing his footing in the cliff is urged down the precipice by the falling herd. The Indians then select as much meat as they wish, and the rest is abandoned to the wolves, and create a most ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... to all that you have sinned against God, and injured a respectable citizen of Rochelle by the seduction of his daughter. We can not hope that God will bless our arms in this approaching battle while such a sin remains unrepented ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... instructed her in the more useful and homely arts of cooking, sewing, knitting, &c. and she had even taught her to spin; for she lived before the establishment of any, or many, of those institutions for the increase of illegitimate children, ignorance, immorality, suicide, seduction, murder, &c.—I mean cotton factories. The comparatively affluent circumstances of her family had, however, rendered it unnecessary for her to practise this last accomplishment. With all these charms ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... took out the box, and opened it. He knew it held two pellets; no more. Why not take them at once, and so break the last link of the devil's chain? He turned them into his palm, . . and paused, while the enemy within whispered words of seduction hard to be withstood. But now a second voice spoke in him also: a voice of mingled authority and pleading. Why not fling away both box and pellets, foregoing the final degradation, the final rapture, that every nerve in him clamoured ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... illuminated barges, scattering music and song, lead a long train down the Canal. The barges used to be rowed in rhythmic strokes, but now they are towed by the steamer. The coloured lamps, the vocalists before the hotels, are not to my sense the greatest seduction of Venice; but it would be an uncandid sketch of the Canalazzo that shouldn't touch them with indulgence. Taking one nuisance with another, they are probably the prettiest in the world, and if they have in general more magic for the new arrival than for the old Venice-lover, they in any case, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... from the beginning. She could recall—with trembling—many a strange moment in Helbeck's presence, or in the chapel, when she had seemed to feel her whole self breaking up, dissolving in the grip of a power that was at once her foe and the bearer of infinite seduction. But always the will, the self, had won the victory, had delivered a final "No!" into which had rushed the whole energy ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is a sophism," cried Durtal, growing angry. "God has left to every man his liberty; no one is tempted beyond his power. If in certain cases, he allows the seduction to overpass our means of resistance, it is to recall us to humility, to bring us back to Him by remorse, for other causes which we know not, which it is not His business to show us. Then probably those transgressions are appreciated in a different ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... she has told me all, a quarrel soon followed by a reconciliation forced her to write the letter which you have received, and she has sent me here in her place. I will not tell you, sir, that by persisting in your plan of seduction you will cause the misery of her you love, that you will forfeit her my esteem, and eventually your own; that your crime will be stamped on the future by causing perhaps sorrow to my children. I will not even speak to ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... sign of self-conscious superiority. Doisy gave credit, for he reckoned on the sisters and aunts of the pupils, who made it a point of honor to pay their debts. I resisted the blandishments of his place for a long time. If my judges knew the strength of its seduction, the heroic efforts I made after stoicism, the repressed desires of my long resistance, they would pardon my final overthrow. But, child as I was, could I have the grandeur of soul that scorns the scorn of others? Moreover, I may have felt the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... be a close fight, bet your boots about that, If we get a clear course without serious obstruction, Of which I'm not sanguine; the practice of PAT Has proved to possess universal seduction. Our last spin was muffed; never mind whose the fault; Let bygones be bygones! But now comes the crisis! It's now win or lose. Every man worth his salt Will pull like a Titan from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... spirit of union is particularly liable to temptation and seduction in moments of peace and prosperity. In war, this spirit is strengthened by a sense of common danger, and by a thousand recollections of ancient efforts and ancient glory in a common cause. But in ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... a day,—of parvenus bursting into millionnaires; of wealth as the necessary instrument of ambition, as the arch ruler of the civilized world. Never once, be it observed, in these temptations, did Lucretia address herself to the heart; the ordinary channels of vulgar seduction were disdained by her. She would not have stooped so low as Mainwaring's love, could she have commanded or allured it; she was willing to leave to Susan the husband reft from her own passionate youth, but leave him ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... died in consequence of the seduction of the serpent:—Benjamin, the son of Jacob; Amram, the father of Moses; Jesse, the father of David; and Chileab, the son ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... consideration; attraction; loadstone; magnet, magnetism, magnetic force; allectation|, allective|; temptation, enticement, agacerie[obs3], allurement, witchery; bewitchment, bewitchery; charm; spell &c. 993; fascination, blandishment, cajolery; seduction, seducement; honeyed words, voice of the tempter, song of the Sirens forbidden fruit, golden apple. persuasibility[obs3], persuasibleness[obs3]; attractability[obs3]; impressibility, susceptibility; softness; persuasiveness, attractiveness; tantalization[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the devices of Satan to keep souls from Christ. The world and the flesh are his grand instruments of seduction, while his temptations and snares drown them in despair. Their wisdom is to resist manfully by faith in the serpent-bruiser, Jesus. He will consummate his victories by a glorious triumph over all the powers of hell ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... this account of Mrs. Potiphar's seduction is a fancy sketch; but it is a true pen-picture of what too often happens in this fair land of ours, and may be perused with profit by many a Benedict. The number of unfaithful wives whose sin becomes the public shame is simply appalling; yet no criminal was ever so cautious, so adept in ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... pope that he professed himself ready to die for the Roman cause, was in the habit of using language so filthy to his penitents, that it was necessary to "sequester him from hearing ladies' confessions." The nuns petitioned the visitors, on the exposure of the seduction of a sister, that he and his companion might come to them no more; and the friar was told that his abominable conduct might be the occasion that "shrift should be ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... let me say, with sufficient plainness, that there are such fashions in existence; and that they ought to be shunned like the plague. Does not the world in which we live, contain sources enough of temptation, and avenues enough to vice, seduction and misery, without increasing their number by our dress? [Footnote: I cannot refrain from saying, in this place, that since I wrote the above paragraph, I have received an excellent letter from a worthy minister of the gospel, on the subject of female dress which, besides ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... buccaneering was rapidly organizing over it which menaced in its consequences the lawful commerce of every nation, and particularly of the United States, while it presented a temptation to every people, on whose seduction its success principally depended. In regard to the United States, the pernicious effect of this unlawful combination was not confined to the ocean; the Indian tribes have constituted the effective ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... Monsieur," said Octave, with increasing emotion, "that she is above all seduction and should be sheltered from all insult; I swear to you—What oath can I take that you will believe? I swear that Madame de Bergenheim never has betrayed any of her duties toward you; that I never have received the slightest encouragement ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... never avoided or blamed women as objects of seduction. Men, he said, were also a temptation to women. I once inquired of my guru why a great ancient saint had called women "the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... blackguarding, the higher tone of this public press, and of society in general, from which the public press takes its tone, and which it represents in our country, but does not often inform. Even seduction is a rare offence, and a matter of general exclamation, where ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... made for each other; a sleepy, stupid solemnity marks every muscle of the divine, and the nasal droning of the lay brother is most happily expressed. Accompanied by her child and mother, the unfortunate victim of his seduction is here again introduced, endeavouring to enter the church, and forbid the banns. The opposition made by an old pew-opener, with her bunch of keys, gave the artist a good opportunity for indulging his taste in the burlesque, and he has ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... for it is already too powerful and progressive. It is the public interest to check all propagation but that of good citizens, and to protect all women from enforced maternity, whether enforced under legal powers or by the arts of seduction and libertinism. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... "The Woodman's Daughter," is a story of seduction, madness, and child-murder. These are powerful materials to work with; yet it is not every man's hand that they will suit. In the hands of common-place, they are simply revolting. In the hands of folly and affectation, their repulsiveness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... peace to mankind, that a vexed and wandering generation might be taught to seek for repose and toleration in the maternal bosom of Christian charity, and not in the harlot lap of infidelity and indifference. Nothing has driven people more into that house of seduction than the mutual hatred of Christian congregations. Long may we enjoy our church under a learned and edifying episcopacy! But episcopacy may fail, and religion exist. The most horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil society is through ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... can be too contemptuous, or too condemnatory, for the spirit of those works in general. Every tie of society is violated in the progress of their pages; and violated with the full approval of every body. Seduction is the habitual office of the hero. Adultery is the regular office of the heroine. In each the vice is simply a matter of course. Manly honour is a burlesque every where, but where the criminal shoots the injured husband in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... Where Superstition, from the marble stone, Gives every sound, a pilgrim-spirit's groan: Pensive thou readest by the moon's full glare The sculptured children of Affection's tear; Or in the church-yard lone thou sitt'st to weep O'er some sad wreck, beneath the tufty heap— Perchance some victim to Seduction's spell, Who yielded, wept, and then ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... ignorance, they inflict upon themselves in youth; but very few are able wholly to cleanse themselves from the foul desires associated in their minds with sex. These desires make young men impotent in the face of temptation. Under their evil dominance, even men of kind disposition will, by seduction, inflict on an innocent girl agony, misery, degradation, and premature death. They will indulge In the most degrading of all vices with prostitutes on the street. They will defile the atmosphere of social life with filthy talk and ribald jest. ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... he commits of this sort, the more sometimes he may expect to be caressed by males and females of his own order. The man who would not hesitate a moment to destroy the happiness of a family by the seduction of the wife or the daughter, would not dare to leave one shilling of a gambling debt unpaid—the one would bring down upon him the odium of his circle, but the other would not; and the odium of that circle is ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... she rode beside him. They two, they were riding together, alone. The smell of the wild free air of the universe thrilled them both with an exquisite recklessness. Vague, limitless, subtle in mystery, the seduction of it was ineffable. Out of the corner of his eye he peeped at her. But wasn't she perched entrancingly on that dragoon saddle, wasn't she, though? The richly heavy coils of burnished copper had loosened, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... that are thus placed in the way of coitus during menstruation, there is nevertheless good reason to believe that the first coitus very frequently takes place at this point of least psychic resistance. When still a student I was struck by the occurrence of cases in which seduction took place during the menstrual flow, though at that time they seemed to me inexplicable, except as evidencing brutality on the part of the seducer. Negrier,[115] in the lying-in wards of the Hotel-Dieu at Angers, constantly found that the women from the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of the iniquity of seduction. Your servant is not destitute of feminine and virtuous qualities; but she was taught that the best use of her charms consists in the sale of them. My nocturnal visits to Mettingen were now prompted by a double ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... away without sufficient ground. Her clothes, jewels, &c. given to her by her relations are her own property. A father generally gives the daughter in jewels, &c. a present double the value of that given him by the husband. A man can have but one wife, but may keep concubines. Seduction and adultery are not cognisable by law. The law says, "a woman's flesh is her own, she may do with it what she pleases." Prostitutes are common. A man may marry his niece, ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... old treasures of knowledge and mine deeply for new Sick must have somewhat wherewith to busy their thoughts Single combats between dead authors and living housemaids Singular inability to weigh the value of testimony Special gift of the man born for a teacher Student must not be led away by the seduction of knowledge Sweeping statistical documents Take down your sign, or never put it up The withered branch of science: medicine They are not well if they do not have them Time is a very elastic element in Geology and ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... social independence of the woman exterminating sexual love between man and woman, it would for the first time fully enfranchise it. The element of physical force and capture which dominated the most primitive sex relations, the more degrading element of seduction and purchase by means of wealth or material good offered to woman in our modern societies, would then give place to the untrammelled action of attraction and affection alone between the sexes, and sexual love, after its long pilgrimage in the deserts, would be enabled to return ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... and purer feelings of less degraded and guilty times. This person (you will guess readily it was a woman) I made it my especial business and care to wean away from my prey; I would not suffer him a consolation he had denied to me. I used all the arts of seduction to obtain the transfer of her affections. Whatever promises and vows—whether of love or wealth—could effect were tried; nor, at last, without success: I triumphed. The woman became my slave. It ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... eyes; the laces attracted his hands; the most insignificant furbelows held his attention. In jewelers' shops he felt for the showcases a sort of religious respect, as if before a sanctuary of opulent seduction; and the counter, covered with dark cloth, upon which the supple fingers of the goldsmith make the jewels roll, displaying their precious reflections, filled him with ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... days; but on the whole 'tis most miserable stuff. Miss How, who is called a young lady of sense and honour, is not only extreme silly, but a more vicious character than Sally Martin, whose crimes are owing at first to seduction, and afterwards to necessity; while this virtuous damsel, without any reason, insults her mother at home and ridicules her abroad; abuses the man she marries; and is impertinent and impudent with great applause. Even that model ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements—genuine observation, humor, and passion. But it is precisely this absence of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of novel-writing to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Measure the Poet was ultimately indebted to Cinthio, an Italian novelist of the sixteenth century. The original story makes the eighty-fifth in his Hundred Tales. A youth named Ludovico is there overtaken in the crime of seduction: Juriste, a magistrate highly reputed for wisdom and justice, passes sentence of death upon him; and Ludovico's sister, a virgin of rare gifts and graces, goes to pleading for his life. Her beauty and eloquence have the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... The charm and seduction of bright water has always been irresistible to me, a snare and a temptation I have hardly ever been able to withstand; and various are the chances of drowning it has afforded me in the wild mountain brooks of Massachusetts. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... general doctrine. But as to the Franks, in particular, if they resembled their modern representatives in their most conspicuous moral feature, it would be more true to say, that the bribe and the almost magical seduction for them, capable of charming away their sternest resolutions, and of relaxing the hand of the patriot when grasping his noblest birthright, has ever lain in great military success, in the power of bringing victory to the national standards, and ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... will shortly arrive, in which, by ascertaining the characters of persons now, we shall be guarded against their mischiefs then; for in proportion as the enemy despair of conquest, they will be trying the arts of seduction and the force of fear by all the mischiefs which they can inflict. But in war we may be certain of these two things, viz. that cruelty in an enemy, and motions made with more than usual parade, are always signs of weakness. He that can conquer, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... with a handkerchief such as every decent woman in the Passeyr valley wears, and their arms adorned with all sorts of golden trinkets such as we see only on those of strolling players who perform in barns. But I will put an end to it; I will preserve the good and virtuous men from seduction, and will not suffer vice to dress up, and shamelessness to stalk by the side of decency. Just wait, my dear woman; I will protect your husband and all other good men from the seductive wiles of frivolous women, and issue ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... deprivation of their industry, or by the furtive removal of their wealth! Dangers fortify his zeal. The work of God fears not man. He believes even that he strengthens his throne by overthrowing that of error. The profane temples are destroyed, the pulpits of seduction are cast down. The prophets of falsehood are torn from their flocks. At the first blow dealt to it by Louis, heresy falls, disappears, and is reduced either to hide itself in the obscurity whence it issued, or to cross the seas, and to bear with it into foreign lands its false gods, ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles |
