"Sensuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was particularly noticeable on account of a pair of dark gray eyes, cold and calculating, and which had at times a steel-like glitter. Though an attractive face, it was not altogether pleasing; it was too sensuous, and indicated stubbornness and self-will ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... indeed of age, but signs which were very becoming to him. At fifty he was a much better-looking man than he had been at thirty,—so that that foolish, fickle girl, Catherine Bailey, would not have rejected him for the cruelly sensuous face of Mr Compas, had the handsome iron-grey tinge been then given to his countenance. He, as he looked at the glass, told himself that a grey-haired old fool, such as he was, had no right to burden the life of a young ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... ironic cheers, And sniggering, "Hear, hears!"— Thou summest well the humbug of our lives. The fistic "bunch of fives" Is not like JULIA's jewelled "palm of milk" Shrouded in kid or silk, But JULIA was a sensuous little "sell," And SMITH and PRITCHARD—well, One would not like a clump upon the head From the teak-noddled "TED," Or e'en a straight sockdollager from "JEM;" But somehow "bhoys" like them, Who mill three rounds to an uproarious "house," And only nap "a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... partisanship and bitter humor. Without justifying Heine's production of this book, we see excuses for him which should temper the condemnation passed on it. There was a radical opposition of nature between him and Borne; to use his own distinction, Heine is a Hellene—sensuous, realistic, exquisitely alive to the beautiful; while Borne was a Nazarene—ascetic, spiritualistic, despising the pure artist as destitute of earnestness. Heine has too keen a perception of practical absurdities and damaging exaggerations ever to become ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... playing with her? She dismissed it at once as the distorted child of a guilty conscience. Fritz was not that sort of man. He might be a brute sometimes, but he was never a subtle brute. He blew two thin lines of smoke out through his nostrils, now with a sort of sensuous, almost languid, deliberation, and watched them fade away in the brilliantly-lit room. Lady Holme resolved to adopt another manner, more in accord with her ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... of the closing act of the Divine Tragedy the sensuous pagan element, which mars too many otherwise admirable works of religious art, was absent. Its appeal was to the intellect rather than to the emotions, inculcating effort rather than inviting any sentimental passion of pity. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... suggestion that I make is this: Remember, and let the memory lead to contrition. Perhaps I am speaking to some men or women for whom this dying year holds the memory of some great lapse from goodness; some young man who for the first time has been tempted to sensuous sin; some man who may have been led into slippery places in regard to business integrity. I draw a 'bow at a venture' when I speak of such things—perhaps some one is listening to me who would give a great deal if he or she could forget a certain past moment of this dying year, which makes ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... without form and void. It sought to trace all things back to the Infinite, το απειρον {to apeiron}—to That which knows no bounds of space or time but is before all worlds, and to whose bosom again all things, all worlds, return. For Goethe Nature meant the beauty, the all but sensuous beauty of the world; for the older philosopher it was the mystery ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... time Sanderson was entering Okar, Alva Dale was letting himself into the door of his office at the Bar D ranchhouse. Dale's thoughts, because of the sensuous longing with which he had always looked upon Peggy Nyland, had become abysmal. Silverthorn had warned him that the dragging of a woman into the plot would be fatal to their aims, but Dale had paid no heed to Silverthorn. During the day he had kept thinking of the girl until now he could ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... less than three years before, and for which her gifts and graces admirably fitted her. She appeared, moreover, in the company of Jean de Reszke, who was then, and who remained till his retirement, in all things except mere sensuous charm of voice, the ideal Romeo. She came fresh from her first successes at Covent Garden, which had been made in the spring of the year, and disclosed at once the lovely qualities which, when they became riper, gave promise of the highest order of things in the way of dramatic expression. At ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the babe is identical with the adult, or the human belief resembles the divine idea. Hence it is impossible for those holding such material and mortal views to demonstrate my metaphysics. Theirs is the sensuous thought, which brings forth its own sensuous conception. Mine is the spiritual ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... transfiguration by the presence of Moses and Elias, so visions should not be believed unless they have the authority of Scripture." Albertus Magnus tries to classify them, and says that those which contain a sensuous element are always dangerous. Eckhart is still more cautious, and Tauler attaches little value to them. Avila, the Spanish mystic, says that only those visions which minister to our spiritual necessities, and make us more humble, are genuine. Self-induced visions inflate us with ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... whitey-brown man is objectionable. He is vain, apt to take offence, sly, indolent, sensuous, and, like Reuben, "unstable as water." He has a facile smile, a clammy hand, a manner either forward or obsequious, a mincing gait, and not always the snowiest linen. [In very dangerous cases ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle in expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity in their relations with language, which they would have not merely a passionate and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicately depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer sort of French critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language; that the language which they use is no longer the calm and faultless French of the past. It is true; it is their ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... them hear and obey; but they will not come, they shall never taste of His banquet. He has not spread a table for the proud, the haughty, the arrogant; He cannot meet in loving communion the worldly, the sensuous, the lovers of ease and hurtful pleasures. Such as these are not prepared to meet Him; they would be out of place and ill at ease in His company, they ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... been created high odes to an unknown god, sensuous lyrics of love, apostrophes and addresses to every human passion. But no poet, to my knowledge, has risen to the heights of the maternal instinct. Some contemporary clap-trap about sentimentalism will perhaps decry and ridicule the demand for an apotheosis ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... the quiet house came the careless ripple of a flute, showering light and sensuous music. There was a dare-devil lilt and sway to the flippant strains and Aunt Agatha covered her face with ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... of the divine Spirit. Poetry is an interpretation of life. Religious poetry endeavors to express, in beautiful forms, the facts of the religious life. There is poetry that is not religious; poetry which deals only with that which is purely sensuous, poetry which does not hint at spiritual facts, or divine relations; and there is religion which has but little to do with poetry: but the highest religious thoughts and feelings are greatly served by putting them into poetic forms; and the greatest poetry ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... grace of its apparel was living actually before us, and the delicate harmonies of colour struck from the first a dominant note of beauty which added to the intellectual realism of archaeology the sensuous ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Miss De Stancy's enthusiastic eulogies. She wore a summer hat, beneath which her fair curly hair formed a thicket round her forehead. It would be impossible to describe her as she then appeared. Not sensuous enough for an Aphrodite, and too subdued for a Hebe, she would yet, with the adjunct of doves or nectar, have stood sufficiently well for either of those personages, if presented in a pink morning light, and with mythological ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... face that still retained a fair shape. Short-necked, florid and plethoric, he had the air of the man who seldom makes a long illness at the end. His eyes were very blue, and the lids were puffed and heavy, whilst the mouth, Mr. Caryll remarked in a critical, detached spirit, was stupid rather than sensuous. He made his survey swiftly, and the result ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... awakens owes nothing to rhythmical language nor to subtle interpretations of sensuous emotion; it proceeds from a perception of eternal truth, the truth that has love, faith, courage, and self-sacrifice for the ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... than myself, can recollect how miserable, how unquiet and uncertain our lives have always been ever since our childhood." Poor, vain, passionate and proud, torn between the selfish impulses of an exactingly sensuous and imaginative nature, and the rigid sense of duty of a heroic and generous mind, Ugo Foscolo was one of the earliest and most genuine victims of that sickness of disappointed hope and betrayed enthusiasm, of that Weltschmerz of which personal ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... her? Dared he to marry her? What would his mother and his brothers say? What would he himself say a couple of years after the event? That would depend upon whether the germs of staunch comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a sensuous joy in her form only, with ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... something else to spoil." But this imperious petulance, curiously as it contrasts with the patience which, a little later, she will display, is native to Ottima; she is not the victim of her nerves this morning, though now she passes without transition to a mood of sensuous cajolement— ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... afterwards that he was awake again, staring into the dim-lit dug-out with every sense alert. He was conscious first of a faint elusive scent—a scent which was new to him. His mind wandered to the scents he knew—Chaminade, Mysterieuse, Trefle Incarnat—but this was different. Delicate, sensuous, with the slightest suggestion of jasmine about it, it seemed to permeate every part of him. Vaguely expectant, he waited for something that he knew must happen. What it would be, he had no idea; he felt like a man waiting for the curtain to rise on a first night, ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... that, at the opening of the ninth century, the Buddhism rampant in China and indeed throughout Chinese Asia was the Tantra system of Yoga-chara.[5] This compound of polytheism and pantheism, with its sensuous paradise, its goddess of mercy and its pantheon of every sort of worshipable beings, was also equipped with a system of philosophy by which Buddhism could be adapted to almost every yearning of human nature in its lowest or its highest ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... nothing; somehow the latter lacked the magnetism essential to the stirring of his desire. This, perhaps, was inevitable to his age, to the swift passage of that young idealism: after forty, the nebulous became a need for sensuous reality. Certain phases of Mina, as well, were utterly those of a child—she had the eluding sweetness, the flower-like indifference, of Helena, of a temperamental virginity so absolute that it was incapable of understanding or communicating an emotional fever. But, in the degree of her genius, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... goddess as having a smile somewhat proud and disdainful; yet the eyes, moist and kindly, glowed with tenderness and passion, and the graceful lines of the shoulders, the voluptuous curves of the thighs, are full of sensuous feeling. The goddess, as represented in coins, stood beside a vase, over which her drapery is falling, while with her right hand she shields herself modestly. The head of Aphrodite in the British Museum, with ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... eyes, and it seemed to me that I recalled the curve of sweet, proud lips. I knew that I should be thinking of my papers, my future; but a quick perversity made me dwell for a long trotting time in a dream of feminine excellence, in a dream of feminine beauty which was both ascetic and deeply sensuous. I know hardly how to say that two eyes, a vision of lips, a conception of a figure, should properly move me as I bounced along the road with Jem Bottles. But it is certain that it came upon me. The eyes of the daughter ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... thee. All love proceeds from seeing: intelligent love, from seeing intelligently; sensuous love, from seeing sensuously. Now this seeing has two meanings: either it means the visual power, that is the sight, which is the intellect, or truly the sense; or it means the act of that power, that is, that application which the eye or the intellect ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... relationship, her essential delicacy. That momentary vision of Ellen as the Countess Martin broke up into absurdities directly he looked at it fully and steadfastly. From thinking of the two women as similar types he passed into thinking of them as opposites; Therese, hard, clear, sensuous, secretive, trained by a brilliant tradition in the technique of connubial betrayal, was the very antithesis of Ellen's vague but invincible veracity and openness. Not for nothing had Anatole France made his heroine the daughter of a ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... sounds ceased, Sah-luma's conversation, brilliant, witty, refined, and sparkling with light anecdote and lighter jest, replaced with admirable sufficiency, the left-off harmonies,—and Theos, keenly alive to the sensuous enemy of his own emotions, felt that he had never before enjoyed such an astonishing, delightful, and altogether fairy-like feast. Its only fault was that it came to an end too soon, he thought, when, the last course of fruit and sweet comfits being removed, he rose ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... hall was to be thrown open at midnight. There was dancing and song during the hours leading up to this important event. Beverly was entranced. She had seen brilliant affairs at home, but none of them compared to this in regal splendor. It was the sensuous, overpowering ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... star. Unmercenary in her mould of mind, While opulent and dainty in her tastes. A nature generous and free, albeit The incarnation of economy. She must be chaste as proud Diana was, Yet warm as Venus. To all others cold As some white glacier glittering in the sun; To me as ardent as the sensuous rose That yields its sweetness to the burrowing bee All ignorant of evil in the world, And innocent as any cloistered nun, Yet wise as Phryne in the arts of love When I come thirsting to her nectared lips. Good as the best, and tempting as the worst, A saint, a siren, ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Its exercise is constantly required by the economist, and in general by the sociologist, to gather into true relations of time, space, and causality those intricately connected phenomena which, though individually amenable to sensuous presentation, are not able to be thus presented as an aggregate in ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... a marked characteristic of mystical literature that the great contemplatives, in their effort to convey to us the nature of their communion with the supersensuous, are inevitably driven to employ some form of sensuous imagery: coarse and inaccurate as they know such imagery to be, even at the best. Our normal human consciousness is so completely committed to dependence on the senses, that the fruits of intuition itself are instinctively referred to them. In that intuition it seems ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... rare and the novel in shivers, or universal impressions: sensuous, mental, and aesthetic, Maryan went once with the baron, and a second time alone, on a journey through Europe. He visited many countries and capitals. To investigate the Salvation Army, he joined its ranks for a period in England. ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... question, Mr. Letz added: "Great violin playing is great violin playing, irrespective of school or nationality. Of course the Belgians and French have notable elegance, polish, finish in detail. The French lay stress on sensuous beauty of tone. The German temperament is perhaps broader, neglecting sensuous beauty for beauty of idea, developing the scholarly side. Sarasate, the Spaniard, is a unique national figure. The Slavs ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... difference. Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance of the first Thought of men,—the chief recognized virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in that one ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... moods and climes, Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly, Where still, between the Christian chimes, The Moorish ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... His benefaction, to be cultivated and cared for with the reverence that His gifts demand. And round the mere physical life group a whole circle of tastes and enjoyments and exercises which belong with the sensuous more than with the intellectual or moral part of us, and whose full life seems to be dependent upon the fulness of physical being, the mere perception of beauty, the love of comfort, the delight in enterprise and adventure and prowess. The sum of all these is what we call full physical life. It ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... desires which appeal to the sensuous and sensual nature of man. Among these can be reckoned a taste for opium or morphine, a taste for women, or for those kinds of literature and drama which appeal to the sensuous nature. All these desires are like drunkenness, in that no one is the better ...
— A Jolly by Josh • "Josh"
... characteristic of the ancient Romans; and we are not astonished, therefore, to find them borrowing music from Etruria, Greece, and Egypt; originating nothing, and (although the study was pursued by the emperors) never finding any thing higher in its practice than a sensuous gratification. ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... apprehend and interpret the unseen; that "something more" and "something beyond" the visible, the sensuous, and ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... showed in the lean brown face of the man, but his blood moved faster. It was impossible to miss the appeal of sex that escaped at every graceful movement of the soft sensuous body, that glowed from the deep still eyes in an electric current flashing straight to his veins. He would have loved to touch the soft flushed cheek, the crisp amber hair clouding the convolutions of the little ears. His eyes were an index of the man, bold and possessive and unwavering. ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... is unfelt by Mr. Cimabue Brown. The child and the gypsy have no words in which to express their sense of nature and its charm, but they have this sense, and there are very, very few who, acquiring culture, retain it. And it is gradually disappearing from the world, just as the old delicately sensuous, naive, picturesque type of woman's beauty—the perfection of natural beauty—is rapidly vanishing in every country, and being replaced by the mingled real and unreal attractiveness of "cleverness," intellect, and fashion. ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... please her to let him have the unimaginable experience of holding that thrilled and thrilling body close to his, seemed to him to be a marvellous piece of sheer luck and overwhelming good fortune. She was so sensuous and yet so serious. Her gaze stimulated not only love but conscience. In him ambition was superlatively vigorous. Nevertheless he felt then as though he had never really known ambition till that moment. He thought of the new century and of a new life. He perceived the childishness and ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... enchanted gardens of Italy, both in the bewildering beauty of its sensuous charm and in the potency of its appeal to the imagination, stands the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... he passed along, Conspicuous for an undetermined grace Of sexless beauty. In his form and face God's mighty purpose somehow had gone wrong. Then on his loom, he wove a careful song, Of sensuous threads; a wordy web of lace Wherein the primal passions of the race And his own sins made ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... allowed to interfere with those who wish to keep by themselves. The sweet peas stay very close to their tradition of wire netting, but they are not snobs at all, and give of their bounty to all who call. The sensuous jasmine is there, and the cold puritanical ceneraria and old maids' pin cushions, with fragrance of sandalwood. The red-hot-poker grows stiff and straight, but the ragged sailor goes uncombed and ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... and friend, sweet-tempered, and helpful." In his political views he was liberal, in his religious, indefinite. Though in his life-time subjected to much harsh and unappreciative criticism, his place among English poets is now assured. His chief characteristics are intense, sensuous imagination, and love of beauty, rich and picturesque descriptive power, and exquisitely ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... safety valve to a whole set of repressed feelings which she was too simple to recognize as starved affections, and which she thought was nature calling to her from without. It was nature, but calling from within, thrilling her with the beauty of things sensuous and driving her for ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... native gallery in softer years): the honourable declaration that many an honest heart beats beneath a poor man's coat. As for his own attire, he was even as the lilies of Quesnay; that is to say, I beheld upon him the same formation of tie that I had seen there, the same sensuous beauty of the state waistcoat, though I think that his buttons were, if anything, somewhat spicier than those which had awed me at the chateau. And when we simultaneously reached the fragrant hour of ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... vitality, and a passion for having men make love to her, there really was not much of Victorine. But it is wonderful how far these two qualities can pass in a handsome woman for other and nobler ones. The animal life so keen, intense, sensuous, can seem like cleverness, wit, taste; the passion for receiving homage from men can make a woman graceful, amiable, and alluring. Some of the greatest passions the world has ever seen have been inspired in men by just such ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... he'd bought a rug, nothing foolish. It hung over there. An exquisite thing, sensuous and soft! Color and form enough to drive a man mad with delight. He'd dreamt of the thing for days before he bought it. Indeed he'd meant not to buy it but something had snapped in his brain when he looked at it. Look at the design. Never once did it tire ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... mind, then, that Venice in all her history, in all her character, is Eastern rather than Western. Hers is the kingdom of feeling rather than that of thought, of emotion as opposed to intellect. Her whole story tells of a profoundly emotional and sensuous apprehension of the nature of things; and till the time comes when her artists are inspired to express that, their creations may be interesting enough, but they fail to reveal the true workings of her mind. When they do, they find a new medium and use ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... waste invades the domain of the canons of ritual serviceability. It touches the ways as well as the means, and draws on vicarious leisure as well as on vicarious consumption. Priestly demeanor at its best is aloof, leisurely, perfunctory, and uncontaminated with suggestions of sensuous pleasure. This holds true, in different degrees of course, for the different cults and denominations; but in the priestly life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a vicarious consumption of time ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... studious character and his literary talent endowed him with another and a worthier sobriquet "Filosofo," and he carried out the role by dressing as a Greek and living as a sybarite. Devoted to the study of the classics and encouraged by his sensuous tutor, Giovanni Francesco Zeffi, when not engaged in vulgar orgies, he translated Plato and other writers, and even composed a ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... widespread indifference among Protestant parents in regard to the religious instruction of their young. He had been told there that parents had but a slight conception of their duty as moral guides, and that children were growing up with only sensuous pleasures and material gain as their life-aims. Again and again he was shown where in whole districts it was utterly impossible to secure young men for ordination to the Protestant ministry. And he was furnished with statistics setting forth the ominous fact ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the pyramid, Clelia, Cornelia, with the Palmyrene That fought Aurelian, and the Roman brows Of Agrippina. Dwell with these, and lose Convention, since to look on noble forms Makes noble through the sensuous organism That which is higher. O lift your natures up: Embrace our aims: work out your freedom. Girls, Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed: Drink deep, until the habits of the slave, The sins of emptiness, gossip and spite And slander, die. Better not be at ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... criterion of truth; so deep a distrust did he impart to his followers, that they were in the habit of saying, "We assert nothing; no, not even that we assert nothing." Epicurus taught his disciples that truth can never be determined by reason. Arcesilaus, denying both intellectual and sensuous knowledge, publicly avowed that he knew nothing, not even his own ignorance! The general conclusion to which Greek philosophy came was this—that, in view of the contradiction of the evidence of the senses, we cannot distinguish the true from the false; and such is the imperfection ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... third time! Dash it, why didn't I? Why the deuce didn't I?" I addressed myself as: "You blithering, blithering fool!" And my temples began to ache and now and then to hammer. For, always in these my early days of puberty, excitement and worry produced such immediate sensuous results. ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... day, all the evening scents were abroad, carried by a gentle wind. Sir Arthur drank them in, with the sensuous pleasure which had been one of his gifts in life. The honey smell of the heather, the woody smell of the bracken, the faint fragrance of wood-smoke wafted from a bonfire in the valley below—they all carried ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with, that Paul Beaufoy was as ready with his sword as clever with his head, and fit for something much better than arresting poor devils accused of God knows what. But that would be too great good fortune, and meanwhile the world was all one warm, sensuous, golden, best of worlds, with just one small fret to mar its perfection—he had had no breakfast! That must be remedied, and the half hour's delay could be made ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... need to go so far," said she, and she beckoned with her hand. The stout man with the reddish beard came up, like some huge, dull animal called by its mistress. His sensuous, fat face was pallid with seasickness, and as he looked at Mrs. Carey there was a senile ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... a room, dark as black velvet, weighted with the indescribable, musty odors of an Oriental abode, and possessed of an almost sensuous gloom, a mystic dreariness, a largeness which knew ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... of it! We shall inform ourselves Into all sensuous life; the goat-foot faun, The centaur, or the merry, bright-eyed elves That leave they: dancing rings to spite the dawn Upon the meadows, shall not be more near Than you and I to Nature's mysteries, for ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... she saw at a glance what would be the character of the remaining hours. The sensuous spirit of wine would inspire the gayety and intensify the natural excitement of the occasion. Heretofore she could join in a fashionable revel with the keenest zest, but she could not to-night. Unconsciously Miss Martell had given her a stinging rebuke. She had ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... agitated, confused, humiliated, at the idea of finding himself—the son—in the presence of this woman who had been his father's mistress. All the morality which lies buried in our breasts, heaped up at the bottom of our sensuous emotions by centuries of hereditary instruction, all that he had been taught, since he had learned his catechism, about creatures of evil life, the instinctive contempt which every man entertains for them, even though he may marry one of them, all the narrow ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... the upper air, a fairy bridge provided by kind Nature for the wingless wild things that have their homes in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of the woodland; the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain
... This desperate, sensuous pain which makes us cry out to the "midnight" that we might "cease upon it," need not harden our hearts before we pass hence. The "gathering swallows twittering in the sky" of our little interludes of peace may still attune us to some strange, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... life is only an appearance, a sensuous image of the pure spiritual life, and the whole of Sense is only a picture swimming before our present knowing faculty like a dream and having no reality ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... infidels who had forced themselves into the peaceful country, where their rajah, like many another, had been free to carry on a happy lawless existence, cutting throats, selling slaves, committing acts of piracy, and indulging in every vile and sensuous custom, was one not to be lost. Rajah Gantang wanted no peace, or order, or prosperity in the land where he could seize on the wretched people, and make them pay him in gold, tin, rice, poultry, fruit, or any precious commodity, for the right to pass down ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... fancy. Under that despotism of the eye (the emancipation from which Pythagoras by his numeral, and Plato by his musical, symbols, and both by geometric discipline, aimed at, as the first propaideuma of the mind)—under this strong sensuous influence, we are restless because invisible things are not the objects of vision; and metaphysical systems, for the most part, become popular, not for their truth, but in proportion as they attribute to causes a susceptibility of being seen, if only ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... he was as short as I am"; also that he "walked like a parade," which, as expounded by Mr. Reeves, meant that his air in walking was that of one conscious always of leading a triumphal procession in his own honour; and again, that one might read in his eyes a keenly sensuous enjoyment in the tones of his own voice; that he coloured these with a certain unction corresponding to the flourishes with which people of a certain obliquity of mind love to ornament their chirography; still again that he, Reeves, was "ready to lay a ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... mind enfeebled by alcohol or opium is frequently mystic and musical; it never deals with the realities and responsibilities of life, but in a witchery of words winds and meanders through the realms of reverie and dream. It may be sweet and sensuous; it is rarely narrative or ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... Prometheus' favourite creation, in dismay and bewilderment, describes the strange experience she has witnessed in the case of a friend, another maiden, and Prometheus tells her that what she had seen was death. What death meant Prometheus explains in the following passage, charged with the sensuous mysticism which was one of the elements of Goethe's own ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... interest alone should suffice: it may be needed at times to bridge a chasm; but habitual living beyond vital income infallibly entails bankruptcy in health. The use of alcohol in health seems practically restricted to purposes of sensuous gratification on the part of those prepared to pay a round price for this luxury. The three golden rules here are,—Never drink before breakfast; never drink alone; and never drink bad liquor. Their observance ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... beautiful references to flowers in their poetry. Keats has merely a sensuous delight in their beauty, while Shelley both revels in their hues and fragrance, and sees in them a symbol of transitory loveliness. His Sensitive Plant shows his exquisite ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the sounds, the odors, enveloped my senses and filled me with delighted, languorous content. It was very comforting, and I sat down on a log in the edge of a little opening, all pink and fragrant with wild roses, to enjoy the sensuous delight of it all and so take revenge upon the great stone Preachers waiting for me ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion. What there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination, changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous. ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... was in Dort and Papendrecht so it is in Venice. Except these beastly, vile-smelling boats there is nothing new, thank God. Everything else is faded, weather-worn, and old, everything filled with sensuous beauty—sky, earth, lagoon, garden wall, murmuring ripples—the same wonderful Venice that thrills its ...
— The Parthenon By Way Of Papendrecht - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of life revived. [B] But all the meditations of mankind, Yea, all the adamantine holds of truth By reason built, or passion, which itself 40 Is highest reason in a soul sublime; The consecrated works of Bard and Sage, Sensuous or intellectual, wrought by men, Twin labourers and heirs of the same hopes; Where would they be? Oh! why hath not the Mind 45 Some element to stamp her image on In nature somewhat nearer to her own? [C] Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad Her spirit, must it lodge ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... know I'm extravagant. I don't need a place as good as this, but I always was sort of sensuous, you know." Ellsworth looked at him without any comprehension, from him to the bed with blankets, and the bare table. "Come in," said Dan Anderson, "and sit down. Better sit on the chair, I reckon. One leg of the bed is sort ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... sparkle with wit and whose music laughs with the hearer; sentimental and love songs whose sensuous cadences intensify the passion of their words; convivial songs where toasts are drunk to the accompaniment of the clinking glasses; and patriotic songs that roll with the ringing cheers of thousands and the tramp of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... respectability and condemned of prejudice and error. This is the first great reason, and the second is not unlike unto it. It is that you retard your preparation for any permanent pursuit, as a centre of your sensuous life, by passing two or three years in Europe. With respect to the first reason, not your own feelings, but those of your friends, demand some consideration. In Heaven's court will their sorrow at your departure and ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... House, or House of Death and Legacies (Scorpio). The old Adam dies. The sensuous has no place in the balanced, harmonious being, but recognizes sex as the law, the door to regeneration now, and that a new ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... swart and her body fairer; but that, in turn, might have come from Shpack, the Big Fat, who inherited the colour of his Slavonic father. And, finally, she had great, blazing black eyes—the half-caste eye, round, full-orbed, and sensuous, which marks the collision of the dark races with the light. Also, the white blood in her, combined with her knowledge that it was in her, made her, in a way, ambitious. Otherwise by upbringing and in outlook on life, she was wholly and utterly a ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... prick up its wooden ears in anticipation. And to-night the congregation thrilled also with breathless expectation. As Maggie looked round upon them she could see that they were throbbing with the anticipation of some almost sensuous delight. By now they had filled the Chapel to its utmost limits, but there was not one human being there who did not seem to have the appearance of having been especially selected from other less interesting human beings. It was not ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Herder never was able to attain to a scientific establishing of his Christianity, or to any sense of the specific aim of its development. He felt himself to be separated from Kant by an impassable gulf. All the sharp antinomies among which Kant moved, contrasts of that which is sensuous with that which is reasonable, of experience with pure conception, of substance and form in thought, of nature and freedom, of inclination and duty, seemed to Herder grossly exaggerated, if not absolutely false. ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... language can supply, is but a sign or symbol for an object beyond our comprehension, and not more truthful and adequate than the images of OSIRIS and VISHNU, or their names, except as being less sensuous and explicit. We avoid sensuousness only by resorting to simple negation. We come at last to define spirit by saying that it ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... time drinking in with silent ecstasy these glorious sights and sounds which fell so soothingly upon my senses, quite forgetful of self and my past suffering, and utterly indifferent to everything but the sensuous pleasure of the moment. Indeed my poor head felt so light and weak that I seemed almost incapable ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... The natural world knows of no complete self-subsistence, for everything is connected with its environment, and it is in this connection with its environment that life below man largely obtains its existence. But in man we discover a transition stage from the sensuous to the non-sensuous, and it is in the latter that the meaning of the former can be obtained. The history of civilisation and culture is a history of this all-important fact. The meaning of man is, therefore, not to be found in his relationship ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... said, "There's no use arguing, Miellyn." When she had readjusted her robes a little while ago, she had pinned them so that the flat sprawl of the Nebran embroideries was over her breasts. I put a finger against them, not in a sensuous gesture, and said, "The minute they see these, they'll throw ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... comprehended the sudden change in her manner, her voice, and the frigid resurrection of a nature he had neither known nor suspected. He looked blankly at the collapsed hammock, as if he expected to find in its depths those sinuous graces, languid fascinations, and the soft, half sensuous contour cast off by this vanishing figure ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... also itself but a dream, yet one that, however defective, has a beauty which must have been too fair. Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, originally regarded as emanations of the ideal, became concrete. Consorts were found for them. From infinity they were lodged in idols. A worship sensuous when not grotesque ensued, from which the ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... soldier's uniform. All joyous sprightliness was crushed out of the infantine heir of a barbarous Imperialism. His education by the crowned corporal who happened to be his parent, appeared to aim mainly at making him physically and in character as rigid as a ramrod. By nature of a sensuous bent, he had to undergo all the ordeals of barrack-room practices, which Nicholas held to be the proper sum and substance ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... without altar, temple, images, or any imposing ceremonial. Pure and simple prayer was their only form of adoration." They talked much of "Christ" as a heavenly principle, but "did not believe in his birth or death. Prayers and Hymns addressed to the source of light, exhortations to subdue the dark and sensuous element within, and the study of the marvellous book of Mani, constituted their devotion. Their manners were austere and ascetic; they tolerated, but only tolerated, marriage, and that only among the inferior orders. ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... to meet him. Her white cap had been taken off and stuffed into the breast of her dress; the hood surrounded her face loosely, but did not hide it; her eyes were sparkling with pleasure—the pure animal pleasure of life and motion, the sensuous pleasure in the beauty and the music of the waves; other pleasures there might be, but these ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... her coffee and noted her lover's increasing uneasiness, she gave no sign of her resentment, part of which was due to the unwillingness of a sensuous nature to leave a warm corner by the fire on a winter night. Her awakened sense of power made her for the first time rebellious of being hustled out of sight and kept in the dark. The struggle between her and Emmet was on in earnest, and her heart beat fast with a resolve to delay him ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... different matters, for though they may be the same, too often they are not. Rarely does sex love maintain itself without marriage and marriage colors over sex love with parental feelings, financial interests, home and its emotions, etc. In sex gratification[1] there is the danger of all sensuous pleasure: that a periodic appetite gratified often leaves behind it an ennui, a distaste,—sometimes reaching dislike—of ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... in Rome was established by Aemilius Paulus, when he brought home the books that had belonged to the vanquished Perseus;[55] and it became as much a feature of conquest amongst the highly cultured to bring home a goodly store of literature as to gather objects of art which might merely please the sensuous taste and touch only the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... The sensuous joy from all things fair His strenuous bent of soul repressed, And left from youth to silvered hair Few hours for pleasure, none ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the course of this world, and the vulgarity of all things material. But the firm belief in the omnipotence of God, and the hope of the world's transformation grounded on the Old Testament, conquered the mood of absolute despair of all things visible and sensuous, and did not allow a theoretic conclusion, in the sense of dualism in principle, to be drawn from the practical obligation to renounce the world, or from the deep distrust with regard ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack |
