"Celibate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a modern mistress, who, in her narrow social ethics, insists that those who minister to the comforts of her family shall minister to it alone, that they shall not only be celibate, but shall be cut off, more or less, from their natural social ties, excludes the best ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... not altogether his fault that it had happened. He remembered well, with the curious patient memory of the celibate, the first casual caresses her dress, her breath, her fingers had given him. Then late one night as he was undressing for she had tapped at his door, timidly. She wanted to relight her candle at his ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... 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 ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... 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? Thou hast ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... it was to call attention to the fact that children will be a hindrance on the day of judgment?"[241] When such views were entertained of marriage, it need not seem remarkable that Tertullian and St. Paul of Nolan, like Tolstoy to-day, discovered the blessings of a celibate life after they were married and ran away from their wives.[242] Jerome finds marriage useful ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... it baldly. He should earn his keep. He must indeed calculate upon provision for two. Mr. Thompson had made the common mistake of believing himself self-sufficient, and Sophie Carr had unwittingly taught him that a male celibate was an anomaly in nature's reckoning. He had thought himself immune from the ordinary passions of humanity. The strangest part of it was a saddened gladness that he was not. Somehow, he did not want to be a spiritual superman. He would rather love ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... might have remarked that the emotional temperature rather rose at so unemotional an interruption. The detachment of a professional celibate seemed to reveal to the others that they stood round the woman as a ring of amorous rivals; just as a stranger coming in with frost on his coat will reveal that a room is like a furnace. The presence ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Herrnhut were soon to be busy in evangelistic labours, they found it convenient to have in their ranks a number of men and women who were not bound down by family ties; and though the young people took no celibate vows, they often kept single through life for the ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... chanting his formulae in the dim light of the temple, the atmosphere about him heavy with incense; and we imagine him as an anchorite who has put away the things of this world. But in reality there seems to have been not even such a thing as a celibate amongst the priests. Each man had his wife and his family, his house, and his comforts of food and fine linen. He indulged in the usual pastimes and was present at the merriest of feasts. The famous ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... the clerk lived and tended his garden when he was not engaged upon his ecclesiastical duties. He was often a married man, although those who were intending to proceed to the higher orders in the Church would naturally be celibate. Pope Gregory, in writing to St. Augustine of Canterbury, offered no objections to the marriage of clerks. Lyndewoode shows a preference for the unmarried clerk, but if such could not be found, a married clerk might perform his duties. Numerous wills are in existence ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... detail. But it may suitably be stated that sixteenth-century standards in these matters were not so high as those of the present day. 'If gold ruste, what shal iren do?' The highest ecclesiastical authorities were unable to check a nominally celibate priesthood from maintaining women-housekeepers who bore them families of children and were in many cases decent and respectable wives to them in all but name; indeed in Friesland the laity for obvious reasons insisted upon this violation ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... for the loss of his first wife, the king now married the beautiful daughter of a fisherman, solemnly promising her son should succeed him, for Bhishma voluntarily relinquished all right to the throne and took a vow to remain celibate. The new wife's main attraction seems to have been a sweet odor, bestowed by a saint, who restored her virginity after she had borne him a son named Vyasa, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... listening. He had heard Nolan air his views before. He was a trifle acid, was Nolan. He needed mellowing, a woman in his life. But Nolan had loved once, and the girl had died. With the curious constancy of the Irish, he had remained determinedly celibate. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... mild eyes on our young man, who had a sense of seeing in them for a moment the faint ghost of an old story, the last strange flicker, as from cold ashes, of a flame that had become the memory of a memory. This glimmer of wonder and envy, the revelation of a life intensely celibate, was for an instant infinitely touching. Nick had harboured a theory, suggested by a vague allusion from his father, who had been discreet, that their benevolent friend had had in his youth an unhappy love-affair which had led him to forswear for ever the commerce ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... earnestly and eagerly, "this is another chapter. I am an old celibate, an old monk. I cannot ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... others who put it down to greed of wealth and reluctance to incur expense. Others, again, spoke of some early love affair, and of a fair-haired girl who had pined away on the shores of the Atlantic. Whatever the reason, Ferrier remained strictly celibate. In every other respect he conformed to the religion of the young settlement, and gained the name of being an orthodox ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... abstention from intercourse except when children are desired. This has been called a counsel of perfection. It could only rightly be so described where such a method of life was both desired and approved by both husband and wife. It would not be a fair thing for either to enforce a practically celibate life on the other without the fullest understanding and consent before the ...
— Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation • Florence E. Barrett
... the latter connection. Cases falling in this category demand careful scrutiny by biological and psychological experts, before any action can be taken in the interest of eugenics; in many cases the affected individual himself will be glad to cooeperate with society by remaining celibate or by the practice of birth control, to the end of leaving no offspring to ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... the habit, ever since she was seventeen, of giving her lovers similar advice, and up to this time no one of them has ever taken it. She therefore has had the not unnatural hope, I think, of organising at one time or another all these disappointed and faithful swains into a celibate brotherhood; and perhaps of driving by the interesting monastery with her husband and calling his attention modestly to the fact that these poor monks were filling their barren lives with deeds of piety, trying to remember their Creator with such assiduity that ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... editor of the New York Albion has had the good fortune to obtain as contributor to his poetical columns the name of Susanna Moodie, better known among the admirers of elegiac poetry, in her days of celibate life, as Susanna Strickland. From the specimen with which she has furnished Dr. Bartlett of her poetic ardour, we are happy to find that neither the Canadian atmosphere nor the circumstances attendant upon the alteration of her name, have dimmed the light of that ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... along the boulevard 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 ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... Quality: 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 ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... 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, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the Natal colonists had a great deal to do with making the Zulu war, but this is not the case. It is quite true that they were rejoiced at the prospect of the break-up of Cetywayo's power, because they were very much afraid of him and of his "celibate man-slaying machine," which, under all the circumstances, is not wonderful. But the war was a distinctly Imperial war, made by an Imperial officer, without consultation with Colonial authorities, on Imperial grounds, viz., because Cetywayo menaced Her Majesty's power in South Africa. Of course, ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... more sons of every family are dedicated to the priesthood, and as Lamaism requires its priests to be celibate, the birth rate is low. To-day there are only a few million Mongols in a country half as large as the United States (exclusive of Alaska), a great proportion of the male population being lamas. With no education, except in the books of their sect, ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... The see suffered, however, from the Danish raids which occurred during the next two reigns; but with Bishop Athelwold its prestige was quite restored. To him is due the establishment of a Benedictine monastery at Winchester, the previous convent having been one of secular (and non-celibate) canons. With the supremacy of the Danes, we find Cnut both elected king and subsequently buried at Winchester. Edward the Confessor, moreover, was crowned in the cathedral on Easter Day, 1043, so that Winchester maintained its position well up to this date. Further invasions of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Winchester - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Philip Walsingham Sergeant
... be celibate is mine own desire," broke in Queen Elizabeth. "Shall every curly fool's-pate of a girl be turning after an anointed bishop? I will have this thing ended, certes! and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... hungry search for a certain exhilaration which he can only have when he has the courage to cease from wandering. Men knew better than this in old times—in the time, for example, of Shakespeare's heroes. When Shakespeare's men are really celibate they praise the undoubted advantages of celibacy, liberty, irresponsibility, a chance of continual change. But they were not such fools as to continue to talk of liberty when they were in such a condition that they could be made happy ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Graves, as he liked to be called, was far more radical. But a great deal was forgiven this attractive boyish celibate by the women of the Episcopal parish. They enjoyed his scoldings, gave him their confidences, and asked his advice, though they never followed it. His slender, black-clad figure, with the Roman collar, was admired ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... money on theatres and boat rides and candy in the next three months to have paid the rent on a flat. It is true John's net income was too small and uncertain to have justified the founding of a family. But it was also true that they spent every cent they had. The celibate life is an extravagant life. One of the innumerable sources of modern extravagance is found ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... loveless, you; Restless and lonely, shaken by your own moods, You are celibate and single, scorning a comrade even, Threshing your own passions with no woman for the threshing-floor, Finishing your dreams for your own sake only, Playing your great game around the world, alone, Without playmate, or ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... was a lot of tea-drinking, I admit, but no doubt this beverage plays a strong part in the social life of the Potteries. There was also much handling of domestic provisions—streaky bacon, cheese, and so forth—but all this was proper enough in a play that largely turned upon the changes in an old celibate's menage. But in the main it was a comedy of character, a struggle between youth and crabbed age, in which the younger will and the quicker wit prevailed. As we first see him, James Ollerenshaw is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various
... 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 pessimists would have ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... congratulating them. But this bland behaviour of the people is unfortunately not maintained when they discuss their priests. And in the Lika, where the population leads a rough, laborious life, they are not satisfied to have an academical discussion. They hold that if a man is celibate he is not manly, and scenes have taken place which Hogarth ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... Mrs. Granville, the landlady who had mysteriously receded into the unknown before the advent of Sarah and Hilda, but with whom George Cannon must have had many interviews. No doubt the room was an epitome of the character of Mrs. Granville, presumably a fussy and precise celibate, with a place for everything and everything in its place, and an ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... they demand." Hence the Faeda Venus of Battista Mantovano. Bayle rejects the history for a curious reason, venery being colder in summer than in winter, and quotes the proverb "Aux mods qui n'ont pas d' R, peu embrasser et bien boire." But in the case of a celibate priesthood such scandals are inevitable: witness the famous Jesuit ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... which favored the swift and magnificent expansion of the French occupation were unfavorable to the healthy natural growth of permanent settlements. A post of soldiers, a group of cabins of trappers and fur-traders, and a mission of nuns and celibate priests, all together give small promise of rapid increase of population. It is rather to the fact that the French settlements, except at the seaboard, were constituted so largely of these elements, than to any alleged sterility of the French stock, that the fatal weakness of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the noble families. Many Scots had read the Lutheran books and disbelieved in transubstantiation; thought that money paid for prayers to the dead was money wasted; preferred a married and preaching to a celibate and licentious clergy who celebrated Mass; were convinced that saintly images were idols, that saintly miracles were impostures. Above all, the nobles coveted the lands of the Church, the ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... 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 ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... molded by the experience of the years. He remembered that she was a spinster, yet there was about her none of the emptiness, the starved quality, of the woman with her destiny unfulfilled; nothing of the futility, the incompletion, of the celibate that causes the imagination to turn with relief to contemplation of the most bovine mother of a family. It must have been an impervious boor indeed who would venture to jest upon Miss Allison's single state. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... discharged, as already noted, priestly functions in connexion with the State religion in addition to their ordinary duties. As a rule, priests proper, frowned upon as non-producers, were recruited from the lower classes, were celibate, unintellectual, idle, and immoral. There was nothing, even in the elaborate ceremonies on special occasions in the Buddhist temples, which could be likened to what is known as 'public worship' ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... religio-sexual outbursts in nuns and Roman Catholic female devotees who lead celibate lives are very numerous; I will, however, call attention to but one other: St. Veronica was so much in love with the divine lion that she took a young lion to bed with her, fondled and kissed it, and allowed it to suck her breasts.[99] Throughout sacred literature, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... large family could easily result from quite a few sexual unions. For the rest the couple should be celibate. Any intercourse not having procreation as its intention is 'sexual union as an end in itself,' and therefore by inference ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... seem to find his bachelor state amiss. His little house, in 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
... was Eustace Leigh; a layman still, but still at his old work. By two years of intrigue and labor from one end of Ireland to the other, he had been trying to satisfy his conscience for rejecting "the higher calling" of the celibate; for mad hopes still lurked within that fiery heart. His brow was wrinkled now; his features harshened; the scar upon his face, and the slight distortion which accompanied it, was hidden by a bushy beard from all but himself; and he never forgot it for a day, nor forgot who had ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... fabric was disfigured by none of the isolation and squalor which so often attend the confirmed celibate. His home life was a model of order and decorum, his home as unchallenged as a bishopric, its hospitality, though select, profuse and untiring. An elder sister presided at his board, as simple, kindly and unostentatious, but as methodical as himself. He was a ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... struggles of the Middle Age; first, of that between Scriptural or unconscious, and Popish or conscious, purity: in a word, between innocence and prudery; next, of the struggle between healthy human affection, and the Manichean contempt with which a celibate clergy would have all men regard the names of husband, wife, and parent. To exhibit this latter falsehood in its miserable consequences, when received into a heart of insight and determination sufficient to follow out all belief to its ultimate practice, is ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... 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 of the practice. Races were established ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... singular appendages, explaining that since his ears had been bored he had ceased to have headaches (he had had headaches). We do not present the chevalier as an accomplished man; but surely we can pardon, in an old celibate whose heart sends so much blood to his left cheek, these adorable qualities, founded, perhaps, on some sublime ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... while some of these communes are still living under the guidance of their founders, others, equally successful, have continued to prosper for many years after the death of their original leaders. Some are celibate; but others inculcate, or at least permit marriage. Some gather their members into a common or "unitary" dwelling; but others, with no less success, maintain the family relation and the ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... you cast the modesty of your young wife and the virginity of your daughter as food for that envious celibate, you leave them alone in the mysterious tete-a-tete of the confessional, with no obstacle between his burning lust and the object of that lost, between those mouths which ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... Settlement? After an adventurous early life, in which, as if youth-intoxicated, he had plunged from danger to danger, experience to experience, he suddenly found himself in a society of which he had never so much as heard, a company of celibate brothers and sisters holding all goods and possessions in common, and trying to live the "angelic life" on earth. Illness detained him for a month against his will, but at the end of that time he had joined the Community; and although it had been twenty-five years ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... suggest themselves in connection with these strange, new elements—new, of course, only in the sense of human knowledge—which all these centuries have been about us, yet which have managed until now to keep themselves as invisible and as intangible as spirits. Have these celibate atoms remained thus always isolated, taking no part in world-building? Are they destined throughout the sweep of time to keep up this celibate existence? And why do these elements alone refuse all fellowship, while the atoms of all the other seventy-odd known elements seek out mates under proper ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... the spider, because they say it spread its web over the mouth of the cave where Hasan and Husain lay concealed from their enemies and thus prevented it from being searched. Some of them have Pirs or spiritual preceptors, these being Muhammadan beggars, not necessarily celibate. The ceremony of adhesion is that a man should drink sherbet from the cup from which his preceptor has drunk. They do not observe impurity after a death nor bathe on returning from ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... 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 England. Whether it be ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... sisters entered a 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 ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... 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 ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... his kinship, is a home-lover at heart, and even in war will not separate himself from his wife and children. This makes his impact slow, his campaigns unscientific. It prepares for him frequent defeats, such as that of the Candavian mountains, which a celibate army would have avoided. But it makes his conquests, when he does conquer, more enduring, while it explains those perpetual demands for land, for a settlement within the Empire, almost on any terms, with which, ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... it was he, intimately he, who responded, as if from afar off, to the touch of her infinite solicitude and abasement, the joy and the shame of her love. As he watched and knew his lips tightened and his face paled with the throb of his own renunciation, he folded his celibate arms in the habit of his brotherhood and was caught up into a knowledge and an imitation of how the spotless Original would have looked upon a woman suffering and transported thus. The poverty of the play faded out; he became ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... 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 other seven ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... that way to her. She has had so much trouble already. Your Church seems so selfish. Forgive me, but I do resent these celibate views. They are unnatural." ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... 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 of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was the sum and substance of his celibate life. He was an old type of ranchman whose waking hours were devoted to a physical labor which left no room for anything else. But Jeff knew that for all his roughness of manner and speech, a roughness which left his own partner, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum |
