"Celibate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the new block of stabling, white walled, red-roofed, painted with cross beams to its pointed gable, was kept with meticulous care. Patsy did his own work. Lady O'Gara was right perhaps when she called him a natural celibate. ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... have lived in the West, and worked and slaved like him, blest and beloved by all classes, creeds, and races. Father Lacombe was one of them. The part he played in the life of Western Canada will be written some day by one who understands how such men, celibate, and dedicated to religious life, may play a stupendous part in the development of civilization. Something of him is to be found in my description ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... convent, as it was supposed hoping to expiate by a life given up to prayer the crimes, as she deemed them, of her brother. Meantime, appalled by the shadow of their father's memory, George and Antoine decided to remain celibate, a pair marked out ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... stories—two of women and one of a man. Mildred Lawson and John Norton are celibates by nature. Agnes Lahens is a celibate from environment and circumstance. Each of the three is utterly different from the other, and yet all are alike in that they are the products of a modern civilization. Mildred and John are without that compulsive force which is known as the sexual passion. If ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... of "virgins'' who, in the church of the early middle ages, lived with professedly celibate monks to whom they were said to be united by spiritual love. The practice was suppressed by the Lateran ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... father's capital, and on the third day of his investigation had spied, under a nursing sister's habit, and above a gentle breast bearing an ivory cross, the face of his dreams. Having taken scientific steps to discover whether that particular garb entailed celibate vows, and learning that it did not, he had industriously run its wearer to sainted earth—had, that is to say, pursued her to a top-floor tenement and there found her upon her knees with sanitary ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... became more and more doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all! Splendid and beautiful and courageous people must come together and have children, women with their fine senses and glorious devotion must be freed from the net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to be childless and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men whom need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of circumstances have forced upon them. We all know that, and so few dare even to whisper it for fear that they should seem, in seeking to save the family, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... social evil is the postponement or abandonment of marriage by many young people, the celibate life imposed upon students and soldiers, the declaration of some physicians that continence is injurious, and lax opinion, especially ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... a bachelors' dinner of confirmed old bachelors. They had instituted this regular banquet twenty years before, christening it "The Celibate," and at the time there were fourteen of them, all fully determined never to marry. Now there were only four of them left; three were dead and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... school of theology Capes, Mr. Cardwell, Dr. Catastrophe, the Catholicity of English Church Catholicus's letters to the Times Celibacy, observations on Celibate clergy scheme Changes in movement Christian Remembrancer Christian Year Christianity, Church of England, two schools of Christie, Albany Christie, J.F. Church, the, in eighteenth century Dr. Whately's theories on Dr. Arnold's theories Coleridge's ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... Baron, the old celibate reflected, as much as he had the mind to reflect, over this incident. If he were to part from Flore (the mere thought confused him) where could he find another woman? Should he marry? At his age he should be married for his money, and a legitimate wife would use him far more cruelly than Flore. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... and vulgar language for any one to be heard to use, and particularly so for a godly celibate. But the words were scarce said, when off fly those monks' hoods, and the waist-ropes rattle as they fall on the floor, and the gray gowns drop ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... and revolutionists in order that their minds may be single to the work which has claimed their lives and all the forces of their beings may be bent in one direction. Sometimes, too, such persons have remained celibate to avoid the burden of caring ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... Gotthold, earnestly and eagerly, 'this is another chapter. I am an old celibate, an old monk. I cannot advise you in ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not retouched; and her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere photographs, but the world of an artist. All that is inessential she casts away, all that is essential she retains; she idealises, and that is why her picture of a lost mistress has had power to keep a man a celibate to the end of his days, and why she can break a human heart with the picture of a dead child. She is a painter, but she ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... new official's house, and Mrs. Judson was entertained by the wife, who questioned her eagerly, and asked if she knew how to dance in the English way; but was satisfied on hearing that the wives of priests did not dance. As Buddhist priests are celibate, Mrs. Judson must have been rather a puzzle to the good lady; and all this time the real work of the mission had not commenced, for the preliminary operation of acquiring the language had not been completed, and Judson was warned not to attempt preaching till he was familiar with it, by Dr. Carey ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Lavington! cannot you see that in those barbarous and profligate ages of the later empire, it was impossible for men to discern the spiritual beauty of marriage, degraded as it had been by heathen brutality? Do you not see that there must have been a continual tendency in the minds of a celibate clergy to look with contempt, almost with spite, on pleasures which were forbidden ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... certain other benefices of the Church should not be given to any one related to him. The people called him Nocens (the Guilty One, or the Harmful One) instead of Innocent, and immortalized the prolific paternity of this saintly celibate ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... to say he agreed ardently with whatever explanation she put forward. Old ladies who give good dinners to a Low Church British curate, or an abbe of the Roman confession, or, indeed, to the needy celibate exponents of any creed whatsoever, may always count upon the active conversational support of their spiritual adviser. And it is not only within the fold of Papacy that careful Christians find the road to heaven made smooth by the arts ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... loquacious, she had even ventured on the Bishop. And the good old Bishop, near-sighted and slightly hard of hearing, had carried away the genial impression that Brenton's wife was a very pretty woman and would be of inestimable help to him in managing a parish. Indeed, the Bishop, who was celibate, thought much about the helpful influence of a proper wife, the evening after his short talk with Catia. He even wondered whether he had been quite wise in allowing the two of them—for, ever afterward, he persisted ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... a dull time they must have with the Married Men, the Celibate, the Paralytic, and Carnaby! I'm glad my girlhood wasn't ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... within a College gate; if it was impossible to find a man to wash clothes, a laundress might be employed, but she must be old and of unprepossessing appearance. A scholar or Fellow of a college had not, however, committed himself irrevocably to a celibate life, for marriage is included among the "causas rationabiles et honestas" which vacated a fellowship. It was possible, though probably infrequent, for a Fellow who had not proceeded to Holy Orders to leave the College "uxore ducta," giving up his ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... the guests' house, and Ole's charming daughter—the Rose of Westfjord-dalen—did not keep us long waiting. Roast mutton, tender as her own heart, potatoes plump as her cheeks, and beer sparkling as her eyes, graced the board; but emptiness, void as our own celibate lives, was there when we arose. In the upper room there were beds, with linen fresh as youth and aromatic as spring; and the peace of a full stomach and a clear ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... right. I thought it very decent of him to meet me himself at the station. He apologised for having insisted on an answer to his written question—was I a confirmed bachelor? The ladies of the parish were in favour of a celibate curate, he said, and he himself did not want to be bothered by a man who would be getting married directly, and going away. I told him there would not be any fear of misdemeanour of that ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... in the presence of the ailing king, he said: "Set thine house in order, for thou wilt die in this world and not live in the next" a fate which Hezekiah incurred because he had failed to take unto himself a wife and bring forth posterity. The king's defense, that he had preferred a celibate's life because he had seen in the holy spirit that he was destined to have impious children, the prophet did not consider valid. He rebutted it with the words: "Why does thou concern thyself with the secrets of the All-Merciful? ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... normal things. He was not one of those who are set apart by the strange aloofness of genius, whose souls burn with a wild light, instead of with the comfortable glow of the hearth fire. He was an ordinary man, loved ordinary things. Neither was he effeminate or a celibate by instinct, though he had not Reddin's fury of masculinity. Sex would never have awakened in him but at the touch of spiritual love. But the touch had come; it had awakened; it threatened ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... holy milkman, who acts as priest of the sacred dairy, is subject to a variety of irksome and burdensome restrictions during the whole time of his incumbency, which may last many years. Thus he must live at the sacred dairy and may never visit his home or any ordinary village. He must be celibate; if he is married he must leave his wife. On no account may any ordinary person touch the holy milkman or the holy dairy; such a touch would so defile his holiness that he would forfeit his office. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... custom which was universal three or four centuries ago, of entrusting education to celibate priests, forbade Fellows of Colleges to marry, under the penalty of losing their fellowships. It is as though the winning horses at races were rendered ineligible to become sires, which I need hardly say is the exact reverse ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... or awed the villagers; thousands of religious zealots in 1844 abandoned their vocations and, drawing on white robes, awaited expectantly the second coming of Christ; every cult from free love to celibate austerity found zealous followers; the "new woman" declared her independence in short hair and bloomers; people sought social salvation in new health codes, in vegetarian boarding-houses, and in physical culture clubs; ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... almost as one returned from the dead that Louis Fores entered the Five Towns Hotel on Easter Saturday afternoon, for in his celibate prime he had been a habitue of the place. He had a thrill; and he knew that he would be noticed, were it only as the hero and victim of a street accident; a few remaining plasters still drew attention to his recent history. At the same time, the thrill which affected him was not ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... husband and wife. This post-nuptial problem is far more difficult to solve, for the intimacy of married life, especially in the earlier years, is sure to offer stimuli that are likely to make sexual instincts more insistent than those that come from celibate repression. However, self-control and temperance in marriage is no new and unattainable ideal, and harmonious adjustment of men and women in marriage is far more common than the ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... belonging to a brigade in command of a General who believed in a celibate army asked permission to marry, as he had two good-conduct badges ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... years younger than she! And he's got nothing but his curacy! And he's a celibate! I heard the bishop laughing at him because he ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... had a son who was married to another friar's daughter, and a daughter who was the wife of a foreigner. In short, bastards of the friars are to be found everywhere in the Islands. Regarding this merely as the natural outcome of the celibate rule, I do not criticize it, but simply wish to show that the pretended sanctity of the regular clergy in the Philippines was an absurdity, and that the monks were in no degree less frail than mankind ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... referred to are those used by the worldly-minded for the sake of pleasure and sensual enjoyment. The celibate should avoid these. ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... of the Shah of Persia is a gold casket studded with emeralds, which is said to have the magic power of rendering the owner invisible as long as he remains celibate. I fancy that this is a safe claim, for the tradition is not likely to be put to the proof in the case of a Shah! Probably there has never been an opportunity of testing the miraculous powers ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... seriously that a celibate who has been subject to a diet consisting of the herb hanea, of cucumbers, of purslane and the applications of leeches to his ears, as recommended by Sterne, would be able to carry by storm the honor of your wife? Suppose that a diplomat had been clever enough to affix a ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... to marry they present themselves to the People's Commissary, who witnesses their marriage. The same course is followed as regards separating, only that the Commissary, after freeing the unhappy pair, inscribes the man afresh on the celibate list and the woman on the register of marriageable persons, notifying each of the obligation to find another partner within six months. In case children have been born from their union, they are either delivered to the custody ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... Convinced, with many good men of all ages and creeds, that a celibate life was the fittest one for a clergyman, he had fled from St. Nepomuc's into the wilderness to avoid temptation, and beheld at his cell-door a fairer fiend than ever came to St. Dunstan. A fairer fiend, no doubt; for St. Dunstan's imagination created his temptress for ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... having a bad time," mused the celibate, suddenly kindled into passion. "One lives but once in this world, and one must live one's ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... . . oh, thinking, if you like, How utterly dissociated was I A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife Of Guido . . . . . . I had a whole store of strengths Eating into my heart, which craved employ, And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help— And yet there was no way in the wide ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... would soon then tire of it. Chesterton tells us that already in America there is demand for less divorce consequent on the increased facilities over there. In England there is demand for more. Let it be given freely and the demand will soon cease. Why should our policy be dictated by a celibate priesthood? Does Chesterton think that people who hate one another are going to live together as though they were the most ardent lovers? Does he consider that it would be better to have no divorce and no marriage as a consequence? Does ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Church. After that date they were, with one exception, members of the Petrovitch family. This has been vaguely accounted for by saying that to prevent quarrels the Montenegrins decided to make the post hereditary in the Petrovitch family. As the Vladika was celibate, his successor had to be chosen from among members of his family. Later events, however, throw much light on this alleged interference with the rules of ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... use everything and everybody in sight to attain that object. He means to succeed and he will. You're purely incidental; but he has that perverted, middle-class family pride that will make him prevent you from getting out and trying your own wings. Nature never intended a woman like you to be a celibate, any more than I was so intended. And sooner or late you'll marry somebody—if only to hop out of the fire into ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... reflected bitterly! Dick was in love. She had not watched him for that very thing for so long without being fairly sure now. She had caught, as simple David with his celibate heart could never have caught, the tone in Dick's voice when he mentioned the Wheelers. She had watched him for the past few months in church on Sunday mornings, and she knew that as she watched him, so ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... thousand stitches into the ruching of her crimson skirt well symbolised the human attitude that night. As leaning heavily on a man's arm she crossed the floor under the blazing chandelier, she secretly exulted in each stitch of her incredible labour. Two hours, and she would be back in the cold, celibate bedroom, littered with the shabby realities of existence; and the spotted glass would mirror her lugubrious yawn! Eight hours, and she would be in the dreadful shop, tying on the black apron! The crimson skirt would never look the ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... heart (who has already been told this morning that I am happily married, Francesca engaged, Salemina a determined celibate, but Benella quite at liberty) peeps under Salemina's umbrella at this juncture, and says tenderly, "And what do you think about these vexed questions, dear madam?" Which gives her a chance to reply with some distinctness, "I shall not know what I think for several months ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the sun shines and life calls! There are no sillier things in life than the mere affectations of intellectuality. Mere solemnity is both an ugly and a futile thing, and nothing is duller than a constant enforced earnestness. I remember a dear old celibate professor of mine who, having met a number of self-consciously intellectual women, became so annoyed that at last when asked whether he did not rejoice in the higher education of women he broke out with the sentence, "No! I don't like clever women—I like silly girls." The ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... But her Relation to him (it may be fear'd) made her very disagreeable: For a Man of his Humour and Estate can no more be satisfy'd with one Woman, than with one Dish of Meat; and to say Truth, 'tis something unmodish. However, he might have dy'd a pure Celibate, and altogether unexpert of Women, had his good or bad Hopes only terminated in Sir Philip's Niece. But the brave and haughty Mr. Would-be was not to be baulk'd by Appearances of Virtue, which he thought all Womankind only did affect; besides, he promis'd himself ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... Roman Catholic Church; that the friend whom he apostrophizes was the Ideal Man, the universal humanity, who gradually develops into the Divine Ideal, and becomes a Messiah, while the Woman is the Church, the "black but comely bride" of Solomon. "Shakespeare found himself between two loves—the celibate Church on the one hand, that deified herself, and the Reformed Church on the other, that eschewed Mariolatry and restored worship to its proper object.... Thus, Shakespeare parabolically opposed the Mariolatry of his time to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... the uniform of a celibate Order of Gray Sisters; and the matron trusted me in an unusual degree, when she consented that I should undertake this journey on a secret mission. I came to Niagara, as I supposed, to keep an appointment with my brother, and I met you. If I lingered ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... celibacy of the monk and the estrangement of the knight from his family, doing this by means of the inner life of the family; for it substituted, in the place of the negative emptiness of the duty of holiness of the celibate, the positive morality of marriage and the family; while, instead of the abstract poverty and the idleness of the monkish piety and of knighthood, it asserted that property was the object of labor, i.e. it asserted the self-governed morality of civil society ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... I merely suspect that you are not so sure of your vocation as you were in the Clergy House. Even a deacon is human, I suppose; and if life is alluring, he can't help feeling it. Are you still sure that the clergy should be celibate, ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... with one or two officers of the University, the whole female society of Oxford. The change was inevitable, if education was to be made a profession, instead of being, as it had been in the hands of celibate Fellows of Colleges, merely the transitory occupation of a man whose final destination was the parish. Those who remember the old Common Room life, which is now departing, can not help looking back with a wistful eye to its bachelor ease, its pleasant companionship, its interesting ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... herself. Modern she is, not because of her petty traits, but simply because Mr. Moore has painted a young woman of the day, rich, and so selfish that at the end her selfishness strangles the little soul she possesses. Her brother Harold, a sedate business man, is also a celibate whose ambition in life seems to be the catching of the 9:10 A.M. train to Victoria Station and the return to his suburban home on the 6 P.M. (He is not unlike a fussy little man, Willy Brooks, in the same Irish writer's early novel, Spring Days.) A rejected but ever hopeful suitor ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... employed men and women, shop assistants, clerks, and so forth, living in, milliners, typists, teachers, servants who have practically no prospect whatever of marrying and experiencing those domestic blisses the Socialist is supposed to want to rob them of. They are involuntary monks and nuns, celibate not from any high or religious motive, but through economic hardship. Consider all that amount of pent-up, thwarted or perverted emotional possibility, the sheer irrational waste ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... represented as the other. Froude had left the dons celibate and clerical. He found them, for the most part, married and lay. There was every variety of opinion in the common rooms, and every variety of perambulators in the parks. London hours had been adopted, and the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... parallel illustration. It is well-known that bachelors are more short lived than married men, but this is not owing entirely to the hygienic influence of marriage. It is partly owing to the inferiority of bachelors as a class. The men who remain celibate are either too inferior personally to win the regard of women, or are generally deficient in the strong affections which seek a conjugal life, and the energies which make them fearless of its responsibilities and burdens. Evidently they have not as a class ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... persecute the old religion before they had ceased to belong to it. That is one of the transitional complexities that can only be conveyed by such contradictions. A person of the type and time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally, and even fiercely, that priests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody caught talking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which may be very variously explained, covered the Church of England, and in a great degree the people of ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... style. Waiting for a sign from me. We'd still be playing by different rules if you hadn't had more sense than I, and finally realized that somewhere along the line we must have got our signals mixed. And I thought you were some kind of frosty offworld celibate." She let her hand go out and her fingers rustled through his hair. Something she had been wanting to ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... looked out at his huge but well-ordered household. Like every head of a prosperous Abbey, Abbot John, the fourth of the name, was a man of various accomplishments. Through his own chosen instruments he had to minister a great estate and to keep order and decorum among a large body of men living a celibate life. He was a rigid disciplinarian toward all beneath him, a supple diplomatist to all above. He held high debate with neighboring abbots and lords, with bishops, with papal legates, and even on occasion with the King's majesty himself. Many were the subjects with ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... owned no superior but the Pope, and between the two rivals could avoid supervision altogether. Such men as Thomas a Kempis, or the great Jean Gerson, were rare indeed; and the monasteries had let themselves lose their missionary character, and become mere large farms, inhabited by celibate gentlemen and their attendants, or by the superfluous daughters of the nobles and gentry. Such devotion as led Esclairmonde to the pure atmosphere of prayer and self-sacrifice had well- nigh died ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to show, in the most explicit manner possible, first, how irresistibly he was impelled toward the celibate life and the practice of poverty; and second, that in yielding to this impulse, he was also drawn away from his former view of our Saviour, as simply the perfect man, to the full acceptance of the supernatural truth that ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... irritating when, as often happens, it displays bad teeth ostentatiously gold-stopped. This man's smile was sincere and he had beautiful teeth. His hands were nervous and thin, his bearing was natural and his voice gentle. Here, evidently, was an altruist, perhaps a zealot, probably a celibate. He was introduced as a rural religionist from Gumma prefecture set on reforming his countrymen. It is important to know the strength of the reforming power which Japan is itself generating: here was a man who for eight years had lived a life of poverty ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... clearness than Jesus Christ ever attained to: "I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn." Paul wished the same end as Jesus. He desired to see every person celibate, but having a little more common sense than Jesus, he saw that such preaching would never be extensively practised (especially by young widows) and he was obliged to make a concession to human frailty. The very fact, however, shows that his view of the question was radically wrong. Marriage ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote |
