"Incestuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... credebant accolae, saith Pausanias. They formed some like storks, apes, bulls, and yet seriously believed: and that which was impious and abominable, they made their gods notorious whoremasters, incestuous Sodomites (as commonly they were all, as well as Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Mercury, Neptune, &c.), thieves, slaves, drudges (for Apollo and Neptune made tiles in Phrygia), kept sheep, Hercules emptied stables, Vulcan a blacksmith, unfit to dwell upon the earth for ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... like the world of the late historical plays. It is an image of the world as intellect is made to feel it. It is a society governed by the enemies of intellect, by the sensual and the worldly, by deadly sinners and the philosophers of bread and cheese. The King is a drunken, incestuous murderer, who fears intellect. The Queen is a false woman, who cannot understand intellect. Polonius is a counsellor who suspects intellect. Ophelia is a doll without intellect. Laertes is a boor who destroys intellect. ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... sound him, should be closetted by his Mother. A Man is conceal'd in the Rushes to overhear their Discourse; whom Amlethus discovers and kills. When the Queen is frighted at this Behaviour of his; he tasks her about her criminal Course of Life, and incestuous Conversation with her former Husband's Murtherer; confesses his Madness is but counterfeited, to protect himself, and secure his Revenge for his Father; to which he injoins the Queen's Silence. Fengo sends Amlethus to Britain: Two of the King's Servants attend him ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... Israel were not wholly without merits. In a high degree they possessed qualities of extraordinary excellence. There were no incestuous relations among them, they were not evil-tongued, they did not change their names, they clung to the Hebrew language, never giving it up,[106] and great fraternal affection prevailed among them. If one happened ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... the good and great Jupiter of ancient Paganism? To imitate such a God would be to take as a model a rebellious son, who wrests his father's throne from him and then mutilates his body; it is imitating a debauchee and adulterer, an incestuous, intemperate man, whose conduct would cause any reasonable mortal to blush. What would have become of men under the control of Paganism if they had imagined, according to Plato, that virtue consisted in ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... Tristram and Iseult, are wholly lacking, there is an equal lack of such minor things as the episodes of Lancelot and the two Elaines, of Pelleas and the Lady of the Lake, and many others. Nor is this lack compensated by the stories of the incestuous (though on neither side consciously incestuous, and on the queen's quite innocent) adventure of Arthur with his sister Margause, of the exceedingly unromantic wooing of Morgane le Fee, and of the warlock-planned intercourse of King Ban and the ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... he fed a thousand daily at his table. But notwithstanding his munificent piety, he was early made to feel the power of the Church. His union with Queen Bertha, a cousin of the fourth degree, whom he had married a year before his accession, was condemned by the pope as incestuous, and he was summoned to repudiate her. Robert, who loved his wife dearly, resisted the papal authority, and excommunication and interdict followed.[40] Everyone fled from him; only the servants ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... glorious to himself, and beneficial to his people. He governed the kingdom of Kent fifty years, and dying in 616, left the succession to his son, Eadbald. This prince, seduced by a passion for his mother-in-law, deserted for some time the Christian faith, which permitted not these incestuous marriages: his whole people immediately returned with him to idolatry. Laurentius, the successor of Augustine, found the Christian worship wholly abandoned, and was prepared to return to France, in order to ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... contended was transubstantiated into real flesh and blood.... A very common way of repelling these charges was for one sect of Christians, which, of course, denounced all other sects as heretics, to urge that human sacrifices and incestuous festivals were not celebrated by that sect, but that they were practised by other sects; such, for example, as the Marcionites and the Capocratians. (Justin Mart., 'Apology,' i., 35; Iren., adv. Haer. i., 24; Clem. Alex., i., 3.) When Tertullian joined ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... in the hope of securing the peace between the two realms. It was only after the lady had borne five children to Alfonso that she voluntarily terminated the obnoxious union, and Innocent found it prudent, as in France, to legitimize the offspring of a marriage which he had denounced as incestuous. Not one of the princes of the peninsula was spared. Sancho of Navarre incurred interdict by reason of suspected dealings with the Saracens, while the marriage of his sister with Peter of Aragon, the vassal of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... in the tragedy, where it begins to transpire to Oedipus that he himself was the unwitting murderer and the incestuous wretch whose exile the oracle demands before dispelling the plague,—here the divine genius of Sophokles introduces a chorus of general merriment, somewhat as Shakespeare uses the maundering fool as a foil to heighten King Lear's fate. No ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... adopted involved the propagation of the human species through incest Adam and Eve's sons must have had children by their sisters. If two couples had been created, their families might have intermarried, and mankind would not then have sprang from the incestuous intercourse of the very first generation. Surely omnipotence might have obviated the necessity of a crime against which civilised consciences ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... the same way can a child really get the beauty of Siegfried? What can he make out of the incestuous love of Siegmund and Sieglinda? And of Siegfried's naive passion on his first glimpse of a woman? What do we want him to make of it? Is that the way we wish to introduce him to sex? And as for the rest, the allegory of the ring itself, ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me: and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands, with heartbreaking partings, and then—everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells! And again, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... philosophers among the Persians, intrusted with the government both civil and ecclesiastick, much addicted to the observation of the stars. Zoroaster is reported to be their first author. They had this custom amongst them, to preserve and continue their families by incestuous copulation with their own mothers. Some are of opinion, that the three wise men that came out of the East to worship our ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... because he sweetly fiddles; Nor for his prophecies in riddles: But for a more substantial cause— Apollo's patron of the laws; Whom Paulus ever must adore, As parent of the golden ore, By Phoebus, an incestuous birth, Begot upon his grandam Earth; By Phoebus first produced to light; By Vulcan form'd so round and bright: Then offer'd at the shrine of Justice, By clients to her priests and trustees. Nor, when we see Astraea[1] ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Monster answerd soon. To mee, who with eternal Famin pine, Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven, There best, where most with ravin I may meet; Which here, though plenteous, all too little seems 600 To stuff this Maw, this vast unhide-bound Corps. To whom th' incestuous Mother thus repli'd. Thou therefore on these Herbs, and Fruits, & Flours Feed first, on each Beast next, and Fish, and Fowle, No homely morsels, and whatever thing The Sithe of Time mowes down, devour unspar'd, Till I in Man residing through the Race, His thoughts, his looks, words, actions ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... incestuous, that adulterate beast, With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts, (O wicked wit and gifts that have the power So to seduce!) won to his shameful lust The will of my most seeming virtuous queen: Oh, Hamlet, what a falling off was there! From ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... Theodora, the restorer of images, in the reign of her son, Michael the Drunkard. But the uncle of the Emperor, the Caesar Bardas, who was a man of flagrantly immoral life, had divorced his own wife, and was living publicly with his son's widow. For this incestuous connection Ignatius repelled him from the communion. Fired with indignation at this insult, the Caesar determined to ruin both the Patriarch and his patroness, the Empress-mother, and with this view persuaded the Emperor to free ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... seduced by a young man and borne a son. First the father admitted parentage and promised marriage. Then he denied parentage, and, apparently without a shadow of evidence, alleged that the child was the result of an incestuous intercourse between its mother and a relative. At the trial, having, it seemed, come to the conclusion that this wicked slander would not enable him to escape an affiliation order, he again frankly admitted his parentage. In the country ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... legitimate issue of his marriage with Sarah, giving naive or derogatory accounts of the relations which connected the others with their common ancestor; Ammon and Moab were, for instance, the issue of the incestuous union of Lot and his daughters. Midian and his sons were descended from Keturah, who was merely a concubine, Ishmael was the son of an Egyptian slave, while the "hairy" Esau had sold his birthright and the primacy of the Edomites ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Would haue mourn'd longer) married with mine Vnkle, My Fathers Brother: but no more like my Father, Then I to Hercules. Within a Moneth? Ere yet the salt of most vnrighteous Teares Had left the flushing of her gauled eyes, She married. O most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to Incestuous sheets: It is not, nor it cannot come to good. But breake my heart, for I must hold my tongue. Enter Horatio, Barnardo, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare |
