"Voluptuary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you suffer is due to no witchcraft. Lead a quiet life for ten weeks, and drink the water of Pougues." The best king France ever had, namely, the gay Gascon, and after him Louis XIII., by no means one of the worst, had recourse to Pougues waters; also that arch-voluptuary and arch-despot, the Sun-King, who imagined that even syntax and prosody must bow to his will. [Footnote: One day the young king ordered his carriage, saying, "mon carrosse," instead of "ma carrosse," the ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... the worldly wise and prudent; and when at last the horizon of Time shuts down between him and ourselves, and the places which have known him know him no more forever, we are almost ready to say with the regal voluptuary of old, This also is vanity and a great evil; "for what hath a man of all his labor and of the vexation of his heart wherein he hath labored under the sun?" But is this the end? Has God's universe no wider limits than the circle of the blue wall which shuts in our nestling-place? ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose, and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. But the rascal of a painter, poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is not content with his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he also wants an advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day spent in the studio or library than in the field; or as if he needed more food to enable him to do his work than the ploughman to enable ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... Rome for his neglect in collecting the dues of Rome or Peter's Pence as greatly as Bishop Adam was blamed by the people of Caithness for his greediness. There is no need to brand Bishop Adam as a voluptuary for excessive ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... man being admittedly a creature of his environment, can we still pretend to horror at this Roderigo and at the fact that being the man he was—prelate though he might be—handsome, brilliant, courted, in the full vigour of youth, and a voluptuary by nature, he should have succumbed to the temptations by ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... from choice or inability to procure them, from the objects of enjoyment. Until, however, the very desire to enjoy is suppressed, one cannot be said to have attained to steadiness of mind. Of Aristotle's saying that he is a voluptuary who pines at his own abstinence, and the Christian doctrine of sin being in the wish, mere abstinence from the act constitutes ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... say, James, that Byron's tragedies are failures. Fools! Is Cain, the dark, dim, disturbed, insane, hell-haunted Cain, a failure? Is Sardanapalus, the passionate, princely, philosophical, joy-cheated, throne-wearied voluptuary, a failure? Is Heaven and Earth, that magnificent confusion of two worlds, in which mortal beings mingle in love and hate, joy and despair, with immortal—the children of the dust claiming alliance with the radiant progeny of the skies, till man and angel seem to partake ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... need not detain us. We can fancy Esther's beating heart putting fire in her cheek, and her subdued excitement making her beauty more splendid as she stood. What a contrast between her and the arrogant king on his throne! He was a voluptuary, ruined morally by unchecked licence,—a monster, as he could hardly help being, of lust, self will, and caprice. She was at that moment an incarnation of self-sacrifice and pure enthusiasm. The blind world thought that he was the greater; but how ludicrous his ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... knowledge than in any part of the European world, and I attribute it, in a great measure, to the social intercourse which has long subsisted between the sexes. It is true, I utter my sentiments with freedom, that in France the very essence of sensuality has been extracted to regale the voluptuary, and a kind of sentimental lust has prevailed, which, together with the system of duplicity that the whole tenor of their political and civil government taught, have given a sinister sort of sagacity to the French character, properly termed finesse; and a polish ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... that Valkendorf's eyes were drawn, compelling as were her stature and her basilisk stare. They quickly turned from her, with a motion of contempt, to feast on the vision by her side—that of a girl on the threshold of young womanhood and of a beauty that dazzled the eyes of the old voluptuary. How had she come there and in such company, this ravishing girl on whom Nature had lavished the last touch of virginal loveliness, this maiden with her figure of such supple grace, the proud little oval face with its complexion of ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... epicure in his own way. The epicures in boiling of potatoes are innumerable. The perfection of all enjoyment depends on the perfection of the faculties of the mind and body; therefore, the temperate man is the greatest epicure, and the only true voluptuary. ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... but selfish gratification. I have no relish, indeed, for sensual indulgences. It is the intellectual taste that calls for such banquets as imagination and science can furnish; but, though less sordid than the epicure, the voluptuary, or the sportsman, the principle that governs them and me is the same; equally limited to self; equally void of any basis in ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... self-conscious note which, in manner and mode of life, as well as in costume, he was to touch later. He was too violently enamoured of all around him, to think very deeply of himself. But he had already realised the tragedy of the voluptuary, which is, after a little time, not that he must go on living, but that he cannot live in two places at once. We have, at this end of the century, tempered this tragedy by the perfection of railways, and it is possible for our good Prince, whom Heaven bless, ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... amongst which we must not forget his involuntary exile, and his residence in this country, where he lived for many years as Duke of Orleans. A worse man than his father it would be difficult to imagine. He was a vain, ambitious, and cowardly voluptuary, who gratified his personal passions at the expense of his sovereign and his country; but his son was reared in a different school, and to that accident, conjoined with a better nature, he probably owes the high position ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... voluptuary, and reclining there in an ease which the languor born of his long illness rendered the more delicious, inhaling the tepid summer air that came to him laden with a most sweet attar from the flowering rose-garden, he realized that with all its cares life may be sweet to live in youth and ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... not half read thy villain lesson! Thou shouldst have known that the very cat, thou thoughtest me, will turn and rend the huntsman if he dare rob her of her portion! I tell you, Lucius Catiline, you thought me a mere wanton! a mere sensual thing! a soulless animal voluptuary! Fool! I say, double fool! Look into thine own heart; remember what blood runs in these female veins! Man! Father! Vitiator! My spirit is not female! my blood, my passions, my contempt of peril, my will indomitable and immutable, are, like my mortal body, your begetting! ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... writers, had not her genius run wild for want of cultivation. Her passions were consequently ungovernable, and she accustomed herself to yield to them without scruple, treating female honor and delicacy as vulgar prejudices. She was therefore a voluptuary and sensualist, without that refinement for which she seemed to contend on other subjects. Her history, indeed, forms entirely a warning, and in no part an example. Singular she was, it must be allowed, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... have not witnessed and understood it. He (or she) who reveals the world of art to them opens heaven to them. They become satellites, disciples, worshippers of the apostle. Now the apostle may be a voluptuary without much conscience. Nature may have given him enough virtue to suffice in a reasonable environment. But this allowance may not be enough to defend him against the temptation and demoralization of ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... works, in which are to be found such admirable and varied types of women characters, that they even surpass in beauty those of Shakspeare (Angiolina, Myrrha, Anna): they said that Faliero wanted interest, that Sardanapalus was a voluptuary; that Satan in "Cain" did not speak as a theologian (how could he?), that there were irreverent tendencies in his sacred dramas—and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... which is to be got from literature (and this, like one or two other chapters here, is partly an effort in literary hedonism) Wilson stands very high, indeed so high that he can be ranked only below the highest. He who will enjoy him must be an intelligent voluptuary, and especially well versed in the art of skipping. When Wilson begins to talk fine, when he begins to wax pathetic, and when he gets into many others of his numerous altitudes, it will behove the reader, according to his own tastes, to skip with discretion and vigour. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... student was also an ardent voluptuary of the most pronounced type, and proposed that Frank should try if he could mesmerize his sister, a charming girl of about fifteen, who was staying with him for a few days, awaiting the arrival of her father. Frank's friend proposed they should go to a certain ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... his wife in the depths of his heart, there can be no doubt. But the circle he moved in, and his volatile, mischievous, beauty-idolising nature played havoc with his good intentions, though not to the extent implied by some critics who have pictured him as a reckless voluptuary. But just herein is the final proof of Constanze's devotion and her understanding of him, for, while there never was a breath of slander against herself, she found heart to forgive Mozart's ficklenesses. He actually made her the confessional of his excursions ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... the only physical traces of it remaining were a camp at Jerbourg, the nearly obliterated tessellated pavement and fragments of wall belonging to the sybarite's villa, which occupied the site in the King's Mills Valley where the Moulin de Haut now stands, the pond in the Grand Mare in which the voluptuary had reared the carp over which, dressed with sauces the secret of which died with him, he dwelt lovingly when stretched on his triclinium, and the basins at Port Grat in which he stored his treasured mullet and succulent oysters. The islanders were of one mind in ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... and voluptuary, is painted against a background of church members and professing Christians scarcely less hypocritical than he. In this book Sinclair Lewis adds a violent stroke to his growing ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... Gluck died, strive to organise a memorial festival in his honour, and when his other rival, Sacchini, was taken from the arena by death, he could deliver the funeral eulogy. This Sacchini, by the bye, was a reckless voluptuary, who ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... day's meal would never be a penny the better - and the next cook (when she came) would be worse, if anything, but just as pious. It was often wondered that Lord Hermiston bore it as he did; indeed, he was a stoical old voluptuary, contented with sound wine and plenty of it. But there were moments when he overflowed. Perhaps half a dozen times in the history of his married life - "Here! tak' it awa', and bring me a piece bread and kebbuck!" he had exclaimed, with an appalling explosion of his voice and ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... called our moral sense is merely an indication of the superior permanency of social compared with personal impressions. Morality, if we take his explanation as complete and final, is reduced to tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; an etiquette which, perhaps, a sceptical voluptuary, wishing to remove the obstacles to a life of enjoyment, might think himself not unreasonable in treating as an illusion. This, so far as appears, is the explanation offered of moral life, with all its beauty, its tenderness, its heroism, its self- sacrifice; ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Though already betrothed to the sister of Charles V., his passion for Dyveke did not pass away. He erected a palace at Opslo, and lived there with his mistress until recalled to Copenhagen, when he took her with him. The most singular feature in this whole intrigue is that the royal voluptuary was from the outset under the absolute sway, not of the fair Dyveke, but of her mother, Sigbrit, a low, cunning, intriguing woman of Dutch origin, who followed the couple to the royal palace at Opslo, and afterwards accompanied them to Stockholm, ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... loveliness. The constant recurrence of similar combinations of colour and outline gradually forces upon us a sense of how the harmony has been built up, and we become familiar with something of nature's mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your "rural voluptuary,"—not to remain awe-stricken before a Mount Chimborazo; not to sit deafened over the big drum in the orchestra, but day by day to teach himself some new beauty—to experience some new vague and tranquil sensation that has before evaded him. It is not the people ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... genius of motion, the divinity of the dance; she was Terpsichore in the grace of her movements, Euterpe in the ravishing sweetness of her voice. A thrill of admiration suffused with a deeper tint even the abhorred cheek of the voluptuary. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various |
