"Nudity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thus writes of a famous monk: "There, in a shed at the back of a small farm, half sitting, half reclining on a mat and a skin of some wild animal, was a man of about seventy years of age, in a state of nudity. A small piece of red blanket was thrown over his shoulders, barely covering them. His whole body was encrusted with filth, and his nails had grown like claws. His vacant look showed him to be a poor, helpless idiot. Beside him a large wood fire was ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... departing from the individual to the universal. The red-headed woman who used to dine at the Ratmort does not lie on a modern bed but on the couch of all time; and she raises herself from amongst her cushions, setting forth her somewhat meagre nudity as arrogantly and with the same calm certitude of her sovereignty as the eternal Venus for whose prey is the flesh of all men born. The introduction of a bouquet bound up in large white paper does not prejudice the symbolic intention, and the picture ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... East, nudity was, even in those days, held to be disgraceful, while the Greeks thought nothing so beautiful as the naked human body. The Hetaira Phryne was summoned before the judges for an offence against religion. Her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... covered with branches, crouched two women and the little girl whose flight had led to this unlooked-for discovery. In a state barely removed from that of nudity, the unhappy trio strove to hide themselves from the many staring eyes which were fixed upon them, not for the purpose of gratifying an indecent curiosity, but simply because no one had for the moment realized the condition in which the unfortunates were placed. Soon, however, the fact was evident ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... Baudelaire, Berlioz could have said, "L'energie c'est le grace supreme." For the beauty of this his masterpiece lies in just the delineating power, the characteristic of this crude, vigorous, unadorned melody. Doubtless to those still baffled by its nudity, his music appears thin. But if it is at all thin, its thinness is ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... crow-bar? Yet these are simple, they have no superfluous parts, they exactly serve their ends, they stand related to all things through the laws of chemistry and physics. A flower is beautiful, a shell on the beach is beautiful, a tree in full leaf, or in its winter nudity, is beautiful; but these things are not very simple. Complex things may be beautiful also. A village church may be beautiful no less than a Gothic cathedral. Emerson was himself a beautiful ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... their venturesome journeys, they were generally very indifferently equipped. Ordinarily they had only the working garments they wore on the plantations, and these furnished but slight relief for a condition very near to nudity. Mrs. Coffin set apart a working room in her house, and there sympathizers of both races joined her in garment-making, the result being that very few fugitives left Cincinnati without ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... doubtless nude. The painters of those days depicted on small panels allegories and bathing scenes, and they painted nude women. Full foreheads, round heads, golden hair, short figures of small build but with embonpoint, their nudity minutely represented and but thinly veiled; many such were produced in Flanders and in Italy. The illustrious masters, to whom those pictures appeared corrupt and indecent, doubtless wished to reproach Jeanne with having looked at them in the house of the treasurer ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... electric light. Ten days more and they would have the triumphal opening; already Paris was covered with picture placards: you saw Tom, as a caryatid, supporting the weight of a palace; the Three Graces entwined in their radiant nudity; the impersonator standing, like a Don Juan, surrounded by a bevy of women: the ballet-girl, the shop-girl, the fine lady; then, besides those, the New Trickers—"My idea!" thought Lily, but she didn't care a jot now—the New Trickers fluttered round Daisy. You saw the ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... picture, the product of a talented hand, but an execrable picture from a moral point of view. Yes, M. Flaubert knows how to embellish his paintings with all the resources of art, but without the discretion of art. With him there is no gauze, no veils, it is nature in all her nudity, in all ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... mischief. No, one is sorely tempted to think that these men are well aware that the moral sense which sound philosophy and Christian faith have developed, is still strong in the minds and deeper conscience of the English-speaking races, and that were they to present materialism in all its loathsome nudity to the public gaze, they would be hissed off the stage. And so they dress it up in the clothes of the old religion just for the present, with many a quiet wink between themselves at the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... summer day, when the bare fields were brown and dry in their after-harvest nudity, and the hills that bordered the winding Henares were drab in the light and purple in the shadow. From a distance the town is one of the most imposing in Castile. It lies in the midst of a vast plain by the green water-side, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... as much as Felix any day,' said Wilmet, with a certain remembrance of the startling nudity of the bone of yesterday's leg of mutton. 'He is doing very well. You need not be afraid for him; but it seems to me that you should consider ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... man who raves, however mad, Who bares his heart and tells of his own fall, Reserves some inmost secret good or bad: 10 The phantoms have no reticence at all: The nudity of flesh will blush though tameless The extreme nudity of bone grins shameless, The unsexed ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... modesty is shocked by the nudity of Francis; but Italy is not Germany nor England, and the thirteenth century would have been astonished indeed at the prudery of the Bollandists. The incident is simply a new manifestation of Francis's character, with its ingenuousness, its exaggerations, its longing to establish ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... caused the Filipina women of the place to be stripped and compelled to march before him on the public plaza in a state of nudity. ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... was silent a moment, looking out at the sleet-darkened grave-yard and the bumping horse-cars. "Yes, I am ambitious," she said at last. "And my ambition has brought me to this dreadful place!" She glanced about her—the room had a certain vulgar nudity; the bed and the window were curtainless—and she gave a little passionate sigh. "Poor old ambition!" she exclaimed. Then she flung herself down upon a sofa which stood near against the wall, and covered her face ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... which we carried, and knocked over several of them while on the wing as they flew towards us. They were incited, we discovered, to attack us in defence of their young, numbers of which, from the little gaping nudity just out of the shell to well-fledged bantlings, covered the ground. There was also a great number of eggs, many of which were newly laid. Of these we got a large store, besides half filling the boat with the birds we had killed. ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... If the Elizabethans had been forced to drive in closed cars through the Nevada desert in the summertime, they might have started a cult of nudity, Malone felt. It was bad enough now, in what was supposed to ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)
... swords, spears, and battle-axes continued, when the chief herald of the tournament announced the SAVAGE KNIGHT. He entered the lists on foot, a visor concealing his face, arrayed as an Indian chief. He was clothed in a skin fitting tightly to his body, which gave half of it the appearance of nudity. In his left hand he held a javelin, in his right hand he brandished ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... work is that, beginning with complexity—typifying the gorgeously robed Istar—the theme discloses itself little by little, as she is stripped of her jewels, until at last, when she stands forth in the full splendor of nudity, the theme is heard unaccompanied, like Isis unveiled or, to change the figure, like a scientific law which has been disclosed. The work is based on three generative themes; the second, derived from the first and of subsidiary importance, called by d'Indy the motif d'appel. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... "fair," and assembled in hundreds, while the Kafirs, in a species of unbelieving surprise, met them in thousands to exchange wares. It was a new idea to many of these black sons and daughters of nudity, that the horns which they used to throw away as useless were in reality valuable merchandise, and that the gum, which was to be had for the gathering, could procure for them beads and buttons, and brass-wire and cotton, with many other desirable things that caused their ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the middle of a great white panel; to accumulate so much patient and delicate workmanship on almost imperceptible accessories, and all to produce an effect which is absolutely nil, an effect of the most utter bareness and nudity. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... Henry Clay; Child-bearing prevented; Dr. Channing; Sacrifice of a set of hands every seven years; Testimony; Laws of Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia. CLOTHING; Witnesses; Advertisements; Testimony; Field-hands; Nudity of slaves; John Randolph's legacy to Essex and Hetty. DWELLINGS; Witnesses; Slaves are wretchedly sheltered and lodged. TREATMENT OF ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the order of the day. Anything that does not deviate from the old beaten track meets with little encouragement from the present race of amusement-seekers, and, consequently, does not pay the entrepreneur. Nudity in public adds fresh charms to the orchestra, and red-fire and crackers have become absolutely essential to harmony. Acting upon this principle, Signor Venafra gave (we admire the term) a fancy dress ball at Drury-lane Theatre on Monday evening last, upon a plan hitherto unknown ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... on every hand The prairie all environs me; I see Nought save a stretch of green and treeless land, Conspicuous alone for nudity: A sea of earth, a boundless stretch unspanned Except by Heaven's ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... serious demonstration by the students occurred, for these students can fight as well as dance. Senator Beranger, having read one morning in the "Courrier Francais" an account of the revelry and nudity of several of the best-known models of the Quarter at the "Quat'z' Arts" ball, brought a charge against the organizers of the ball, and several of the models, whose beauty unadorned had made them conspicuous on this most festive occasion. At the ensuing trial, several celebrated ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... flesh, I might raise it to as high a place and within as divine a light as even the soul had been set in. The ages were as an aureole, and I stood as if enchanted before the noble nakedness of the elder gods: not the infamous nudity that sex has preserved in this modern world, but the clean pagan nude,—a love of life and beauty, the broad fair breast of a boy, the long flanks, the head thrown back; the bold fearless gaze of Venus is lovelier than the lowered glance of the Virgin, and I cried with my master that ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... landings were littered with bedding, pots, pans, drying clothes, fire wood, boxes, all manner of rubbish, the overflow of the crowded little flats. Over these obstructions and down the ladders were falling and stumbling men, women, children, babies, in all degrees of nudity—for many of the big families that slept in one room with windows tight shut so that the stove heat would not escape and be wasted when fuel was so dear, slept stark naked. Susan contrived to get Etta and ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... waists up as our university crews do, or used to do, and I missed the Greek joy I have experienced at New London, when the fine Yale and Harvard fellows slipped their tunics over their heads, and sat sculpturesque in their bronze nudity, motionlessly waiting for the signal to come to eager life. I think that American moment was more thrilling than any given moment at Henley; and though there is more comfort in a college barge, and more gentle seclusion for the favored spectator, I am not going to own that it ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... recommend it, except that a certain amount of civilisation, the wearing of trousers and petticoats, banking, railways, and steam navigation were on one side, and a very primitive mode of life with nudity, or getting on to it, on the other. True, that there is the question of the slave trade, and that iniquitous business is kept up entirely by the Arabs, but that very important matter had no weight at that time with Harry, who merely knew that the slaves he had met were almost ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... send your ladyship a rocket in my next letter. Lady Mary, I believe, has had a private audience of the ambassador's leg,(220) but en tout bien, et honneur, and only to satisfy her ceremonious curiosity about any part of royal nudity. I am just going to her, as she is to Versailles; and I have not time to add a word more to the vows of your ladyship's ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... general belief, with their clothes and everything about them, even to their purses and the money in them, and their ashes to be thrown into the Rhine; but, as will be immediately seen, from the account of an eye-witness, in a state of perfect nudity. ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... Stuart's work, no trace exists. The faces of the two satyrs and the head of the thyrsus are also much mutilated. The other two satyrs (II: II), whose faces are also mutilated, correspond very closely in youth, action, and nudity. In these two pairs of figures it is also to be noticed that the heads of I and II at the left face the central group, while the heads of I and II at the right are turned away from the centre, toward the right. ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad, doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror. Hedger did not happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her. Nudity was not improper to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and he continued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman's body so beautiful as this one,—positively glorious in action. As she swung ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... room; it is narrow, ill aired; ten or twelve black and sloping stones receive the suicides, who are placed on it almost in a state of nudity; the places are seldom all occupied, except perhaps during a revolution. Then it is that the Morgue is recruited; two more days of glory and immortality in July, and the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 549 (Supplementary issue) • Various
... seemed all the same. Each gave the same impression of spotlessness and nudity. Each was stiffly rectangular like the honey squares fitted into a hive. Above all, there was nothing about any of them to indicate their individual use, or the character of the person to whom they were specially assigned. No ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... foremost philosophers and teachers have become so intoxicated with the dream of Pan-Germanism that in the utmost sincerity they have espoused and with a certain pride proclaimed the vicious principles of Machiavelli in all their moral nudity. There is an emotional and mystical element in the advanced German thinker, which makes him capable of accepting in full sincerity intellectual and moral absurdities of which the more robust common sense of other nations would be incapable. The advanced ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... infants, or, it may be, perfecting their own unfinished toilets; men, squalid and filthy, with long beards, flowing robes, and all the other appurtenances which usually belong to their race; children in a state of nudity; turbaned heads, features thoroughly Oriental; tarnished finery, books, music, and musical instruments, scattered about; everything, in short, whether animate or inanimate, as entirely in contrast with what you have just left behind, as you might ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... even upon as ignoble an animal as a Barbary ass, goaded by a dusky little islander almost in a state of nudity, that, an hour before sunset on the day of his arrival, the English traveller approached the casino of the Consul's daughter, for there a note from Major Ponsonby had invited him to repair, to be introduced to his daughter, and to taste his oranges. The servant who ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... hydrostatics, we see the instinctive impulse under which those who have brought to light a great result, are constrained to proclaim it aloud; and we should be thankful when the mighty inventor can refrain from rushing out, in native nudity, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... ceased when it reappeared in the Chesapeak; and, in order to approach it more closely during the disembarkation, the patriot army crossed through the town. Their heads covered with green branches, and marching to the sound of drums and fifes, these soldiers, in spite of their state of nudity, offered an agreeable spectacle to the eyes of all the citizens. General Washington was marching at their head, and M. de Lafayette was by his side. The army stationed itself upon the heights of Wilmington, and that of the enemy landed in the Elk ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... battle-ship was then receiving the last touches, was a statue for which I could not claim an equal unconsciousness. In fact, it challenged the public attention and even homage as it extended the baton of command and triumphed over the four Moorish or Algerine corsairs who, in their splendid nudity, were chained to the several corners of the monument and owned themselves galley-slaves. The Medicean grand-duke who lords it over them, and who erected this monument in honor of himself for the victories his admirals had gained in sweeping ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... you enter; first, her refined head with its bird's helmet, surmounted by a solar disc; then, as the light continues to descend, her neck and shoulders, and her arm, raised to make who knows what mysterious, indicating sign; and finally the slim nudity of her torso, and her hips close bound in a sheath. Behold her now, the goddess, come completely out of the shadow. . . . But she seems surprised and disturbed at seeing at her feet, instead of the stones she had ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... particular elevation, and make itself familiar to the comprehension even of a child. Strength must let the Graces bind it, and the arbitrary lion must yield to the reins of love. For this purpose taste throws a veil over physical necessity, offending a free mind by its coarse nudity, and dissimulating our degrading parentage with matter by a delightful illusion of freedom. Mercenary art itself rises from the dust; and the bondage of the bodily, at its magic touch, falls off from the inanimate and animate. In ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... erotic character. There is not the least doubt that the lighter musico-dramatic works and the pantomimes, in consequence of these matters, are the direct and immediate cause of many acts which religious people regard as acts of sexual immorality. The degree of nudity, of display of the human form in our theatres, and, of course, music-halls as well, to those unaccustomed to such matters is certainly quite startling, and by many people such displays are regarded as being entirely demoralizing to hot-blooded young men. It is, therefore, not surprising that there ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... myself to a common lodging-house, and lived in comparative decency. Some score of us, or perhaps a dozen, went up together for surgical examination, and were made to strip stark naked in each other's presence. I had never objected to this amongst my own kind and kindred, when one exposed one's nudity by the side of the clean brook or yellow canal in which we used to bathe in boyhood; but amongst this crew it was hard, and even terrible. We had all been bathed, perforce, before the medical examination began; but a mere tubbing does not cleanse the mind or tongue, and ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... he is as yet under the charm of Southern art and of ancient models; he does not weary of invoking and depicting the gods of Olympus. Nudity, which the image-makers of cathedrals had inflicted as a chastisement on the damned, scandalises him no more than it did the painters of Italy. He sees Venus, "untressed," reclining on her couch, "a bed of golde," clothed in ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... and hand, feel them in the head alone, and love them for the joy they bring you, and which goes to your heart, know that the author having in an evil hour let his ideas, id est, his inheritance, go astray, and being unable to get them together again, found himself in a state of mental nudity. Then he cried like the woodcutter in the prologue of the book of his dear master Rabelais, in order to make himself heard by the gentleman on high, Lord Paramount of all things, and obtain from Him fresh ideas. This said Most High, still busy with the ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... forward until the natives put on some clothes. For that purpose they had borrowed or got together about a dozen Arab dresses of kinds, wherewith to cover the bodies and limbs of the unsophisticated Shilluks. The national costume for men is a state of nudity, but they occasionally sprinkle their bodies with red or grey ashes. The women usually wear scant leather or thong aprons. When the Sirdar ascertained the true cause of the delay, time pressing, he intimated he would waive for the nonce their putting on of ceremonial attire. "Let them all ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... considered an outrage to strip her and leave her stark naked in the middle of the room. I cannot see why a man should not be credited with some feeling of modesty about his soul. I detest having my last garments plucked from me in public. Complete spiritual nudity causes ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... forms, rising upward like an altar of candelabra. A new spirit appears here, a more delicate sensibility; it is not excessive and disordered as in the north, and yet it is not satisfied with the grave simplicity, the robust nudity of antique architecture. It is the daughter of the pagan mother, healthy and gay, but more womanly than ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... were a strong contrast to the miserable twelve-feet-square mud-and-log cabins we passed by. Every farmer we met was a perfect picture of wretchedness and misery; their women dirty and covered with rags, which could scarcely conceal their nudity; the cattle lean and starving; and the horses so weak, that they could scarcely stand upon ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... what they typify. The most disagreeable of English painters is Etty, who had a diseased appetite for woman's flesh, and spent his whole life, apparently, in painting them with enormously developed busts. I do not mind nudity in a modest and natural way; but Etty's women really thrust their nudity upon you with malice aforethought, . . . . and the worst of it is ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... feeling for delicacy and beauty of outline, it followed of course that they became more and more removed from nature in their desire to rival each other in the forced attitudes of their figures, and in the exhibition of nudity, until at last such disgusting caricatures were produced as we find in the works of Martin Heemskirk or Franz Floris, artists who were even deficient in good colouring, the old inheritance of ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... time-honored spirit that we owe the mysteries lying buried in every human word? In the word True do we not discern a certain imaginary rectitude? Does not the compact brevity of its sound suggest a vague image of chaste nudity and the simplicity of Truth in all things? The syllable seems to me singularly ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... Nudity is not the cheese on public occasions: but why not go dressed like a lady as she always does, only with white gloves; and be married without any ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... uncompromising in their manner of life. When I speak of life, I include art, which is life to him. I should like you to see what a wonder of light and colour and space and breathable air, he put into his Venus rising from the sea—refused on the ground of nudity at the Paris Exhibition this summer. The loss will be great to him, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... with delight, like a child on a birthday morning. The tender beauty of everything around her reassured Catherine, who had come from town in a mood of strange apprehension. As she looked at the expectant woods awaiting their lovely costume in fragile nudity, at the violets that seemed to sing in odours, at that pale and shallow sky which is a herald of the deeper skies to come, it seemed to her impossible that Mark, who could be so blithe, so radiant, could turn to dark imaginings in such an atmosphere of exquisite enterprise. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... time we speak of the Indians of Iquitos went about in almost a state of nudity. The Spaniards and half-breeds alone were clothed, and much as they scorned their indigenous fellow-citizens, wore only a simple shirt, light cotton trousers, and a straw hat. All lived cheerlessly enough in the village, mixing little together, and if they ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... reward for which the sins and sufferings of the whole world would be immediately alleviated. Upon her demurring to fulfil this mandate, she received the further assurance that if she took her card-case in her right hand and her pocket-handkerchief in her left, her condition of nudity would be entirely unobserved by any one she met. Under the influence of her diseased fancy, Mrs. Crow accordingly went forth, with nothing on but a pair of boots, and being immediately rescued from the terrible condition of mad exposure, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... envelop himself in things made of cloth and linen, this common duty is confounded with that fair procedure, elaborate of many thoughts, in whose accord the fop accomplishes his toilet, each morning afresh, Aurora speeding on to gild his mirror. Not until nudity be popular will the art of costume be really acknowledged. Nor even then will it be approved. Communities are ever jealous (quite naturally) of the artist who works for his own pleasure, not for theirs—more ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... wear|! Now, as this is a true ditty, I do not assert—this you know is between us— That she's in a state of absolute nudity, Like Powers's Greek Slave, or the Medici Venus; But I do mean to say I have heard her declare, When at the same moment she had on a dress Which cost five hundred dollars, and not a cent less, And jewelry worth ten times more, I should guess, That she had not a thing in the wide world to wear! ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... glorify the human body, as God made it, will bring him in collision with our notions of the decent, the proper; the "courageous, clear voice" with which he seeks to prove the sexual organs and acts "illustrious," will result in his being excluded from good society; his "heroic nudity" will be apt to set the good dame, Belles-lettres, all a-shiver; his healthful coarseness and godlike candor will put all the respectable folk ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... odd an appearance, that he might have been taken for anything but what he really was. A few of the women on the ground by the side of the king wore large white dresses, which covered their persons like a winding-sheet. Young virgins, according to custom, appeared in a state of nudity; many of them had wild flowers stuck behind their ears, and strings of beads, &c., round their loins; but want of clothing did not seem to damp their pleasure in the entertainment, for they appeared to enter into it with as much zest as any of their companions. Of the different coloured ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... by the Turks, "stripped and manacled and offered for sale in the market place," and so had a sentimental appeal which went straight to the heart of a sentimental people, and overcame any antagonism which her nudity might have produced. It inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning to a not very noteworthy sonnet, clergymen gave it certificates of character, so to speak, and "it made a sensation wherever shown, and was fondly believed to be the greatest work of sculpture known to history." Let us say at once ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... the "Eagle" the boys resumed their old sport of swimming and gathering wood. About this time, owing no doubt to the complaints of the riverside inhabitants, the city authorities determined to stop all further rows and displays of nudity. The orders against naked bathing were strictly enforced by a constable named Sam Long. Before the boys got thoroughly acquainted with him, he often captured an offender's clothing, which he detained until the boy came ashore. Then Sam would escort him to the Mayor's office to receive a stern ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... of the individual into his or her nagual was about to take place, the person must strip to absolute nudity;[49-*] and the lascivious fury of bands of naked Nagualists, meeting in remote glades by starlight or in the dark recesses of caves, dancing before the statues of the ancient gods, were scenes that stirred the fanaticism of the Spanish ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... of a shirt and trowsers of coarse, thin, hard, hempen stuff, in the Summer, with an addition of a very coarse woolen jacket, breeches and shoes in Winter. But since the war, their masters, for they cannot get the cloathing as usual, suffer them to go in rags, and many in a state of nudity. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... immoral person. But what could he be doing there?—copying? Nay again, whatever might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an eminently decorous person. He would be the last man to sit down to his desk in any state approaching to nudity. Besides, it was Sunday; and there was something about Bartleby that forbade the supposition that he would by any secular occupation violate the ...
— Bartleby, The Scrivener - A Story of Wall-Street • Herman Melville
... inquiry Anne replied, "I am going to Cromer for sticks." The little woman said it seemed unnecessary to go so far, and pointed out an oak-tree close at hand where she could get them. The little woman vanished like a spirit, and Anne returned home, in a partial state of nudity, with a quantity of sticks wrapped in her gown and apron. Mrs. Gardiner, who, like the minister, her husband, believed in witchcraft, on hearing the girl's tale, said she would burn the witch; and, suiting the action to the words, threw the sticks into the fire. The charm ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... grief, that are foundering, that will presently go down. Yet we are not altogether to be pitied: we know life. To the respectable man, the prosperous, life shows herself only in the world, decently attired: we know her at home in her nudity. For him she has manners, a good behaviour, a society smile; with us she is frankly herself—brutal, if you please, corrupt with disease and vice, sordid, profane, lascivious, but genuine. She is kind to him, but hypocritical, affecting scruples, modesties, pieties, a ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... that country customably refresh and wash themselves, the king, looking into the baths, saw in them men wholly naked with every garment cast off. At which he was displeased, and went away quickly, abhorring such nudity as a great offence, and not unmindful of that sentence of Francis Petrarch 'the nakedness of a beast is in men unpleasing, but the decency of ...
— Henry the Sixth - A Reprint of John Blacman's Memoir with Translation and Notes • John Blacman
... of the Prodigal.—His departure from his father's house. A resolute youth in the garb of nudity, with a bandage over his eyes; his right hand is tied behind him and in his left is a bunch of flowers; he turns and gives ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... Smith was standing, staring upwards. In his virile, bronzed semi-nudity, he might have been a god who had emerged for the first time into the air from the woods at his back. His lips were open ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... of every man, who, if and when he can realise it and has detached himself from his unworthy because unreal surroundings, is himself God. Akin to Vedantic mysticism is the Yoga system, which teaches extreme asceticism, retirement into solitude, fastings, nudity, mortification of the flesh, profound meditation on unfathomable mysteries, and the endless reiteration of magic words and phrases as the means of accelerating that ineffable fusion of God and man. The materialism of the Sankhya and the idealism of the ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... mean?" I thought it, however, most prudent to obey his command, and followed him down the staircase. The shop and the portal were now thronged with the inhabitants of Finisterra, men, women, and children; the latter for the most part in a state of nudity, and with bodies wet and dripping, having been probably summoned in haste from their gambols in the brine. Through this crowd the figure whom I have attempted to describe pushed his way with an ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the nudity of arm and leg he must have presented to eighteen's tender sensibilities in Mr. Latz's expression now as he sat well forward on the overstuffed chair, his overstuffed knees strained apart, his face nude of all pretense ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... throughout the whole compass of Civilized Life and Speculation, should lead to; the rather as he was no Adamite, in any sense, and could not, like Rousseau, recommend either bodily or intellectual Nudity, and a return to the savage state: all this our readers are now bent to discover; this is, in fact, properly the gist and purport of ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... are given and received, these are not regarded seriously, and there are seldom any fights. Col. Bivar says the contending villagers in their excitement, sometimes relapse into a state of almost complete nudity. The party which succeeds in obtaining possession of the post is supposed to gain health and prosperity during the coming year. Col. Bivar remarks that the origin of this so-called ceremony is said to be that the god of thunder, "u'lei pyrthat," and Ka Aitan, the goddess ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... found an immense assemblage of men, and women, and children, whose appearance denoted dirtiness, laziness, and poverty. They were almost all in a state bordering on nudity, but a few of them wore miscellaneous portions of European apparel. The hair of the men was long, except on the forehead, where it was cut square, just above the eyebrows. The children wore no clothes at all. The infants were carried on stiff cradles, similar to those used by North ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... air of pomposity, that it was no wonder the uninitiated should have been deceived, and have taken him for a lion of the very first nobility; nor can we be surprised that a poor cur, almost in a state of nudity, should, in the most abject manner, supplicate a trifle from "His Lordship;" that an ignorant cat, in passing, should take off his cap and make a profound bow; or a kitten, just behind, cross its paws as though it stood in the presence of a superior. There was one, however, ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... inseparably associated. He is the most positive intellect among the writers of Young Germany and their most radical innovator in regard to form. He is a fanatic of truth and deals only with facts; discarding the mitigating accessories of the milieu, he places those facts before us in absolute nudity. This would make him the most consistent naturalist; but when facts are presented bald and bare, they do not make the impression of reality, but rather of grotesque caricature. Hence Wedekind has sometimes been compared with early English ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... are those who prefer (perhaps for reasons of sentiment) the early Gothic, and many more who love far better the sweet purity of the early Renaissance. Before us Raphael presents his full figures replete with action, rich with broad, open curves in nudity, and magnificent with lines of flowing drapery. To him be accorded all due honour; but, if it is the privilege of the artist's spirit to wander still on earth, he must find his particular post-mortem punishment in viewing the deplorable school of exaggeration which his example founded. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... farm were, the new manager found, three black fellows and two 'gins,'{*} all of whom were in a state of stark nudity; but they welcomed him with smiles and an overpowering smell of ants, the which latter is peculiar to the Australian nigger. One of the bucks, who when Denison entered was sleeping, with three exceedingly mangy dogs, in the ex-proprietor's bunk—a gorgeous affair ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... those Japanese trifles, those screens, those carpets, those pedestals surmounted by terra-cotta figures presenting in their nudity the flesh tints of woman, those clock-cases above the doors, that profusion of knickknacks, of furniture, of ottomans, that soft upholstery that seemed to be made only to excuse a fall—nay, even urged to sudden temptations, to chance love, to violent caprices; and on leaving ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... Von Raumer, Perraud, Paul-Dubois, Filon, Bonn. The considerations already adduced ought to be enough to lead the English reader to certain conclusions which are fundamental. For the sake of clearness they may be repeated in all their nudity: ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... day, from the first annunciation of Master Payne's expected appearance at Philadelphia, we were obliged to listen to the misjudging applause of his panegyrists. There is a narrowness of heart, and a nudity of mind too common in our nature, under the impulse of which few people can bring themselves to do homage to one person without magnifying their incense by the depreciation of some other. According to these a favourite has not his proper station, till all others are put below him; as ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... mob of blacks, some garbed in the uniform of German East African native troops, others wearing a single garment of the same uniform, while many had reverted to the simple dress of their forbears—approximating nudity. There were many black women with them, laughing and talking as they kept pace with the men, all of whom were armed with German rifles and equipped ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... trodden under foot, which, with her toothless gums, she attempted to masticate with all the eagerness of a starving swine. Little children, from one to four years old, were crawling about in a state of nudity, and almost of starvation, while their own mothers and fathers, were staggering, and fighting, and swearing. It is a fact, that while these poor creatures cannot articulate a word of any thing else in English, the most awfully profane ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... and the nature of others; stripping away of all the soul's veils; nay, so to speak, melting away of the soul's outward forms, melting away of the soul's active structure, its bone and muscle, till there is revealed only the shapeless primaeval nudity of confused instincts, the soul's ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... nudity their skin is not very susceptible to touch for it is hardened and toughened by the effects of sun, rain, cold and dew which makes it as weather-beaten as that of any old salt's; besides this they are accustomed from childhood to be stung by insects and nettles, to be pricked and ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... his own recollections of his only visit to the National Gallery some years ago he should say that these noble fellows were better outside that place than in. One painting that he saw there was so scandalous in its nudity that he blushed even now when he thought of it. Better far that our defenders from the Dominions should continue to walk up and down ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... head. "You say that only to patch me up—to cover the nudity of my want of exaltation. I've neither the one nor the other. I've mere battered indifference. I see that what you mean," Miss Gostrey pursued, "is that if your friend HAD come she would take great views, and the great views, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... to the manners of an age which counts its women not dressed if they are not half undressed, and with his sensibilities further calloused by a night devoted to restaurants the entree to which, for women, seemed to be conditioned on at least semi-nudity, Lanyard was none the less inclined to think he had never seen, this side of footlights, a gown quite so daring as that which revealed the admirably turned person of the lady who named herself Liane. There was so little ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... quarters, generally at such awkward moments as when we were dressing or undressing. This was a matter of constant annoyance to Lyte, as the people persisted in announcing themselves with a "Bon jour, monsieur," no matter what state of nudity they had ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... upon my wants being made known to him, procured proper relief, obtaining through Mrs. Bigelow and ladies in the town, clothing and proper care for five women who were rescued in a state of entire nudity. The men rescued were taken charge of by the citizens, who did all in their power to relieve their distress. All the rescued were greatly exhausted, having been in ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... presence of gentlemen without a blush. I now allude to the most licentious pictures in the collection. I saw French women stop and criticise pictures which I could not look at, in their presence, at least—pictures which exhibited the human form in a state of nudity, and at the same time expressed the most shameful sensuality and portrayed the most licentious attitudes. I cannot believe a woman of perfectly pure mind can delight to look at such pictures in a public gallery. ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... hardihood that amazed and scandalized the priest. [ 1 ] Nor was he better pleased with their postures, in which they consulted nothing but their ease. Thus, of an evening when the wigwam was heated to suffocation, the sorcerer, in the closest possible approach to nudity, lay on his back, with his right knee planted upright and his left leg crossed on it, discoursing volubly to the company, who, on their part, listened in postures ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... native princes. The influence of example was as strong in this as in most other instances; and great numbers of the English settlers who came over under various adventures resigned their pretensions to superior civilisation, cast off their lower garments, and lapsed into the nudity and barbarism of the Irish. The limit which divided the possessions of the English settler from those of the native Irish was called THE PALE; and the expressions of inhabitants WITHIN THE PALE, and WITHOUT THE ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... anywhere. The stone which on other planets underlay soil, here showed harshly. There was no soil. There was no microscopic life to nibble at rocks and make soil in which less minute life could live. The nudity of the stones led to glaring colors everywhere. The colors were brilliant as nowhere else but on Earth's moon. There was no vegetation ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... civilisation has made a mystery of marriage, which, veil by veil, it is the duty of the successful novelist to disclose. If I were a novelist I should seek my characters in the Divorce Court; if I were a painter I should study those superstitions which have grown up around human nudity so that the very word 'naked' has become invested with a covert significance and must very shortly be obsolete. I contemplate opening a new Pythagorean Institute for instruction of the artistic young. Above the portal I shall ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... the throne and usurp the sceptre and diadem of her ancient line of kings as the Third Estate; and to come to power with violent upheaval, wading to the throne through blood and terror. Here we see Vigee Le Brun, royalist, glorifying motherhood, her arms and shoulders bare in chaste nudity, her body scantily attired in the simple purity of Greek robes, her ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... obtained power to cure diseases, and especially snake-bite. One day all the women were transplanting rice, and it was found that Lona could do as much work as all her companions put together. So they watched her, and when she thought she was alone she stripped off her clothes (nudity being an essential element in magic), muttered some spells, and threw the plants into the air, when they all settled down in their proper places. Finding she was observed, she tried to escape, and as she ran the earth opened, and all the water of the rice-fields followed her and thus was formed ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... five or six years of its life. It has no birthdays, its hair is never cut, unless it be that it is trimmed over the eyes to form bangs, and it wears clothing only on very special occasions. The children are by no means innocent in sexual matters; but absolute familiarity with nudity has removed all curiosity and false modesty, and the relations between the sexes are no freer than in ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... an orgy of goblins, an image Of nudity flouting the flood, Of shorn-headed brownies who scrimmage And splash in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... ever beheld such a sight. They were almost coal-black in colour, and inspection of them through the telescope showed them to be absolutely naked, wherefore I decided not to pay them a visit until some future occasion when Billy should not be with me, although, apart from their state of nudity, they impressed me ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... the Supreme Court, says, "If I had been a legislator I would never have voted for this law.... It is evident that mere nudity in painting and sculpture is not obscenity. It is a false delicacy and mere prudery which would condemn and banish from sight all such objects." Public opinion should be directed against the vice society which employs and pays such a tool as Comstock. The prosecution which he instigated ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... board, a prize to H.M.S. Sybille. This vessel was afterwards fitted out as a tender to the Commodore's ship, and well known, as the celebrated Black Joke, for her success in capturing other slavers. To-day I accompanied the Rev. Mr. Davy on board. A multitude of slaves crowded her deck in a state of nudity. The spectacle was humiliating in every sense, and the immediate effect upon the olfactory nerves was excessively disagreeable and oppressive. We found the officer who had charge of the vessel confined to a small space ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... or important documents, or charming romances: our tribal citizens know nothing about that and do not want to know anything: all that they do know is that incest, prostitution, abortion, contagious diseases, and nudity are improper, and that all conversations, or books, or plays in which they are discussed are improper conversations, improper books, improper plays, and should not be allowed. The Censor may prohibit all such plays with complete certainty that there will be a chorus of "Quite right too" sufficient ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... should be next to feel the refreshing torrent. We let slip the garment of timorous covering very easily when nudity is commonplace. Vait-hua was to teach me to be modest without pother, to chat with those about me during my ablutions without concern for the false vanities of screens or even the shelter of rocks as in the river in Atuona. In such scenes one perceives that immodesty is in the false shame ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... figures of saints and Eighteenth Century hangings with mythological scenes were reflected in the deep azure mirrors above the consoles. The vaulted ceiling was painted in fresco, with an assemblage of gods and goddesses seated on clouds, whose rosy nudity and bold gestures contrasted sharply with the dolorous visage of a great Christ which seemed to preside over the salon, occupying a wide space on the wall between two doors. The Popess recognized the sinfulness ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... uncanny bang and in the bang stood a fragile minute queer figure, remotely suggesting an old man. The chief characteristic of the apparition was a certain disagreeable nudity which resulted from its complete lack of all the accepted appurtenances and prerogatives of old age. Its little stooping body, helpless and brittle, bore with extraordinary difficulty a head of absurd largeness, yet which moved on the fleshless neck ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... in New York. One night I entered a theater devoted to burlesque opera and the exhibition of a popular actress, known as the Western Thalia, whose beautiful and audaciously draped figure was the talk of the town. I recognized my wife in this star of nudity; more than that, she recognized me. The next day, in addition to the usual notice, the real name of the actress was given in the morning papers, with a sympathizing account of her romantic and unfortunate marriage. I renounced my position, and, taking ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... the nineteenth century has sought to degrade Love; to define it as purely physical. The result has been a corresponding degradation of art, and even literature has lost much of its lofty idealism. Nudity has become a synonym of vulgarity; Love, of lust. "Evil be to him who evil thinks." True Love never seeks to degrade its object; on the contrary, it magnifies every virtue, endows it with divinest attributes, and guards its chastity, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... were given to them for lovers and husbands. One of the most graceful of the early Indian myths is the story of the apsaras, Urva. Urva loved Puravaras and became his 'wife, on the condition that she was n-ever to behold him in a state of nudity. They remained together for years, till the heavenly companions of Urva determined to secure her return to them. They accordingly beguiled Puravaras into leaving his bed in the darkness of night, and then with a lightning flash they disclosed ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... mounting with the waters of the Deluge, was not content till he had found in Cuba the ark, the raven and dove, the uncovering of Noah, and his curse; in fact, the Indians were descended from this unfortunate son whom Noah's malediction reduced to nudity, but the Spaniards, descending from another son, inherited his clothes. "Why do you call me a dog?" said an old Indian of seventy years to Cabrera, who had been insulting him. "Did we not both come out of the same large ship that saved us ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... been reduced to my shirt and drawers,—excuse the nudity of my style in stating this fact. Mellasys Plickaman took a ladle-full of the viscous fluid and poured ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the Kasai are probably the most attractive in the Congo. This applies particularly to the Batetelas, who are of light brown colour. From childhood the females of this tribe have a sense of modesty that is in sharp contrast with the nudity that prevails elsewhere throughout the country. They swathe their bodies from neck to ankle with gaily coloured calico. I am often asked if the scant attire in Central Africa shocked me. I invariably reply by saying that the contemporary feminine fashion ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... great many years past, there has been a woodcut on the cover of the "Farmer's Almanac," pretending to be a portrait of Father Time. It represents that respectable personage as almost in a state of nudity, with a single lock of hair on his forehead, wings on his shoulders, and accoutred with a scythe and an hour-glass. These two latter symbols appear to betoken that the old fellow works in haying time, by the hour. But, within ...
— Time's Portraiture - (From: "The Doliver Romance and Other Pieces: Tales and Sketches") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... doctrine was closely allied to Jainism, especially the Digambara sect, but was probably more extravagant and anti-social. He appears to have objected to confraternities[235], to have enjoined a solitary life, absolute nudity and extreme forms of self-mortification, such as eating filth. The Jains accused his followers of immorality and perhaps they were ancient prototypes of the lower class of religious mendicants who have brought ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... severe. There is every reason to suppose that DIANA wanted some one to accidentally notice her proficiency in swimming, else why should she have chosen a place of popular resort for her bath? And then the simple nudity in which she was surprised was not nearly as suggestive as the peculiar costumes in which our fashionable ladies now-a-days enter the surf in the presence of admiring crowds. However, ideas change ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... had only lived like other men! If he had only listened to the worst among them, if he had only torn the veil early from every limb of that draped female figure, that iron maiden, if he had only seen it in its horror of nudity, with its sharp nails for eyes, and its jagged knives where the bosom should be, he should not be pressed to death in its ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... itself, but, in a more general sense, their divisions are but three, viz, those who eat human bodies, the dog eaters, and those who have no custom of the kind. Early in the morning the pupils would be out on, the beach, or on the rocks, in a state of nudity. Each had a place in front of his own tribe, nor did intense cold interfere in the slightest degree. After the poor creature had crept about, jerking his head and screaming for some time, a party of men would rush out, and, after surrounding ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... What nudity is beautiful as this Obedient monster purring at its toil; These naked iron muscles dripping oil And the sure-fingered rods that never miss. This long and shining flank of metal is Magic that greasy labor cannot spoil; While this vast engine that could rend the soil Conceals its fury ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... representation of the nude in sculpture. This aversion was deep-seated; he constantly returns to it, exclaiming upon the incongruity of modern artists making naked figures. He apparently quite failed to see that nudity is not an incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence and principle; and his jealousy of undressed images strikes the reader as a strange, vague, long-dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan ancestry. Whenever ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... as he does; he is a very good servant, of course, but as a man and a brother— pooh! Egypt may be his country, and he may love it as much as we love England; but our feelings are more to be considered than his, and there is no connecting link of human sympathy between Elephant-Legs and sun-browned Nudity! ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... woman, begins to scream and tear off and destroy her clothing. If on the ship, she will walk up and down the deck, screaming and gesticulating, and generally in a state of nudity, though the thermometer may be in the minus forties. As the intensity of the attack increases, she will sometimes leap over the rail upon the ice, running perhaps half a mile. The attack may last a few minutes, an hour, or even more, and some sufferers ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... invalid, to become prominent. The fine lines of art give way to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron. Meanwhile, architecture is tormented in her struggles to conceal this nudity. Look at the Greek pediment inscribed upon the Roman pediment, and vice versa. It is still the Pantheon on the Parthenon: Saint-Peter's of Rome. Here are the brick houses of Henri IV., with their stone corners; the Place Royale, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... lovely eyes are fixed on the water. One arched and blue-veined foot is slightly raised as if the touch of the marble chilled her. Her limbs are in an easy attitude, and beautifully modelled. She is represented as a slight young girl, and the figure stands out in exquisite nudity from a background of Pompeian red, and the dark green of myrtles. With one hand she is holding aloft the masses of her rich brown hair—the attitude suggests the stretching of the muscles after repose; with the other"—but here his ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... their shades, living as Nature's woodland children, until a more subtile being than the serpent of Eden crept amongst them, and, with his glittering novelties and dangerous beauty, caused their total annihilation! I see, in spirit, the red hunter, lofty, fearless, and stern, stalking in his painted nudity, and displaying a form which Apollo might have envied, amidst the everlasting and silent woods; I see, in spirit, the bearded stranger from the rising sun, with his deadly arms and his more deadly fire-water, conversing with his savage fellow, ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... Confession, vol. ii, p. 122. For many centuries bishops and priests used themselves to apply the discipline to their penitents. At first it was applied to the back; later, especially in the case of female penitents, it was frequently applied to the nates. Moreover, partial or complete nudity came to be frequently demanded, the humiliation thereby caused being pleasant in the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... pursuit of truth, I said what I had to say bluntly—and it seems I had nothing but commonplaces to give forth. In the search for sincerity of style, I reduced every proposition to its barest form of language. And that abnegation of rhetoric has revealed the nudity of ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... happens in the visions of solitary ascetics, some strange queen or female magician, with stars in her eyes and witchery in her voice, some loose woman who held up the symbolical lamp immodestly, to light up her radiant nudity, and the pink and white bouquet of her sweet-smelling skin, some woman in search of voluptuous pleasures, whose lascivious appeals it is impossible for any man to listen to, without being excited to the very depths of his being. Neither a princess out of some fairy tale, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... that fills all vanquished glooms, O, silent song o'ermastering rhyme! I covered either little foot, I drew the strings about its waist; Pink as the unshell'd inner fruit, But barely decent, hardly chaste, Its nudity had startled me; But when the petticoats were on, "I know," I said; "its name shall be Paul Cyril Athanasius John." "Why," said my wife, "the child's a girl." My brain swooned, sick with failing sense; With all perception in a whirl, How ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a curious contest that took place in the vicinity of Uddeholm. A peasant had just got into bed, when his ears were assailed by a tremendous uproar in his cattle-shed. On hearing this noise, he jumped up, and, though almost in a state of nudity, rushed into the building to see what was the matter: here he found an immense wolf, which he gallantly seized by the ears, and called out most lustily for assistance. His wife—the gallant Trulla—came to his aid, armed with a hatchet, with which she severely ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Divestment. — N. divestment; taking off &c. v.. nudity; bareness &c. adj.; undress; dishabille &c. 225; the altogether; nudation[obs3], denudation; decortication, depilation, excoriation, desquamation; molting; exfoliation; trichosis[Med]. V. divest; uncover &c. (cover ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... they each took a stick, to the end of which they hung the heads of their enemies, who had been killed, together with some beads, all of them singing. When they were through with this, the women undressed themselves, so as to be in a state of entire nudity, when they jumped into the water, and swam to the prows, of the canoes to take the heads of their enemies, which were on the ends of long poles before their boats: then they hung them about their necks, as if it had been some costly chain, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... bleaker by suggested contrast. Even the waste places by the side of the road were not, as Hawthorne liked to put it, "taken back to Nature" by any decent covering of vegetation. Wherever the land had the chance, it seemed to lie fallow. There is a certain tawny nudity of the South, bare sunburnt plains, coloured like a lion, and hills clothed only in the blue transparent air; but this was of another description—this was the nakedness of the North; the earth seemed to know that it was naked, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spirit of the pieces, but complete the full abandon and veracity of the farm-fields and the home-brew'd flavor of the Scotch vernacular. (Is there not often something in the very neglect, unfinish, careless nudity, slovenly hiatus, coming from intrinsic genius, and not "put on," that secretly pleases the soul more than the wrought and re-wrought polish of the most perfect verse?) Mark the native spice and untranslatable twang in the very names ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of his white companion. It is so with the blanket, which is being shed for the coat; and, again, this is true with the moccasin, which is being replaced by the leathern shoe. The dress of the female has undergone the same alteration. From almost a state of nudity, they have been raised to a position from which they look upon silk and satin with a "connoisseur's eye." When New Mexico was part and parcel of the domain of Old Mexico, Taos was the seat of much smuggling from the United States, and many ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... Came one who wore my lost career With star on star pinned round, And stood him by my bones to stare. With pity's ancient sneer He mocked my bleachen nudity; Then did she turn, then did she care, And pausing where I might not see She let the winds blow back her hair ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... also appear here and there in western Rajputana and Gujarat: see Indian Antiquary, vol. VII, p. 28.]—each of which is split up into several subdivisions. The Digambara, that is, "those whose robe is the atmosphere," owe their name to the circumstance that they regard absolute nudity as the indispensable sign of holiness, [Footnote: The ascetics of lower rank, now called Pa[n.][d.]it, now-a-days wear the costume of the country. The Bha[t.][t.]araka, the heads of the sect, usually wrap themselves in a large cloth (chadr). ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... morals and public manners in the purest state of Roman society. What must have been the worst? The worst! Well, I will give you an idea of it. The Emperor Nero drove through the streets of the capital with his mistress in a state of nudity; and the Emperor Commodus first seduced and then murdered his own sister. Here reason, blinded by lust, was their guide. These people were not troubled with that terrible book called the Bible. Happy (?) state. How would we like to have our homes in the midst of such fellows? Their conscience ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... and adapted to that awful atmosphere. It was the nearest approach to nudity I ever saw, even ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... they cannot be accused of corrupting suggestiveness or subtle insinuation of vicious sentiment. Theirs is a coarseness of language, not of idea; they are indecent, not depraved; and the pure and perfect naturalness of their nudity seems almost to purify it, showing that the matter is rather of manners than of morals. Such throughout the East is the language of every man, woman and child, from prince to peasant, from matron to prostitute: all are as the naive French traveller said ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of bed—thrusting one arm into a brocade nightgown, deeply furred with sables, and one foot into a velvet slipper, while the other pressed in primitive nudity the rich carpet—his Grace, without thinking farther on the assembly without, began to pen a few lines of a satirical poem; then suddenly stopped—threw the pen into the chimney—exclaimed that the humour was past—and asked his attendant if there were any ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... questions, by signs and expressions, as to whether we had any women, and where they were. The whole tribe generally assembled to receive us, and all, without exception, were in a complete state of nudity, and really the loathsome condition and hideous countenances of the women would, I should imagine, have been a complete antidote to the sexual passion. It is to be observed, that the women are very inferior in appearance to the men. ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... have related he invited Bonaparte and all the inmates at Malmaison to witness a theatrical representation. 'Alzire' was the piece performed. Elise played Alzire, and Lucien, Zamore. The warmth of their declarations, the energetic expression of their gestures, the too faithful nudity of costume, disgusted most of the spectators, and Bonaparte more than any other. When the play was over he was quite indignant. "It is a scandal," he said to me in an angry tone; "I ought not to suffer such indecencies—I will give Lucien to understand that I will have no more of it." ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne |
