"Seductive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was of opinion that those who violate poetry, using it for purposes of a meretricious kind, deserved punishment as public corrupters of two most sacred things: poetry and morals. It is one of the curious ironies of art that the measure which the seductive Garcilasso used for amatory purposes should have appealed to Luis de Leon as the vehicle most suited to enraptured chants and hymns ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... have disappeared from our settlements—a fact of great importance, and which I apprehend has not been heretofore sufficiently considered. There are many Potawatamies and Ottawas, as also Winnebagoes and Menomonees, who may be easily induced to move into Canada by seductive bribes, in the use of which the British Government has always displayed ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... I want no explanation to see and understand how M. Josselin has written most of his chefs-d'oeuvre from the depths of a happy consciousness habituated to all that is most graceful and charming and seductive in real life—and a deeply sympathetic, poignant, and compassionate sense of the contrast ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... luggage, and went themselves to walk beside the river until their guest had made his toilet. Although the Abbe de Sponde chanced to be even more absent-minded than usual, Mademoiselle Cormon was not less preoccupied. They both walked on in silence. The old maid had never before met any man as seductive as this Olympean viscount. She might have said to herself, as the Germans do, "This is my ideal!" instead of which she felt herself bound from head to foot, and could only say, "Here's my affair!" Then she flew to Mariette to know if the dinner ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... idea made him laugh. But upon reflection it was not funny; it sobered him. What a situation! He felt instinctively that he ought to fly from this hidden valley. But he could not have done it, even had he not been in the trader's employ. The thing was provokingly seductive. It was like an Arabian Nights' tale. What could these strange, fatally bound women do? Would any one of them become involved in sweet toils such as were possible to him? He was no fool. Already eyes had flashed ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... repented, rather too late, that I had not given her time to dress. I felt that all was lost, all the more as having to use both her hands she could not hold her smock and conceal two swelling spheres more seductive than the apples of the Hesperides. How could I help seeing them? I shut my eyes and, said "For shame!" but I gave in at last, and fixed such a hungry gaze upon poor Tonine that she blushed. "Come," said I, "take your smock between your teeth ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... cloud" great stars were shining whitely. The breeze of early morning stirred, penetrating our barred outer gates, and bringing a subtle fragrance from the beflowered groves that lie beyond the city. It had a freshness that demanded from one, in tones too seductive for denial, prompt action. Moreover, we had been rising before daylight for some days past in order that we might cover a respectable distance before the Enemy should begin to blaze intolerably above our heads, commanding ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... where such things are paramount and must be lived up to; a world where the friendship of a Duchess may transform a nobody into a SOMEBODY, to be bowed to by the most elaborate shirtfronts, curtsied to by the haughtiest of turbans, and found worthy of the homage of bewitching eyes, seductive ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... invokes to his aid the genius of strategy; and as the mind of man is a sponge full of expedients, from which once pressed by the hard fingers of necessity many an ingenious device is extracted, innumerable are the various seductive baits that in our plains and forests are placed in the way of the gluttonous appetite of the wolf; and I shall now describe the inventions that are ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... moment. Hearing no further sound, once more he raised his trumpet, this time giving a low, seductive call. The effect was immediate and unexpected. A short distance back in the forest there came the crash of trampled undergrowth and, the next moment, a huge black bulk detached itself from the dark background and stood forth ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... bankers pursue their avocations, and shopkeepers display their wares in a pleasant array of modern shops. On the streets walk leisurely an indolent and elegant people; the dark women are especially chic and it must be said refined and restrained, and not so seductive in appearance as the South would suggest. You see also at the many open-air cafes and in the street a very distinguished-looking type of man with finely cut features and plentiful iron-grey hair. You surmise that you are looking upon the most indolent ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... resorted to the coffee-house, to read the newspapers and enjoy a bowl of punch. Until an arch fellow from Dublin came to be master of the chief coffee-house, nine o'clock was the hour for these worthy mercantile gentlemen to be at home in the evening. The seductive Irish stranger began his wiles by placing a few nice cold relishing things on the table, and so gradually led the way to hot suppers and midnight symposia. Towards the end of his college-session, Carlyle was introduced to a club which gave him ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... still lower, it affects indifference and scepticism and it puts on the air of the trifler in order to insinuate a word of wisdom into the seductive talk that is heard around it, and it holds language somewhat as follows: "Probably everything has its good points and there is something to be said for both vice and virtue, crime and honesty, sin and innocence, rudeness and politeness, licence and purity. These are all simply different ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... seductive St.-Ange, "Miguel and Joe is church- member'—certainlee! They love to talk about rilligion. Come at Miguel and talk about some rilligion. I am nearly ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... nothing of miscellaneous objects of the most varied nature, from sticks of candy, which tempted in the smaller youth with coppers in their fists, up to ornamental articles of apparel, pocket-books, breast-pins, gilt-edged Bibles, stationery, in short, everything which was like to prove seductive to the rural population. The Colonel had made money in trade, and also by matrimony. He had married Sarah, daughter and heiress of the late Tekel Jordan, Esq., an old miser, who gave the town-clock, which carries his name to posterity in large ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... recognized as a formidable enemy, and although a cool and wary savage when himself, and as capable of appreciating the consequences of an act as clearly as any one and therefore likely to be deterred from violence, there was no knowing what he might do, when stimulated by the frenzy that lurks in the seductive draught. Peena knew the difficulty, with which an Indian foregoes revenge, and her apprehensions were the more excited by the attachment she felt for the two white men. Fears, vague and unformed had before floated through her mind, but they now assumed ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... economy in ham and lemonade. The drummer takes his country customer to the theatre, the opera, the circus; dines him, wines him, entertains him all the day and all the night in luxurious style; and plays upon his human nature in all seductive ways. For he knows, by old experience, that this is the best way to get a profitable order out of him. He has this reward. All Governments except our own play the same policy, with the same end in view; and they, also, have their reward. But ours refuses to do business by business ways, and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... stream seventy yards broad divided by a pebbly island, running over seductive riffles and swirling into deep, quiet pools where the good salmon goes to smoke his pipe after meals. Set such a stream amid fields of breast-high crops surrounded by hills of pine, throw in where you please quiet water, log-fenced meadows, and a hundred foot ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... as it would have been after a heavy rain-fall. The horses stepped carefully from flax bushes to "nigger heads" (as the very old blackened grass stumps are called), resting hardly a moment anywhere, and avoiding all the most seductive looking spots. I thought my companion must have gone suddenly mad, when, a hawk rising up almost from beneath our horses' feet, he flung himself off his saddle and cried out, "A late hawk's nest, I declare!" And so it proved, for a little searching in a sheltered and tolerably ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... her beauty of to-day is often not that of yesterday, fortunately for herself, perhaps! The young man, who was still at an age when youth delights in the nothings which are the all of love, watched eagerly for each movement of the eyelids, and the seductive rise and fall of her bosom as she breathed. Sometimes he fancied, suiting the tenor of his thoughts, that he could see a meaning in the expression of the eyes and the imperceptible inflection of the lips. Every gesture betrayed to him the soul, every ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... "not there." A vision of Mrs. Mervill, pink and fair and seductive, had risen before her, the rose-leaf creature with the hard eyes, who had so abruptly broken her sympathy ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... stepped to the altar fancying she might keep to her part of the contract by appearing the miracle that subdued him. Seen by light of day, this bitter object beside him was a witch without her spells; that is, the skeleton of the seductive, ghastliest among horrors and ironies. Let her have the credit of doing her work thoroughly before the exposure. She had done it. She might have helped—such was the stipulation of his mad freak in consenting to the bondage—yes, she might have helped to soften the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... societies there is a third of quite a different cast, which tends to throw the sunshine of good-humor over the whole neighborhood. It meets once a week at a little old-fashioned house kept by a jolly publican of the name of Wagstaff, and bearing for insignia a resplendent half-moon, with a most seductive bunch of grapes. The whole edifice is covered with inscriptions to catch the eye of the thirsty wayfarer; such as "Truman, Hanbury, and Co's Entire," "Wine, Rum, and Brandy Vaults," "Old Tom, Rum, and Compounds," etc. This indeed has been a temple of Bacchus and Momus from time immemorial. It has ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... fifteen, in the old National Gallery, I would linger long before Raphael's "St. Catherine." There was no picture in the whole gallery that appealed to my youthful brain as that picture appealed, with its seductive blend of feminine grace and heavenly aspiration. But a little later the glory of Rubens suddenly broke on my vision. I could never look again with the same eyes on Raphael. By an intellectual effort ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the best of the recent English novels—those by the author of Pelham—may be able to abstract from them a tolerably just idea of English fashionable society, provided he does not forget to deduct qualities which the national self-love has erroneously claimed —namely, grace for its roues, seductive manners and witty conversation ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... men. He takes the witching form of woman, paints her pulpy cheek with peachy bloom, knots into grace her mass of wavy hair, lights in her sparkling eye the kindling flame, hangs on her pouting lip the expectant kiss, and bids her supple waist invite caress; and more seductive far than gold or power are these cunning lures to win men to bow down in abject, grovelling worship of his might. My dear Madam, I would not imply that your beauty and grace are exhibitions of his skill. By no manner ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... seemed to have kept a perfect control of himself and passions until made chief eunuch of the Cherif, who possessed a well-assorted harem of choice Circassian, Georgian, and European beauties. The neglige toilet of the harem bath and the seductive influence of this terrestrial Koranic seventh heaven was too much for the warm Soudanese blood of the chief; his forays were not suspected until a blonde Circassian houri presented her lord and master, the Cherif, with a ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... incur greater dangers than those he would avoid. London!—a beauty and an heiress, in her first debut in London! What formidable admirers would flock around her! Vargrave shuddered to think of the gay, handsome, well-dressed, seductive young elegans, who might seem, to a girl of seventeen, suitors far more fascinating than the middle-aged politician. This was perilous; nor was this all: Lord Vargrave knew that in London—gaudy, babbling, and remorseless London—all ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... attractive voice, not caressingly but carelessly seductive; a voice that suggested a creature both warm and lazy, that would, perhaps, leave many things to chance, but that might at a moment grip closely, and retain, what chance threw ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... been ever so laggard and indifferent a lover the touch of that pretty hand, and the glance from the dark eye that shot fire down into his very heart, would have decided him to obey this seductive invitation. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... flame-tongued, primeval power" have all but ceased. In one of his latest works Hamsun himself notes this change in saying: "When a wanderer reaches fifty years he plays with muted strings." But with or without the sordine Hamsun's production is equally seductive, equally entrancing and compelling. All over the continent of Europe he is known and his writings treasured; in Russia his popularity exceeds that of many of its own inimitable writers. It is to be expected ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... dispelled my fears, for they came armed with bamboo jugs of Murwa beer, and were very drunk and very amiable: they grinned, nodded, kotowed, lolled out their tongues, and scratched their ears in the most seductive manner, then held out their jugs, and besought me by words and gestures to drink and be happy too. I awoke my servant (always a work of difficulty), and with some trouble ejected the visitors, happily without setting the house on fire. I heard ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... grows within him. She had played with him—killed all that was best in him, and then flung him aside. She had let him go for the moment—only to return and spoil whatever good the world had left him. Her face rises before him pleading, seductive; and here is the other face—angry, scornful. Oh, dear little angry face! How fair, how ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... transformed—he is not the same creature," Aunt Victoria told her gravely, speaking according to her seductive habit with Sylvia, as though to an equal. "The year when we lost our money and he married, altered all the world for us." She linked the two events together, and was rewarded by seeing the reference slide ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... lachrymosity.) Dear, alluring, immoral catalogues, sweet sirens for a man's undoing! How you sang to me of sedums, and whispered of peonies and irises—yea, even of German irises! How you spoke in soft, seductive accents of wonderful lilacs, and exquisite spireas, and sweet syringas, murmurous with bees! How you told of tulips and narcissuses, and a thousand lovely things for beds and borders and rock work—at so much a dozen, so very much a dozen, and ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... in his home ministry. Circumstances called him to that wider field of usefulness, the Pacific, in which so many millions of our dusky brethren either worship owls, butterflies, sharks, and lizards, or are led away captive by the seductive pomps of the Scarlet Woman, or lapse languidly into the lap of a bloated and Erastian establishment, ignorant of the Truth as possessed by our community. Against all these forms of soul-destroying error the Rev. Thomas Gowles thundered nobly, "passing," ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... again as he suppressed a seductive desire to throw something at the Irishman's head, silhouetted against the sky as he limped past the entrance. Six weeks had elapsed since the battle of San Juan, in which Hamilton and Kelly had been among the many grievously hurt. Kelly, witness this needless service of ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... Madame, so brilliant under its powdered hair and flashing gems,—the sweet, foreign accents of the voice,—the tiny, jewelled fan, with its glancing pictures and sparkling tassels, whence exhaled vague and floating perfumes; then she hears again that manly voice, softened to tones so seductive, and sees those fine eyes with the tears in them, and wonders within herself that he could have kissed her hand with such veneration, as if she had been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Fouquet's in the Champs Elysees, and of an almost divine meal at the Tour d'Argent, on the other side of the river, where Frederic of the Ibsen whiskers used once to reign: the delicacy of the soufflee of turbot! the succulent tenderness of the caneton a la presse! the seductive flavour of the raspberries and ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... curiosity. There is hardly anything in the world which Godfrey will not find out if he is given time. A secret has the same attraction for him that cheese has for a mouse. Some day, I hope, he will find a trap baited with a seductive mystery. ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... beats upon the ear; Yet, striving for release, The most seductive string's Sweet jargonings, The happiest throat's Most easeful, lovely notes Fall back ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... power fatal to the infant Commonwealth. No men occupy so splendid a place in history as those who have founded monarchies on the ruins of republican institutions. Their glory, if not of the purest, is assuredly of the most seductive and dazzling kind. In nations broken to the curb, in nations long accustomed to be transferred from one tyrant to another, a man without eminent qualities may easily gain supreme power. The defection of a troop of guards, a conspiracy ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... heard the girl murmur something that sounded like, "Why shouldn't I?" Her face was turned up to him in a way that had but one significance for maiden or medium. She was, he reminded me, Ena's sister, about to become his own; there was a clinging, seductive scent about her, too, and a subtle aroma of Benedictine; and, well, he ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... however, and of the facts, grim or seductive, of life, Doggie learned little. Whether by force of some streak of honesty, whether through sheer laziness, whether through canny self-interest, Phineas McPhail conspired with Mrs. Trevor to keep Doggie in darkest ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... "you are suspected of having used some seductive arts to induce M. d'Espard to hand over to you ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... considered as strictly normal, the inevitable outcome of the play of the sexual impulse. No doubt it may often become morbid, and is never a healthy process when indulged in to excess, as it is liable to be by refined young people with artistic impulses, to whom it is in the highest degree seductive and insidious.[230] As we have seen, however, day-dreaming is far from always colored by sexual emotion; yet it is a significant indication of its really sexual origin that, as I have been informed by persons of both sexes, even in these apparently non-sexual cases it frequently ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... this force, giantesses included, with a rod of iron, stood there in the entrance of the immaculate kitchen looking dainty and out of place, with her thin proud profile, her clear dark skin, beautifully tinted in the cheeks, her seductive infirmiere uniform. But she has accomplished one of the ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... she less fatigued, she would have caught the vague anxiety, the note of distrust, in his voice. But the carpet of sand and leaves on which she lay was very seductive. Her eyes closed. She nestled into a comfortable ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... languorous and caressing like the purr of a great cat; and there was something exotic in her accent, something seductive, something that ought to be prohibited by the police. She sank into her low chair by the fire, indicating one for me square with the hearthrug. Dale, so as to leave me a fair conversational field with the lady, established himself on the sofa some distance off, ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... here, it is a fearful thing for young men, released from all the restraints of their native land, to find the house of revelry and dancing so near the house of God, and the gates of hell, alluring by all the fascinating and seductive attractions of harmonious sounds, so near ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... buildings, the terra-cotta decorations add the element of life and movement. The thought of the artist in its first freshness and vivacity is felt in them. They have all the spontaneity of improvisation, the seductive melody of unpremeditated music. Moulding the supple earth with 'hand obedient to the brain,' the plasticatore has impressed his most fugitive dreams of beauty on it without effort; and what it cost him but a few fatigueless hours to fashion, the steady heat of the furnace has ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... prejudice, ignorance, and fear. It would seem that in Europe, where man so easily submits to the despotic sway of women, they are nevertheless curtailed of some of the greatest qualities of the human species, and considered as seductive but imperfect beings; and (what may well provoke astonishment) women ultimately look upon themselves in the same light, and almost consider it as a privilege that they are entitled to show themselves futile, feeble, and timid. The women of America ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... there, with this strange, almost magical blurring of realities into a velvety ease ... with visions of blue water and contented thoughts hovering near in a waking and seductive ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... excitable disposition, the place of a constitutional king has greater temptations than almost any other, and fewer suitable occupations than almost any other. All the world and all the glory of it, whatever is most attractive, whatever is most seductive, has always been offered to the Prince of Wales of the day, and always will be. It is not rational to expect the best virtue where temptation is applied in the most trying form at the frailest time of human life. The ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... Uncannily clever! Wealthy! Under thirty! Broad-minded! No provincial prejudices!... Her voice, that always affected his spine! Her delicious flattery!... She was no mean actress either! And the multifariousness of her seductive charm! In fact, she was a regular woman of the world, such as you would read about—if you did read!... He was sitting with her again in the obscurity of the discussion-room at the Azure Society's establishment. His heart was ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... companion's character. Her cheeks, which had so lately been pale, flushed, and her eyes lighted with some of their former brilliancy. Feeling gave expression to her countenance and softness to her voice, rendering her who was always beautiful, trebly seductive and winning. ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... the bed of the wicked. She is a wanton mistress, and will cuddle where her fancy chances, careless whether vice or virtue is her bedfellow; coy when most eagerly supplicated, seductive ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... dainty coquette uses with her lover. She was arch, gay, imperious, tender, all in a breath: I confess that I often felt that, let her once put forth her might, not Georgy Lenox could be more winning, sweet and seductive. But all her tenderness was for her father: with me she was sometimes proud and shy, sometimes wearing the manner of a loving little child. I often called her "little sister" in those days, and so, and in no other wise, I held her. When she was kind, we had pleasant talks ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... her short skirt yielding the seductive rustle of the silk beneath it. Her movements were beyond words in grace. Her tall figure, so beautifully proportioned, and so daintily rounded, displayed the becoming coat-frock she usually wore in business to ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... (—and not only in his hand!); he launches them with benevolent contempt against "understanding," "the senses," "honor," "good living," "science"; he sees such things as beneath him, as pernicious and seductive forces, on which "the soul" soars as a pure thing-in-itself—as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word, holiness, had not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors and vices.... The pure soul is a pure lie.... ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... which she had sung through the long winter nights, in which her deft fingers had wrought needlework, the envy of Rehoboth. The old arms mutely opened as though to welcome her; the rockers, too, seemed ready to yield that oscillation so seductive to the jaded frame. And the trimmings! and the cushion! the same old pattern, somewhat faded, perhaps, but as warm and cosy as in the days of yore. It was the chair, too, at which she used to kneel, ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... a last coquetry. The pallor of her cheeks, the less brilliant carnation of her lips, her long eyelashes lowered and relieving their dark fringe against that white skin, lent her an unspeakably seductive aspect of melancholy chastity and mental suffering; her long loose hair, still intertwined with some little blue flowers, made a shining pillow for her head, and veiled the nudity of her shoulders with its thick ringlets; her beautiful hands, purer, more diaphanous, ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... took unchecked sway, and, although bound by solemn treaties which England could not thrust aside without open violation of pledged faith, she did not hesitate. The diamonds of Kimberley in the Free State flashed with a too seductive brilliancy, and the Gold Mines of the Rand became ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... happier, but always the violoncello murmuring in blissful harmony with the seductive voice and rejoicing in the cunning witcheries which lull Masetto's suspicions to sleep. Now all go into Don Giovanni's palace, from which the sounds of dance music and revelry are floating out. Donna Elvira, Donna Anna, ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... be impossible to describe the acclamations which followed this address; there is something so seductive in popular enthusiasm that even indifferent persons cannot help yielding to its influence. And yet the least reflection would have shown how shamefully Napoleon forswore the declaration he made to the Senate, when the organic ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... truths." "I enter the arena," says he "as the champion of common sense, against what in my soul I believe to be the most tremendous enemy of God, morals and religion, that ever found foothold on the earth—the most seductive, hence most dangerous form of sensualism that ever cursed a nation, age or people." If Dr. Randolph had been brought from spirits of delusion on our ground, he would have assisted us to open the door for the New Era. But he returned to ...
— Secret Enemies of True Republicanism • Andrew B. Smolnikar
... petty personal ambitions, a war among the Great Powers brings halcyon days of flattery, bribery and seductive prospects in an imaginary future. In Greece all these and other attractions were dangled before the eyes of men of power and influence. The Sovereign, whose admiration for the Kaiser verges on idolatry, soon extended this platonic sentiment to the Kaiser's army. And when ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the buffetings of the tempest, to the rigours of wintry weather, and considering the rough unkept roads of the time, it is easy to imagine how seductive would be the fireside of the country house; and bearing in mind the desire on the part of the inmates to learn the latest news, it is not surprising that the poor post-runner occasionally departed from the ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... souls break through the meshes of that pantheistic idolatry which kneels only to "Natural Laws"; and spring as suppliants to Him, who made Law possible. We take our portion of happiness and prosperity, and while it lasts we wander far, far away in the seductive land of philosophical speculation, and revel in the freedom and irresponsibility of Agnosticism; and lo! when adversity smites, and bankruptcy is upon us, we toss the husks of the "Unknowable and Unthinkable" behind us, and flee as the Prodigal who knew his father, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of the road, the strollers camped upon the bank. The river murmured a seductive cradle-song to the rushes, and, on the shore, from the dark and ominous background, came the deeper voice ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... of this money was to bribe foreign cabinets, and to detach venal powers from the coalition, and to foment revolutionary symptoms in Belgium. Dumouriez alone knew the channels by which this money was to flow. His exhausted personal fortune, his costly tastes, his attachment to a seductive woman, Madame de Beauvert, sister to Rivarol; his intimacy with men of unprincipled character and irregular habits,—reports of extortion charged on his ministry, and falling, if not on him on those he trusted, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... or the speculators were the only ones that found them faithful pledges. The flood-gates once opened, the water poured in amain. Every pressing emergency afforded a pretext for a new issue. Other Colonies followed the seductive example. Paper was soon issued to make money plenty. Men's minds became familiar with the idea, as they saw the convenient substitute passing freely from hand to hand. Accepted at market, accepted at the retail store, accepted in the counting-room, accepted for taxes, everywhere a legal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... from the actual. It is not the spell of that which shall be that is upon the soul, but the irksomeness or the dreadfulness of that which is. This is a mood that awaits us all. No man faces life as it should be faced, but some can hardly be said to face it at all. Their face is ever turned towards a seductive vision of quietness. The solution of life for them is not in a fight, but in a retreat. Of course we know there is no going back, and no easy deliverance from the burden and the battle, but in the thick of any ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... briefly, flushing a little. She thought she could read the motive at the back of Elisabeth's proposal—the spirit which, putting up a gallant fight even in the very face of defeat, could make yet a final effort to secure success by throwing Tim and the woman he loved together in the dangerously seductive intimacy of ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... suffered much, and was completely humbled before him, one who would all her life look on him as her saviour, worship him, admire him and only him. How many scenes, how many amorous episodes he had imagined on this seductive and playful theme, when his work was over! And, behold, the dream of so many years was all but realised; the beauty and education of Avdotya Romanovna had impressed him; her helpless position had been a great allurement; in her he had found even ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... normal type of priest. But it is well to study tendencies in their extreme catastrophe. This is only the catastrophe, in one of its many shapes, of the fatal doctrine that money, position, power, philanthropy, or any of the thousand seductive masks of the pseudo-expedient, may carry a man away from love of truth and yet leave him internally unharmed. The depravation that follows the trucking for money of intellectual freedom and self-respect, attends in ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... who knew him well, that, however loose his comedies, the temper of the author was modest;[58] his indelicacy was like the forced impudence of a bashful man; and Rochester has accordingly upbraided him, that his licentiousness was neither natural nor seductive. Dryden had unfortunately conformed enough to the taste of his age, to attempt that "nice mode of wit," as it is termed by the said noble author, whose name has become inseparably connected with it; but it sate awkwardly upon his natural ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... success. He was at the same time consoled by remembering that his hopes of assistance rested on better foundations than their generosity—their avarice and their curiosity. He had promised liberal exchanges for their horses; but what was still more seductive, he had told them that one of their countrywomen, who had been taken with the Minnetarees, accompanied the party below; and one of the men had spread the report of our having with us a man (York) perfectly black, whose hair was short ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... listened to snatches of the usual vapid chatter that dancing seems to induce. Then the orchestra blared forth with another of the seductive popular pieces. ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... was very small. The private had only threepence a day. One half only of this pittance was ever given him in money; and that half was often in arrear. But a far more seductive bait than his miserable stipend was the prospect of boundless license. If the government allowed him less than sufficed for his wants, it was not extreme to mark the means by which he supplied the deficiency. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the edge, and almost to the bottom of the Chine; and here, amid laurel and rhododendron, broom and gorse, the garden merges into a network of paths and stairways, with tempting seats and unexpected arbors at every turn. This seductive little labyrinth is of Mrs. Stevenson's own designing. She makes the whole garden her special charge and delight, but this particular corner of it is as a kingdom conquered, where to reign. Mrs. Stevenson, ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... seductive—with its pleasant society; its "land parties," as they call picnics; its evening dances, enlivened by gipsy music—that I remained on and on from want of moral courage to tear myself away. I had thoughts of changing my plans altogether, and of devoting ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... would think so—it's only human nature. But Otto is a handsome man and has a fine seductive voice; and mind you, music has charms to soothe the breast, savage or otherwise; as for your prospects, you may apply to me for a testimonial of ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... readers it is but a time-deodorised dunghill by the roadside, not beautiful, but negligible. Of the other part of this kind—the "naughty" part which is not nasty and may be somewhat nice—there is, when you come to consider it dispassionately, not really so very much, and it is seldom used in a seductive fashion. It may tickle, but it does not excite; may create laughter, but never passion or even desire. Therefore it cannot be this which "holds" any reader but a mere novice or a ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... downstairs. Mr. Tovey and the Mayor were talking at the foot of the stairs, Mr. Frere was listening sardonically. As Sarah Brown went past them into the Shop, she smelt the unflower-like scent that always denoted the presence of Miss Ford. Sarah Brown herself was accompanied by nothing more seductive than a faint smell of gasoline, showing that her clothes had lately been home-cleaned. In the darkness of the Shop she saw Miss Ford stooping, trying to shut the big difficult drawer in which the witch ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... triumph, and I speak Of it with utter penitence and shame. I knew that he would come again; I knew His feet would bring him, though his soul rebelled; I knew that cheated heart of his would toy With the seductive chains that gave it thrall, And strive to reconcile its perjury With its own conscience of the better way, By fabrication of apologies ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... wholly to be accounted for by the fact that he had inveigled his feet into shoes a size too small for them. I misgave more than ever, and having once launched Reginald on to the McKillops' lawn, I established him near a seductive dish of marrons glaces, and as far from the Archdeacon's wife as possible; as I drifted away to a diplomatic distance I heard with painful distinctness the eldest Mawkby girl asking him if he ...
— Reginald • Saki
... soul in 'My 'art's in the 'ighlands,' or 'The brave old Hoak.' The stout man is also addicted to sentimentality, and warbles 'Fly, fly from the world, my Bessy, with me,' or some such song, with lady-like sweetness, and in the most seductive ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... within three or four perches of the pole. But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his Greenland-men were; yet that disadvantage is greatly counterbalanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there; then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the top-sail yard, take ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... wonder Hiram was carried away by the spectacle. There is something very overpowering in such a scene. Who is sufficient to resist its seductive influences? ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Count Konrad and his company went silently forth, escorting a score more who carried sacks of the newly baked bread on their backs, or leathern receptacles filled with wine, as well as a stout cask of the same seductive fluid. Near the Schloss Bernstein the rescuing party came upon the Archbishop's outpost, who raised the alarm before the good sword of the Captain cut through the cry. There were bugle calls throughout the camp and the sound of men hurrying ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... joy and happiness: these were the ministers to the pleasures of Francesco, who, rich as a king, every night revelled in the orgies of Alexander, the wedding revels of Lucrezia, and the excesses of Tiberius at Capri. After an hour, the door closed, and the seductive vision vanished, leaving Beatrice full of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to walk in separation from the world, refusing the seductive enticements of her would-be lovers and with an upward and heavenly look serve while she waited for a ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... friendships seemed purely platonic. There was, moreover, nothing of the female author about her. Mademoiselle des Touches is charming as a woman of the world,—languid when she pleases, indolent, coquettish, concerned about her toilet, pleased with the airy nothings so seductive to women and to poets. She understands very well that after Madame de Stael there is no place in this century for a Sappho, and that Ninon could not exist in Paris without grands seigneurs and a voluptuous court. She is ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... 1521, the University of Paris, whose opinion respecting Luther's tenets the entire Christian world had for two years been anxiously expecting, pronounced its solemn decision. It condemned the writings of the German monk to the flames, on the ground that they were seductive, insulting to the hierarchy, contrary to Scripture, and schismatic. It likened his latest production, De Captivitate Babylonica, to Alcoran. It branded as preposterous the notion that God had reserved the discovery of what is needful to the salvation of the faithful ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... shallowness of his thought, by striking images and flowery metaphors, and by all the phraseology of rhetoric in which the versatile French nature is so superior to our sober German one. It is all the more important that we should not let ourselves be dazzled by these seductive tricks, and particularly by adduced facts which bear upon the most important and fundamental questions of human science, but that we should extract the hard kernel from the savoury and fragrant fruit. In the preface to my "Evolution of Man," and in the notes 22 and 23 of my ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... Mrs. Flanagan, with a seductive smirk, asked, "what he was going to give them?" The poet replied, "a little thing of his own—'Rosalie; or, the Broken Heart,'—sentimental, ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... because they were promised a Paradise peopled by dark- eyed houris. Orthodoxy got its hold by a promise of rest, idleness and freedom from responsibility. The heaven into which Jean Jacques slipped was a combination of all that Allah, Gabriel and the seductive dreams of Moody, Sankey and such could provide. Science founded on truth can never be popular until mankind further evolves, since it offers nothing better than toil and difficulty, and after each achievement increased work as a reward for work. This condition stands no show when compared ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... the illustration of the engine, in chapter two, the non-human thing is a personality, even if it is not beautiful. When it takes on the ritual of decorative design, this new vitality is made seductive, and when it is an object of nature, this seductive ritual becomes a new pantheism. The armies upon the mountains they are defending are rooted in the soil like trees. They resist invasion with the same elementary stubbornness with which ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... such as this, with the agents of evil ever active and threatening, with error strewn as thorns about our path at every step, and with polished and seductive voices whispering doubt and suggesting rebellion and disobedience to men, already too prone to disloyalty, and arguing as cunningly as Satan, of old, argued with Eve; in such a world, who, we may well ask, does not see the pressing ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... Turk adored the maid of Hooe (Although his harem would have shocked her); But Brown adored that maiden, too: He was a most seductive doctor. ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... he heard Massenet improvising at one of the pianos he was inspired, and he put himself at the other (we have two grand pianos), and they played divinely, both of them improvising. He is by far the finest pianist I have ever heard, and has a very seductive way of looking at you while playing, as if he was only playing for you, and when he smiles you simply go to pieces. I don't wonder he is such a lady-killer, and that no woman can resist him; even my father-in-law stayed in the salon, being completely hypnotized by Liszt, who ought ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... magistrates, Mme. Fauville was no longer the widow and mother who must on no account be attacked. She had suddenly become a woman whom circumstances compelled them to cross-examine. However prejudiced they might be in her favour, however charmed by the seductive qualities of her beauty, they were inevitably bound to ask themselves, whether for some reason or other, for instance, in order to be alone in the enjoyment of the enormous fortune, she had not had the madness ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... the trees which flanked the house the dimmed headlights of what was presumably Jerry Mitchell's hired car shone faintly like enlarged fire-flies. A boat of some description was tooting reflectively far down the river. Such was the seductive influence of the time and the scene that Jimmy might have remained there indefinitely, weaving dreams, had he not been under the necessity of making his way down to the library. It was his task to close ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse |
