"Ascetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who narrates the prodigies of that perspicacious and venerated diplomat, Saint Epiphanius, the upright and vigilant pastor; or like Eugippus, who tells of the life of Saint Severin, that mysterious hermit and humble ascetic who appeared like an angel of grace to the distressed people, mad with suffering and fear; writers like Veranius of Gevaudan who prepared a little treatise on continence; like Aurelianus and Ferreolus who compiled the ecclesiastical canons; historians ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... night behind gilded bars than in the garish light of day—and an equal number of pale-faced, dark-moustached, well-dressed, and suspiciously idle men. A dozen rivals of Thompson's Saloon had sprung up along the narrow main street. There were two new hotels—one a "Temperance House," whose ascetic quality was confined only to the abnegation of whiskey—a rival stage office, and a small one-storied building, from which the "Sierran Banner" fluttered weekly, for "ten dollars a year, in advance." Insufferable in the glare of a ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... with the lean, ascetic face moved about his new abode, arranging, changing, altering, hardly yet into his working-stride again, he gave the impression of almost spinster-like precision and nicety. For twenty years past, in a score of lodgings, garrets, flats, and rooms furnished and unfurnished, he had been accustomed ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... long day, and he went early in the semi-light and sat before the holy man. The dusk darkened, and a new moon rose, but Gobind did not rise to mere physical consciousness that night, though Bedient sat very still before him for hours. The bony knees of the old ascetic, covered with dust, were moveless as the black roots of the camphor-tree; and a dog of the village sat afar off on his haunches and whined at intervals, waiting for the white man to go, that he might have the ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... its real universals, was celebrating its ascetic, unearthly triumphs in the West, Aristotelianism, which maintains that the individual is the real, was making its way in the East. Banished as heresy beyond the limits of the Catholic Church, in the fifth and sixth centuries, in the persons of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... conviction that marriage is honorable in all, even the highest and holiest, nurturing some of the loveliest graces of the Christian character. The event for a time caused some stir among the enemies of the truth; but it soon died away, and the old ascetic views of piety are passing away with the social degradation in which they ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... blockhouse. His name was Xerxes Alexander Anxley, and he was unceremoniously called by the community "X," and by Mivane "the unknown quantity," for he was something of an enigma, and his predilections provoked much speculation. He was a religionist of ascetic, extreme views,—a type rare in this region,—coming originally from the colony of the Salzburgers ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... flock, and, with a motion of the arm, sped his dog to fetch in some stragglers which seemed straying off waywardly over the crest of the opposite hill. As he stood so she marked his ascetic gauntness, and noted that the hand which swung at his side twitched and clenched, and that the muscles of his cleanly shaved jaws swelled as he ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... prodigious emotion issue from her, or is she its victim? Such knowledge as we possess of the general psychology of the bee warrants the belief that the swarming always takes place against the old sovereign's will. For indeed the ascetic workers, her daughters, regard the queen above all as the organ of love, indispensable, certainly, and sacred, but in herself somewhat unconscious, and often of feeble mind. They treat her like a mother in her dotage. Their respect for her, their ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... consulate of Publius Rutilius Rufus and Gnaeus Mallius Maximus. His parents were well-born though poor, and he was educated in a knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures. His fervent devotion and a gravity beyond his years led his parents to dedicate him to the religious and ascetic life, and soon after a visit to Jerusalem, in which the extraordinary intelligence and eagerness for knowledge of the youth were shown in his seeking of the doctors in the Temple, he was sent to be trained in an Essene community in the ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... aim. Temperance controls appetite for the sake of greater life and health and strength. Asceticism is the control of appetite merely for the sake of controlling it. Asceticism, in shunning the evils to which food and drink may lead, misses also the best blessings they are able to confer. The ascetic attempts to regulate by rule and measure everything he eats and drinks, and to get along with just as little as possible, and so he misses the good cheer and hearty enjoyment which should be the ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... bitterly about Polly Love, and that caused him to remember a patient to whom her selfish little heart had shown no kindness. It was her brother. He was some nine or ten years older, and very different in character. His face was pale and thin—almost ascetic—and he had the fiery and watery eyes of the devotee. He had broken a blood-vessel and was threatened with consumption, but his case was not considered dangerous. When Polly was about, his eyes would follow her round the ward with something of the humble entreaty of a ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... and a bit of an ascetic. I have no doubt that his life is now and will continue to be spotless. But that it was always so is most unlikely. Army subalterns during the war were given no end of a good time. And quite right too, it was the least that could be done for us: and the most, in nine ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... arruga wrinkle. arruinar to ruin, demolish. arrullo cooing. arte m. f. art, artfulness; malas artes evil practices. articular to articulate. artista m. artist. asador m. turnspit. asalto assault, storm. ascendiente forefather. ascetico ascetic. asco nausea. asegurar to secure, assure. asemejar vr. to be like. asasinar to assassinate. asesinato assassination. asesino assassin. asesor assessor, counselor. asestar to aim. asfixiar ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... influence of his pious mother Anthusa. After his baptism (about 370) by Meletius, the bishop of Antioch, he gave up all his forensic prospects, and buried himself in an adjacent desert, where for nearly ten years he spent a life of ascetic self-denial and theological study, to which he was introduced by Diodorus, bishop of Tarsus, a famous scholar of the Antiochene type. Illness, however, compelled him to return to the world; and the authority of Meletius gained his services to the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... scarlet and gold, as he bombastically described to the knot of poor relations and admirers that elbowed him the splendours of the last entertainment at "Peterhof," where Lord Lytton still reigned. I smiled, and Isaacs frowned at the ancient and hairy ascetic believer, who suddenly rose from his lair in a corner, and bustled through the crowd of Hindoos, shouting at the top of his voice the confession of his faith—"Beside God there is no God, and Muhammad is ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... lightly tapping the table with the forefinger of his right hand. Prescott observed his thin, almost ascetic face, smooth-shaven and finely cut. Both General Wood and the Secretary were mountaineers, but the two faces were different; one represented blunt strength and courage; the other suppleness, dexterity, meditation, the power of silent combination. Had the two been blended here would ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... likely were, assembled at their theatre and laughing at their games—as Sallust and his friends, and their mistresses protested—crowned with flowers, with cups in their hands, against the new, hard, ascetic, pleasure-hating doctrine, whose gaunt disciples, lately passed over from the Asian shores of the Mediterranean, were for breaking the fair images of Venus, and flinging the altars of ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... marked by refraining from marriage. But these ascetics lived in close relations with those who were non-ascetics. Monasticism is an advance upon this earlier asceticism in that it attempts to create, apart from non-ascetics, a social order composed only of ascetics in which the ascetic ideals may be more successfully realized. The transition was made by the hermit life in which the ascetic lived alone in deserts and other solitudes. This became monasticism by the union of ascetics for mutual spiritual aid. This advance is associated with St. Anthony. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... been objected, that the piety which it inculcates is of the ascetic kind, and that the spirit of penance, voluntary mortification, and contempt of the world, which it breathes everywhere, is neither required nor recommended by the gospel. But no difference can be found between the spirit of piety inculcated by our ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... mental weakness in himself which had caused him to act as he had acted. He saw himself as one of those puny creatures whose so-called kind hearts lead them into follies, into crimes. Like many young men of virtuous life and ascetic habit, Uniacke was disposed to worship that which was uncompromising in human nature, the slight hardness which sometimes lurks, like a kernel, in the saint. But he was emotional. He was full of pity. He desired to bandage the wounded ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Byron was much addicted to that species of superstition of which I am treating: the gloomy idea of spirits revisiting the earth to gaze on those who they loved, was congenial to his mind, and an overheated fancy indulged beyond its due limits, converted the morbid visionary into the superstitious ascetic. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... one thing among all these quasi-ascetic sects that has ever been in advance of the great mass of humanity from which they are detached parts: they have given woman her rights; whereas, the mass has always prated, and does yet, mentioning ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... ridicule than by stern reproof. He might never have gone with Howard in search of abuses, but he would have drawn such pictures of those near home as would have made some laugh and some blush and all unite heartily in doing away with them. With nothing of the ascetic, he could impose self-denial and bear it. Like Erasmus, he may not have aspired to become a martyr,—but in those long voyages and journeys, which, in his infirm old age, he undertook in his country's service, there was much of the sublimest spirit of martyrdom. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... ambitious clerks. Any one seeing her for the first time might have shuddered involuntarily at the look of poetic wildness which the clever Valerie had succeeded in bringing out by the arts of dress in this Bleeding Nun, framing the ascetic olive face in thick bands of hair as black as the fiery eyes, and making the most of the rigid, slim figure. Lisbeth, like a Virgin by Cranach or Van Eyck, or a Byzantine Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness, the precision of those mysterious ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... a handsome, opulent-looking nun—possibly an abbess or prioress of noble lineage. Can a holy woman of such a complexion listen to a fine operatic barytone in a sumptuous temple and receive none but ascetic impressions? What a cross-fire of influences ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... could serve as a fulcrum for resisting decline, or producing recovery. In such a period despair wins control. The philosophy is pessimistic. The world is supposed to be coming to an end. Life is not valued. Ascetic practices fall in with the prevailing temper. Martyrdom has no great terrors; such as it has can be overcome by a little enthusiasm. Inroads of barbarians only add a little to the other woes, or hasten an ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Tonetti are those of the Spanish cavaliers, with bannered cross. The eagles stand for the Nation that built the Canal. Excellent in spirit are Flanagan's figures of the four types, especially that of the strikingly ascetic Priest. (p. 44.) Besides their symbolism, the statues fulfill a useful architectural purpose in relieving what would otherwise be the blankness of the wall. But the same cannot be as truly said of the Armoured Horsemen above. Vigorous as they are, they are not in the right ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Greal originally formed a distinct romance, but it was the dull production of some ascetic monk, who thought that the knights of the Round Table were too much occupied with secular pursuits, and who found no greater encomium to pass upon Sir Galahad, than to call him a "maid." But the idea of ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... the grave boy whose gravity impressed all Cambridge, and had taken immortal shape in the Nativity Ode and the sonnet of the "great Taskmaster's eye" before he was much past twenty, did not mean to hold up a drunken sensualist like Comus as a model for youth. He was not an ascetic, then or later; and he was writing a dramatic poem; and, of course, had no difficulty in giving Comus a fine speech about the follies of total abstinence which, indeed, he loved no better than other monkeries. The Lady, in reply, as she is dramatically ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... voices of some artful Jacobites, who merely wished to cause discord and delay, and who hoped to attain this end by mixing up with the difficult question which it was the especial business of the Convention to settle another question more difficult still. It is probable that some who disliked the ascetic habits and rigid discipline of the Presbyterians wished for an union as the only mode of maintaining prelacy in the northern part of the island. In an united Parliament the English members must greatly preponderate; and in England the bishops were held in high honour by the great majority ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... article of diet with both Mussulmans and Hindoos. Many of the latter take a vow to touch no flesh of any kind. They are called Kunthees or Boghuts, but a Boghut is more of an ascetic than a Kunthee. However, the Kunthee is glad of a fish dinner when he can get it. They are restricted to no particular sect or caste, but all who have taken the vow wear a peculiar necklace, made generally of sandal-wood beads or neem ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the shade, and composed the limbs, and then seated himself and gave his mind over to bitter reflection. Ryder's face exerted a strong influence upon him. In death it had assumed a delicacy almost effeminate. It was the face of a saint and an ascetic. What was most evil in him had been grown in the forcing-house of vice and crime society had set up, and for being the thing it had made him society had butchered him like a mad dog. Jim recognised Monkey Mack only as the instrument ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... short time for preparation and devices which render the attention of the housewife unnecessary are ethical and healthy, both for the family and society. The joys of the table are not to be despised, and only the dyspeptic or the ascetic hold them in contempt; but simplicity in eating is the very heart of ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... it very rapidly, according to Matthew. Though, like John, he became an itinerant preacher, he departed widely from John's manner of life. John went into the wilderness, not into the synagogues; and his baptismal font was the river Jordan. He was an ascetic, clothed in skins and living on locusts and wild honey, practising a savage austerity. He courted martyrdom, and met it at the hands of Herod. Jesus saw no merit either in asceticism or martyrdom. In contrast to John he was essentially a highly-civilized, cultivated person. According ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the Convent' of Saint Francis of Cheylas a tall, lean man with an ascetic face, prominent cheekbones, and a nose not unlike Garnache's own—the nose of a man of action rather than of prayer—bowed gravely to this stalwart stranger, and in courteous accents begged to be informed in what he ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... Penn," said the minister, helplessly. His thin gray-bearded face was pathetic. He was a sickly man; his youthful confidence had cooled; he had to scourge himself up to some of his pastoral duties as relentlessly as a Catholic ascetic, and then he was prostrated by ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... vigour. The state is partially attained during holidays, in salubrious climates, and health-bringing avocations; it is lost, in the midst of toils, in privation of comforts, and in physical prostration. The seeming exception of elated spirits in bodily decay, in fasting, and in ascetic practices, is no disproof of the general principle, but merely the introduction of another principle, namely, that we can feed one part of the system at the expense of degrading ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... George:—and if you take the heads from a statue of Mino, or a painting of Angelico—very little but drapery will be left;—drapery made redundant in quantity and rigid in fold, that it may conceal the forms, and give a proud or ascetic reserve to the actions, of the bodily frame. Bellini and his school, indeed, rejected at once the false theory, and the easy mannerism, of such religious design; and painted the body without fear or reserve, as, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... still a shock. He had a bunch of his toughest hoods with him and they crowded through the door like an overweight baseball team. China Joe was in front, hands buried in the sleeves of his long mandarin gown. No expression at all on his ascetic features. He didn't waste time talking to us, just gave the word to ...
— Arm of the Law • Harry Harrison
... that we, the pillars of the Holy Catholic Church, unworthy though we be, should submit to insult and indignity at the hands of a pack of godless Lutheran dogs." And, so saying, he seated himself and proceeded to remove his own head-covering, disclosing lean, ascetic features, cold, cruel, and domineering, crowned by the monk's tonsure. At the same time the others did the same, and with very similar result, the dominant expression of the faces thus disclosed being that of cold, stern ruthlessness, ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... denunciations of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, nor the cold sarcasms of Erasmus of Rotterdam had a more lasting effect on the world than had Busch's missionary zeal or Geiler's ascetic discourses. Then arose Martin Luther, and centered in himself all those scandals and floating heresies, which for a hundred years had poisoned the spiritual and intellectual atmosphere. Insidious disease lurking in dark places was now become a stalking ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... painful processes by which the animal portion of our being is rendered the slave of the spiritual, and the will and the affections are rent away from all creatures, to be fixed on God alone. Fasting and abstinence are the first elements in this ascetic course. The natural taste is neglected, thwarted, and tormented, till, wearied of soliciting its own gratification, it ceases to interfere with the independent action of the soul. The appetite is further denied its wonted satisfaction as to quantity of food. By fasts gradually increasing ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... him; she trusted that she might be preserved from putting her face very close to his at dinner in studying the bill of fare; getting out of carriages, she forbade him ever to take her by the waist. All ascetic resolutions are modified by experiment; but if Isabel did not rigorously keep these, she is not the less to be praised for having ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... gives us a mortal comment upon this immortal carelessness and delight. Whether his figures are tranquil or rapturous, there is in his colour an expression of something far from their felicity. Indeed, however voluptuous the forms may be, the colour is always ascetic. It is not that he seems to disapprove of those glorified pleasures of the senses, but that he cannot satisfy himself with his own conception of them, as Titian could. Titian represents a world in which all the mind ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... West this gigantic wave of powerful but uncultured life was flowing in, from the East had come another. Early Christianity had already established itself, and its ascetic teachings made another element in the contradictions of the time. Up to this date slavery had been the foundation of society, and any amelioration in the condition of women had applied only to the patrician class. The Carpenter of Nazareth set his seal ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... manners of the Tuscans; and the climate and serenity of the hills of Florence softened there even tyranny, and these princes became voluptuaries or sages. Florence, the city of Leo X., of philosophy, and the arts, had transformed even religion. Catholicism, so ascetic in Spain, so gloomy in the north, so austere and literal in France, so popular at Rome, had become at Florence, under the Medici and the Grecian philosophers, a species of luminous and Platonic theory, whose dogmata were only sacred symbols, and whose pomps were only pleasures that overpowered ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... and change. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... grand vicar of the bishopric of Seez. Maternal uncle, guardian, guest, and boarder of Madame du Bousquier—nee Cormon—of Alencon; he died in 1819, almost blind, and strangely depressed by his niece's recent marriage. Entirely removed from worldly interests, he led an ascetic life, and an uneventful one, entirely consumed in thoughts of salvation, mortifications of the flesh, and secret works of charity. [Jealousies ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... in detail his devious and criminal work, one brief tale will explain how his revolutionary activities were brought quickly to an end. There was in Moscow, so the story runs, a gentle, kindly, and influential member of Nechayeff's society. Of ascetic disposition, this Iwanof spent much of his time in freely educating the peasants and in assisting the poorer students. He starved himself to establish cheap eating houses, which became the centers of the revolutionary ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... much (notwithstanding their partial and Manichean idea of beauty) to the early ascetic painters. Their works are a possession for ever. No future school of religious art will be able to rise to eminence without learning from them their secret. They taught artists, and priests, and laymen, too, that beauty ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... person standing almost but not quite abreast of me, and turning sharply I found a clergyman at my side. He was the vicar, the person who had been letting himself go on the organ; a slight man with a handsome, pale, ascetic face, clean-shaven, very dark-eyed, looking more like an Italian monk or priest than an English clergyman. But although rigidly ecclesiastic in his appearance and dress, there was something curiously engaging in him, along with a subtle look which it was not easy to ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... Snurge president of the United States? Many have asked that question, he frequently used to ask it himself, and his wife—the sainted Amy Snurge of ever revered memory—would rest her thin, ascetic hand upon his coat sleeve and answer him with ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... father, was big and florid, with bristling hair. He was marked in the town because he called himself a "Socialist," but Samuel did not know that. His wife was a little mite of a woman, completely swamped by child-bearing. Most interesting to Samuel was Friedrich, who played the violin; a pale ascetic-looking boy of fifteen, with wavy ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... was a cold, steely glitter in his eye, for one thing. With it, however, was a strengthfulness of purpose, a certain pleasant masterfulness, that made me feel that I could trust him, and it was to this aspect of his nature that I yielded. There was something frankly appealing in his long, thin, ascetic looking face, and I ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... most certain of all to challenge the attacks of malice. Of the great pulpit orator, Fra Egidio of Viterbo, whom Leo made a cardinal on account of his merits, and who showed himself a man of the people and a brave monk in the calamity of 1527, Giovio gives us to understand that he preserved his ascetic pallor by the smoke of wet straw and other means of the same kind. Giovio is a genuine Curial in these matters. He generally begins by telling his story, then adds that he does not believe it, and then hints at ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... battle. He loved courage, enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue; everything that lifts us above the table where we eat or the bed we sleep upon. This with no touch of the motive-monger or the ascetic. He loved his virtues to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he loved the jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense of life and of man's unequal character ran through all his thoughts. He ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Despenser, it must be admitted, was not the woman calculated to attract such a nature as that of Constance. She was a Lollard, by birth no less than by marriage; but in her creed she was an ascetic of the sternest and most unbending type. In her judgment a laugh was indecorum, and smelling a rose was indulgence of the flesh. Her behaviour to her royal daughter-in-law was marked by the utmost outward deference, yet she never failed ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... of this chronicle the ascetic sternness of the old Norman castles had been humanized and refined so that the new dwellings of the nobility, if less imposing in appearance, were much more comfortable as places of residence. A gentle race had built their houses rather for peace than for war. He who compares the savage ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... strange tales going about. I wonder who that other woman is. Marvell—Gertrude Marvell?—I seem to have heard the name somewhere.—Hullo, Masham, how are you?" He greeted the leading local solicitor who had just entered the station, a man with a fine ascetic face, and singularly blue eyes. Masham looked like a starved poet or preacher, and was in reality one of the hardest and shrewdest men of business in ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... plucking flowers beside the stream of Lethe, in the stern and warlike chatelaine of Canossa. Unfortunately we know but little of Matilda's personal appearance. Her health was not strong; and it is said to have been weakened, especially in her last illness, by ascetic observances. Yet she headed her own troops, armed with sword and cuirass, avoiding neither peril nor fatigue in the quarrels of her master Gregory. Up to the year 1622 two strong suits of mail were preserved at Quattro ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... ascetic and autocratic but not unkindly statesman Las Casas decided to address himself, and he proceeded to Madrid to acquaint the two regents with the abuses prevailing in the Indies and to announce his intention of going to Flanders unless the necessary measures for the relief of the oppressed Indians ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... waiting for a special ukaz (that is, command) from the Tsar on the subject and are waiting for their chiefs to be baptized ... (by force—be it understood). This eloquent pontifex says, too, that the native priests ought, in view of their ascetic manner of life, to be removed from the natives and put into special institutions somewhat after the fashion of monasteries. A nice set of people and no mistake! They have wasted two million roubles, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... so many precious books in classic times among the Romans. The monks, indeed, were not seldom creators as well as copyists, though the works which they composed were mainly theological (as became their sacred profession and ascetic life). The Latin, however, being the almost universal language for so many centuries, the love of learning conspired to widen the field of monastic study. Many zealous ecclesiastics were found who revived the classic authors, and copies of the works of ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the mind and body, the purer spirit may ascend to the enjoyment and vision of the Deity. The opinions and practices of the monasteries of Mount Athos will be best represented in the words of an abbot who flourished in the eleventh century. 'When thou art alone in thy cell,' says the ascetic teacher, 'shut thy door and seat thyself in a corner: raise thy mind above all things vain and transitory; recline thy beard and chin on thy breast; turn thine eyes and thy thoughts towards the middle of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... there was a timid fire—of the kind usually met in English inns—imprisoned behind a grill that had been set up stoutly to confine a larger and rowdier fire. My antagonist was a tall lank man of pinched ascetic face and dark complexion, with clothes brushed to shininess, and he belonged to a brotherhood that lived in one of the poorer parts of London along the wharves. His sojourn at the inn was forced. For two weeks in the year, he explained, ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... attention. But this is Burton, by some accounted a morose person, but by those who knew him intimately a cheery and witty companion. Here, too, with slow and faltering step comes Pusey in extreme old age, and Liddon of ascetic mien. Hark to the laughter! It is Stubbs—historian Bishop—with witty saying falling from his lips. And there is Liddell, feared of the undergraduate, but splendid both in figure and in face. And many another ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... all graces! fourfold wonder Of wit and beauty, love and wisdom! Canst thou Beatify the ascetic's savagery To heavenly prudence? Horror melts to pity, And pity kindles to adoring shower Of radiant tears! Thou tender cruelty! Gay smiling martyrdom! Shall I forbid thee? Limit thy depth by mine own shallowness? Thy courage by my weakness? Where thou darest, I'll shudder and ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... sectaries, are in question. Nor would bran and hot water be a Hindu regimen. The staple diet of the Tibetans is Chamba, the meal of toasted barley, mixed sometimes with warm water, but more frequently with hot tea, and I think it is probable that these were the elements of the ascetic diet rather than the mere bran which Polo speaks of. Semedo indeed says that some of the Buddhist devotees professed never to take any food but tea; knowing people said they mixed with it pellets of sun-dried beef. The determination of the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... brother of his patron in Yezd. He was soon back again: travel had no inducement for him. The great world outside could offer him nothing more than his wonted haunts in Shiraz. It is further said that he put on the garb of a Dervish; but he was altogether free of the Dervish's conceit. "The ascetic is the serpent of his age" is a saying put ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... This passionate and ascetic old man would have attracted the interest of the world even more, had it not been for one of his disciples. This was a young man from Sinope, on the Euxine, whom he did not take to at first sight; the son of a disreputable money-changer who had ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... sorts and conditions struggled toward that light and came to our shores with an eager desire to realize it, and a hunger for it such as some of us no longer felt, for we were as if satiated and satisfied and were indulging ourselves after a fashion that did not belong to the ascetic devotion of the early devotees of those great principles. Strangers came to remind us of what we had promised ourselves and through ourselves had promised mankind. All men came to us and said, "Where is the bread of life with which you promised ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... appeal to Magni, Brask despatched to the Vadstena Chapter a tract in refutation of the Lutheran doctrines, and along with it a sermon preached by Petri, "in which," so wrote the bishop, "you will observe his blasphemy of the Holy Virgin." Brask, despite his spiritual duties, was no ascetic, and, though suffering at the time from illness, added a postscript begging the Chapter to let him have a box of nuts. Apparently these delicacies came; for the bishop's next letter, written to the pope, was in a happier vein. "I have just had from Johannes Magni a letter ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... by a genuine desire to free Russia, but the idea was unmistakably imbedded in my mind that his Christianity was like Napoleon's description of a Russian. Scratch it and you would find Tartar fanaticism under it,—the fanaticism of the ascetic who would drive his own flesh and blood into the flames to save the soul of his domestics. This impression grew as I watched the attitude of the countess toward her husband. What must a wife think of such a husband's views of marriage when she is the mother of thirteen of his children? What must ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... the country, it was again plunged in barbarism. The monasteries were in every way similar to any other feudal residence, and the ascetic rule of St. Benedict was entirely forgotten. The abbots rather distinguished themselves from the other nobles by their greed and violence. They married and indulged in drinking bouts and predatory expeditions. A reform ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... experience? Your authority is for the weak, the timid, the credulous,—for those who do not care to trust themselves, who run for shelter from the storms of life to a 'papier-mache' fortress, made to look like rock. In order to preach that logically you should be a white ascetic, with a well-oiled manner, a downcast look lest you stumble in your pride; lest by chance you might do something original that sprang out of your own soul instead of being an imitation of the saints. And if your ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the seat of government. The site of Jodhpur was selected on a peak known as Joda-gir, or the hill of strife, four miles distant from Mundore on a crest of the range overlooking the expanse of the desert plains of Marwar. The position for the new city was chosen at the bidding of a forest ascetic, and was excellently adapted for defence, but had no good water-supply. [562] Joda had fourteen sons, of whom the sixth, Bika, was the founder of the Bikaner state. Raja Sur Singh (1595-1620) was one of Akbar's greatest generals, and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... come to us of his power in swaying his audience. The man was tall, thin, ascetic and of remarkably handsome presence. His speech was slow, deliberate, kindly, courteous, and most effective. He disarmed criticism, from his first word. His voice was not loud nor deep, and he had that peculiar ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... still alive, but in capital spirits. To-day I took a fancy to ride a donkey, for such is the custom in Italy, so I thought that I too must give it a trial. We have the honor to associate with a certain Dominican who is considered a very pious ascetic. I somehow don't quite think so, for he constantly takes a cup of chocolate for breakfast, and immediately afterwards a large glass of strong Spanish wine; and I have myself had the privilege of ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... however much he may differ from the Premier in many aspects of his temperament, also finds the foundation of his judgment in exercise and caution. As a player of games he is rather poor, but makes up in enthusiasm for tennis what he lacks in skill. His habits are almost ascetic in their rigour. He drinks nothing, and the finest dinner a cook ever conceived would be wasted on him. A single course of the plainest food suffices his appetite, and he grows manifestly uneasy ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... however, that at all events there was a season when the inexplicable attraction of it was too strong for him to resist the singular temptation to embody in palpable form, to array in dramatic raiment, to invest with imaginative magnificence, the godless ascetic passion of misanthropy, the martyrdom of an atheistic Stylites. Timon is doubtless a man of far nobler type than any monomaniac of the tribe of Macarius: but his immeasurable superiority in spiritual rank ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... was little suited to such an enterprise, for in appearance he was slight and pale, and in constitution delicate. Also, there was another reason against the thing. High Church and somewhat ascetic in his principles, in the beginning he had admired celibacy, and in secret dedicated himself to that state. But at heart Thomas was very much a man, and of late he had come to see that which is against nature is presumably not right, ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... he formed a school, consisting at first of three hundred of the richest of the citizens, who bound themselves by a sort of vow to himself and to each other, for the purpose of cultivating the ascetic observances which he enjoined, and of studying his religious and philosophical theories. All that took place in this school was kept a profound secret; and there were gradations among the pupils themselves, who were not all admitted, or at all events not ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... could watch them more calmly. Eagerly as I sought her face, it was a relief, surely, that it was not there. Pale to ghastliness, most of them, with high, sharpened shoulders, and features set like those of a corpse, it was indeed difficult to realize that these ascetic forms, these swaying devotees, were women—women who might else have been wives and mothers. Some of them wore in their hollow eyes an expression of ecstasy akin to madness, and there was not a face there that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... man who answers God's love by his love. The notion of a saint has been marred and mutilated by the Church and the world. It has been taken as a special designation of certain selected individuals, mostly of the ascetic and monastic type, whereas it belongs to every one of God's people. It has been taken by the world to mean sanctimoniousness and not sanctity, and is a term of contempt rather than of admiration on their lips. And even those of us, who have got beyond thinking that it ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Wildfell Hall, it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake: it was too little consonant with the character, tastes, and ideas of the gentle, retiring, inexperienced writer. She wrote it under a strange, conscientious, half-ascetic notion of accomplishing a painful penance and a severe duty. Blameless in deed and almost in thought, there was from her very childhood a tinge of religious melancholy in her mind. This I ever suspected, and I have found amongst her papers mournful proofs that ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... is often as rigid in his morality as any Brother of the White Lodge.[FN8: Terms while and black as used here have no relation to race or colour.] Of the disciples of the black and white magicians, the disciple of the black magician is often the more ascetic. His object is not the purification of life for the sake of humanity, but the purification of the vehicle, that he may be better able to acquire power. The difference between the white and the black magician lies in the motive. You might have a white magician, a follower of the right-hand ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... superstition. So she was most distinguished by an irrepressible haughtiness and an illimitable credulity. The only softening circumstance was that, being in the hands of the Jesuits, her religion did not assume an ascetic or gloomy character. She was fond of society, and liked to show her wondrous jewels, which were still unrivalled, although she had presented his holiness in his troubles with ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... jôgi is a Hindu ascetic, but like the word faqîr, jôgi is often used for any kind of holy man, as here. Supernatural powers are very commonly ascribed to them, as well as the universal attribute of granting sons. Classically the yôgi is the devotee seeking yoga, ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... comfortable by creating for itself an anaphrodisiac environment composed of pressures that can be fitted into its own. Or there may be an insufficiency of standard pressure in the alimentary tract, and we have the ascetic, mal-nourished, striving, uplifting type. Different types will be made by the permutations and combinations of factors that determine the intravisceral pressure and the environmental, i.e., ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... commissions for you, wh will not occupy your time, and wh will, I hope, be a subject of interest to you. It is for my little library of R. C. works. The perplexity is to find out ye best books upon difft subjects, for I cannot read all. The general class is, as you know, ascetic books, books of guidance, wh shall give people knowledge of self, enable us to guide consciences, build people up in ye higher life, force them to mental prayer, or give them subjects of meditation in it, the spiritual life, Xtian perfection, holy performance of ordinary actions, ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... said the uncle, warmly, charmed for the moment from every thought but that of kindness for the young and soft creature before him,—"who can," he repeated with a sigh, "but an old and withered ascetic like myself? I must leave you indeed; see, my carriage is at the door! Will my beautiful niece, among the gayeties that surround her, condescend now and then to remember the crabbed lawyer, and assure him by a line of her happiness and health? Though I rarely write any notes but ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dealer was a thin, ascetic person, with cold gray eyes and two distinct sets of manners; one for his customers and another for his employees; and the look he gave me ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of those walks. I make no apology to the spiritually minded, to whom this statement must be a revelation of grossness. I am content to tell the truth as well as I am able. I do not even need to console myself with the reflection that what is dross to the dreamy ascetic may be gold to the psychologist. The fact is that I ate, even as a delicate child, with considerable relish; and I remember eating with a relish still keener. Why, I can dream away a half-hour on the immortal flavor of those thick cheese cakes we used ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... man of medium height. His rather slender, finely featured face belied the apparent heaviness of his body, though his appearance was not actually abnormal. Rather, he gave the impression of being a man of powerful physique and ascetic habits. His dress was that of a herdsman, or possibly of an owner of herds from ...
— The Players • Everett B. Cole
... asceticism is brought forth from one of its strong citadels, Mt. Athos, the holy mountain of Greece, and a contrast is made between the "gleaming beauties of the world" and the utter absorption of the ascetic by the intangible world beyond. The vision of "Queen Hellas," the classic age of Greece, is followed by the conquering spirit of Hellenism spreading triumphantly from the democracies of Athens and Sparta to the ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... of the value of money, giving it away to those in need as readily as if it had no value, often enduring privation himself in consequence; with a mode of life so simple that the entire menage was frequently transported elsewhere on slight provocation, this ascetic was now to encounter housekeeping problems, make money, save it (most difficult of all), employ servants, in short undertake in middle-age and in impaired health, duties the nature of which he could not ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... justice we must admit that he led an ascetic and saint-like life, renouncing all worldly pleasures. An Englishman who saw much of him about 1851 declared that his goodness of soul surpassed even his brilliancy ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... composed face, but with that humorous questioning twinkle in his eyes which a master chess-player might assume when he had left his opponent without a move. On the top of the box beside him sat a very ascetic-faced, yellow, hollow-eyed man of fifty, with prim lips and a shrunken skin, which hung loosely over the long jerking tendons under his prominent chin. He was dressed in snuff-coloured clothes, and his legs under his knee-breeches were of a ludicrous thinness. He shook his ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... slightest degree to their power), the St. Barbara and St. Elizabeth.[27] I do not know among the pictures of the great sacred schools any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically expressive of the need of the heart that conceived them. Not ascetic, nor quaint, nor feverishly or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities of thought. Only entirely true—entirely pure. No depth of glowing heaven beyond them—but the clear sharp sweetness of the northern air: ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... thin white hands, which could hardly pull the blanket to his chin when he felt cold, could never again have strength to grasp sword-hilt or hold bridle, and in the blank collapse of his physical existence the image of himself as a monk, young, ascetic and holy in his life, presented itself with a marvellous and luring attraction. He made the nursing brother teach him prayers from the offices of the night and day, and he repeated them at the right hours, feeling that he was taking a real part in the monastic existence. Gradually, too, as ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... returned and lived with his herdsman parents, who were no doubt his real ones. He performed numerous miracles, and his devotees are still possessed by his spirit. Singaji is another godling who was a Gaoli by caste in Indore. He became a disciple of a holy Gokulastha Gosain or ascetic, and consequently a great observer of the Janam-Ashtami or Krishna's birthday. [26] On one occasion Singaji was late for prayers on this day, and the guru was very angry, and said to him, 'Don't show your face to me again until you are dead.' Singaji went home and told the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... broken down by age, on another occasion by the sight of a man suffering from a loathsome disease, and some months after by the horrible sight of a decomposing corpse. Each time his charioteer, whose name was Channa, told him that such was the fate of all living beings. Soon after he saw an ascetic walking in a calm and dignified manner, and asking who that was, was told by his charioteer the character and aims of the Wanderers, the travelling teachers, who played so great a part in the intellectual ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Gold. But we could not account for a girl of her Caste being seen in a wood; she was always kept in seclusion. At last we found out the truth. She had shown some sign of a lingering love for Christ, and her mother had taken her to a famous Brahman ascetic who lived in that wood; and there together, mother and daughter stayed in a hut near the hermit's hut, and for three days he had devoted himself to confuse and confound her, and finally he succeeded, ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... suffered any morbid, soul-shaking experience such as besetting religious doubt brings with it, or the pangs of despised love; that on the contrary he moved among men and women with a serene and godlike tread, neither self-indulgent nor ascetic, with mind and senses ever alert to every form of beauty. We know that his poetry was popular while he lived, and we cannot doubt that his personality was equally attractive, though it is probable that no contemporary knew the full measure ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... Church, which differed in so many ways from the Christian world. We see the hermit in his lonely cell, the monk at his devotions or at his work of copying in the scriptorium or under the open sky; or we hear the ascetic who, alone or with twelve chosen companions, has left one of the great monasteries in order to live in greater solitude among the woods or mountains, or on a lonely island. The fact that so many of these poems are fathered upon well-known saints emphasises the friendly attitude ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... public in general know of what the singer often suffers in the way of nervousness or stage fright before appearing in front of the footlights, nor that his life, outwardly so feted and brilliant, is in private more or less of a retired, ascetic one and that his social pleasures must be ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... fasted regularly on Fridays and Tuesdays. We always recognized her jours maigres by the quantity of cakes and pastry we saw carried to her room just before dinner, to which dinner she came in nun-like gray silk, saintly coiffure, with ascetic pallor on cheeks wont to bloom with roses de Ninon, to dine, a la Sainte Catherine or Sainte Something else, on a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... impression of a consciously eminent ecclesiastic, who was determined to lift his Church into greatness in England by all lawful means in his power; his appearance was ascetic, distinguished, and memorable; he was manifestly a man of direct nobility of life, and most lofty purpose—a great statesman for his Church, leading an austere and detached life as an example in every detail for the faithful in his community—a prince of ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... creature: life is to you full and complete only when it is a carnival of love. My case is just the reverse. Before three soft speeches have escaped me I rebuke myself for folly and insincerity. Before a caress has had time to cool, a strenuous revulsion seizes me: I long to return to my old lonely ascetic hermit life; to my dry books; my Socialist propagandism; my voyage of discovery through the wilderness of thought. I married in an insane fit of belief that I had a share of the natural affection which carries other men through lifetimes of matrimony. ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... with his mother, who held rigid Presbyterian views. From this time dates his friendship with Robert Leighton (1611-1684), who greatly influenced his religious opinions. Leighton had, during a stay in the Spanish Netherlands, assimilated something of the ascetic and pietistic spirit of Jansenism, and was devoted to the interests of peace in the church. Burnet wisely refused to accept a benefice in the disturbed state of church affairs, but he wrote an audacious letter to Archbishop Sharp asking him to take measures to restore peace. Sharp sent for Burnet, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... appear after that period, and to abolish the old law by substituting his own. But to his great mortification many of the monks undertook to demonstrate the contrary; and this disappointment, combined with his love of power and his impatience under the restraints of an ascetic life, quickly disabused him of his imaginary godhead, and drove him back to his palace and his harem. The king of Siam "is venerated equally with a divinity. His subjects ought not to look him in the face; they prostrate themselves before him when he passes, and appear before him on their ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... entertained for two days at the Priory of the Holy Trinity at Canterbury. Then brother Richard Ingworth, with another Richard—a Devonshire youth conspicuous for his ascetic fervour and devotion, but only old enough to be admitted to minor orders—set out for London, accompanied by the Lombard and another foreigner, leaving behind him Agnellus and the rest, among them William of Esseby, the third Englishman, enthusiastic and ardent as the others, but a mere ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... the physician looked silently into the fire. He had seen a great deal of dying, but he had lived a quiet ascetic life, which made his sensibilities tender, and he did not get used to death. "I wish you would stay with him, if you can," he said to Hanway at the outer door. "It will be a very ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... a master at concentration, a master strategist-a great general. With passionate beliefs on all important social questions, she resolutely set herself against being seduced into other paths. Far from being naturally an ascetic, she has disciplined herself into denials and deprivations, cultural and recreational, to pursue her objective with the least possible waste of energy. Not that she did not want above all else to do this thing. She did. But doing it she had to abandon the ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... dogmatic-apologetic exposition of the Veda. This contains (1) the establishment of the authority of the Veda as holy scripture revealed by Brahma, and also of the relation in which it stands to tradition; (2) the proof that everything in the Veda has reference to Brahma; (3) the ascetic system, or the discipline. To explain contradictory statements in the older and later parts of the Veda, Brahminical learning makes use of the subtleties of an harmonistical method of interpretation. Second, the "Mimansa" (inquiry), devoted to the solution of the problem, How can ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... got to Mr. St. John's room, the latter took off his clerical coat and waistcoat, and put on a coloured smoking jacket, which had the curious effect of transforming him from an ascetic looking High Churchman into what, from his refined, intellectual, clean-shaven face, and rather long straight hair, most people would have mistaken for an actor suffering ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... startled at the face and appearance of the man who came upon their boat. They had never thought of encountering such a figure in the wilderness. He was of middle age, tall, well-built, and remarkably straight, but his shaven face was thin and ascetic, and the look in his eyes was one of extraordinary benevolence. Moreover, it had the peculiar quality of seeming to gaze far into the future, as it were, at something glorious and beautiful. His dress was a strange ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... at both and understood why her cousin preferred the soldierly figure with the sword to the ascetic with his crucifix. One was riding bravely through the world in purple and fine linen, with horse and hound and squires at his back; and the other was in a lazar-house, praying over the dead and dying. The contrast was a strong one, and the girl's eyes lingered longest ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... was also dominant. From some source—perhaps the Buddhist mission {93} of Asoka—the ascetic life of recluses was established in the Ptolemaic times, and monks of the Serapeum illustrated an ideal to man which had been as yet unknown in the West. This system of monasticism continued, until Pachomios, ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... strong wish to meet the architect, Brother Michel; and one day, when I was talking with the Resident in Tai-o-hae (the chief port of the island), there were shown in to us an old, worn, purblind, ascetic-looking priest, and a lay brother, a type of all that is most sound in France, with a broad, clever, honest, humorous countenance, an eye very large and bright, and a strong and healthy body inclining to obesity. But that his blouse was black and his face shaven clean, you might pick such ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... any methods of discipline applied to the body which tend to modify its desires or repulsions, are good—for ascetic ends. But if done for display, they betray at once a man who keeps an eye on outward show; who has an ulterior purpose, and is looking for spectators to shout, "Oh what a great man!" This is why Apollonius so well said: "If you are bent upon a little private discipline, ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... believe, long been a subject of irony to the foreign observer; but the American breakfast is an ascetic meal compared with the French dejeuner a la fourchette. The latter, indeed, is simply a dinner without soup; it differs neither generically nor specifically from the evening repast. If it excludes soup, it includes eggs, prepared in a hundred forms; and if it proscribes ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... college, he knew very little of life indeed,—and, moreover, he cherished not a few ascetic notions, deeming this world "all a fleeting show," from whose vain illusions it was one's chief duty to shield one's self. He had never read a novel, save "some of Scott's,"—nor ever seen or read a play, not even of Shakspeare's. How I envied him this new world, in whose usages ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... in another. As Mr. Gosse says, "his imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum, between the North and the South, between Paganism and Puritanism, between resignation to the insticts and an ascetic repudiation of their authority." It is the conflict between the two moods that is the most interesting feature in Swinburne's verse, apart from its purely artistic qualities. Some writers find Swinburne as great a magician as ever in those poems in which he is free ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... in the library and a good fire burned on the hearth, near which his visitor was comfortably seated in a big leather chair. He rose as Challoner entered, and the latter was not favourably impressed by him. There was a hint of grossness about the fellow which repelled the Colonel, who was of an ascetic type; besides, he was badly and carelessly dressed, and Challoner was fastidious in such matters. Also the man had an ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... ascetic through habit, contented himself with very little, and, like all those used to work from childhood and whose muscles have been developed, he could work much and easily, and was quick at any manual labour; but what he valued most was the leisure in prisons and halting stations, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... a man of ascetic views, James, in his first shallow moments, before he thought about it, assumed that his house should be entirely non-alcoholic. A temperance house! Already he winced. We all know what a provincial Temperance Hotel is. Besides, there is ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... almost at all,—strange as it may sound to readers. His hopes at this time are many;—and among them, I perceive, there is not wanting secretly, in spite of his experiences, some hope that he himself may be a good deal "happier" than formerly. Nor is there any ascetic humor, on his part, to forbid trial. He is much determined to try. Probably enough, as we guess and gather, his agreeablest anticipations, at this time, were of Reinsberg: How, in the intervals of work well done, he would live there wholly to the Muses; have his chosen spirits round him, his colloquies, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... object had been attained, he did not venture to put any questions to her, which might possibly, by reviving painful or horrible recollections, increase her agitation. The clergyman soon arrived—a man of ascetic countenance and venerable age—one whom Gerard Douw respected very much, forasmuch as he was a veteran polemic, though one perhaps more dreaded as a combatant than beloved as a Christian—of pure morality, subtle brain, and frozen heart. He entered the chamber which ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... attempts to bring about the death of the Buddha (Vinaya Texts, iii. 241-250; J[a]taka, vi. 131), shortly afterwards, relying upon the feeling of the people in favour of asceticism, he brought forward four propositions for ascetic rules to be imposed on the order. These being refused, he appealed to the people, started an order of his own, and gained over 500 of the Buddha's community to join in the secession. We hear nothing further about ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... Vices which are punished by our legal code had not prevented Diogenes from being a philosopher and a teacher. Caesar and Cicero were profligates and at the same time great men. Cato in his old age married a young girl, and yet he was regarded as a great ascetic and ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... susceptible of so much enthusiasm as shall not disturb digestion, that he might seem to have been born middle-aged. Few men have so amicably combined the love of a good dinner and of the higher morality. He seems to have comfortably solved the problem of having your cake and eating it, at which the ascetic interpreters of Christianity teach us to despair. He serves us up his worldly wisdom in a sauce of Plato, and gives a kind of sensuous relish to the disembodied satisfactions of immortality. He is a better Christian than many an orthodox divine. If he do not, like Sir Thomas Browne, love ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity of the thing. He felt it was monstrous that the modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic and the colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos, be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It is indeed ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... beef or venison, finnan haddie or brook trout, eggs or oysters thus "sauced," taste all alike—sauce! To use such ready-made sauces with dishes cooked a l'anglaise is logical, excusable, almost advisable. Even the most ascetic of men cannot resist the insidiousness of spicy delights, nor can he for any length of time endure the insipidity of plain food sans sauce. Hence the popularity of such sauces amongst people who do not observe the correct culinary principle of seasoning food judiciously, befitting ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... majority of artists', for now and then we meet an artist who seems to have strayed from the path of beauty, and who is devoting his energies to an ascetic determination to keep alive one particular interpretation of a composer's work, or works; who dictates these interpretations to his pupils, and who talks of other artists who feel the bounden duty of self-expression ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... of the old Debats, which was formerly devoted exclusively to Romanticism, but at this time to the classics—the set headed by Ingres in painting and Reber in music. Theirs was a secluded and ascetic world in silent revolt against the abominations of the century. One had to hear the tone of devotion in which the members of this circle spoke of the ancients to appreciate their attitude. Nothing in our day can give any idea of them. "They say," one of the devotees once told me, "that ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... heavy green baize curtain, that at the Convent had shut off the noise of the great classroom from the rest of the house. The curtain was drawn, hiding the little iron cots brought from the Sisters' cells, ascetic couches whose narrow wire mattresses must afford scant room for repose to double sleepers now, where all were crowded, and Conventual rules must be in abeyance. The outer place held a deal table, the oil cooking-stove; some household utensils ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves |
