"Compunctious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... divine departed from his pulpit, and shaking the dust from his shoes, left the church as hastily as he had entered it, though with a different reason for his speed. The citizens saw his retreat with sorrow, and not without a compunctious feeling, as if conscious that they were not playing the most courageous part in the world. The Mayor himself and several others left the church, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... all our systems of education. Of the beauty and fragrance of flowers all earthly creatures except man are apparently meant to be unconscious. The cattle tread down or masticate the fairest flowers without a single "compunctious visiting of nature." This excites no surprize. It is no more than natural. But it is truly painful and humiliating to see any human being as insensible as the beasts of the field to that poetry of the world which God seems to have addressed ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... Deacon, turning with a grin and a gleaming droop of the eye on the head of his tormented enemy. The Deacon's face was alive and quick with the excitement of the game, his face flushed with an eager grin, his eyes glittering. Decent folk in the brake behind felt compunctious visitings when they saw him turn with the flushed grin and the gleaming squint on the head of his enduring victim. "Now for ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... considered his whole course of conduct to her, the nature of the education he had imparted to her, the example he had set for her imitation. His reflections were not altogether satisfactory, and kindled a few compunctious thoughts. The blame had not been all on the side of the daughter. His misanthropic character was the origin of ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... digressions, the long conversations, the carefully wrought side-scenes are so rich in a certain tender religious wisdom, yet crisp and piquant withal, and so full of living thought on the great questions of the day, that we dwell in them with enjoyment, though with a compunctious half-consciousness that they ought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here: And fill me, from the crown to th' toe, top-full Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it. Come to my woman's breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murthering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature's mischief. Come, thick ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Leader; when they draw near, or are, our intelligence is all vain, and, if some one report not to us, we know nothing of your human state. Therefore thou canst comprehend that our knowledge will be utterly dead from that moment when the gate of the future shall he closed." Then, as compunctious for my fault I said, "Now wilt thou therefore tell that fallen one that his son is still conjoined with the living, and if just now I was dumb to answer, make him know that I was so because I was still thinking in that error which you ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... verses which I thought pretty enough to send to press. Then I thought of the MANHATTAN, towards whom I have guilty and compunctious feelings. Last, I had the best thought of all - to send them to you in case you might think them suitable for illustration. It seemed to me quite in your vein. If so, good; if not, hand them on to MANHATTAN, CENTURY, or ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... known a man die in the very effort of triumphant chuckling over his unfortunate neighbours, by his successful fraud and over-reaching; yet, perhaps, this man's conscience was only dead as to any sense of right and wrong in this particular line; very possibly he had "compunctious visitings" about "mint and cumine"—and oh! human inconsistency, some such have been known to found hospitals—some spark of conscience working its way into the very rottenness of their hearts, that, like tinder, have let out all their kindred and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... neglect with which she was treated, Nettie gazed at the sobbing creature with eyes unconsciously wondering, yet but half-surprised. She knew very well beforehand that this was how her dreadful tidings would be received; yet out of her own softened, awed, compunctious heart—her pity too deep for tears over that lost life—Nettie looked with the unbelief of nature at the widowed woman, the creature who had loved him, and been his wife—yet who could only think of somebody else ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant |
