"Pleasurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... worth seizing in a criticism of Helvetius. The direction of morality by religion had proved a failure. Helvetius, as the organ of reaction against asceticism and against mysticism, appealed to positive experience, and to men's innate tendency to seek what is pleasurable and to avoid what is painful. The scientific imperfection of his attempt is plain; but that, at any rate, is what the attempt signified ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... these strengthening and animating effects of travel, the ennobling excitement of danger, which he more than once experienced,—having been placed in situations, both on land and sea, well calculated to call forth that pleasurable sense of energy, which perils, calmly confronted, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... told him I had been very lucky," she said suddenly despondent, missing Anthony's masterful manner, that something arbitrary and tender which, after the first scare, she had accustomed herself to look forward to with pleasurable apprehension. He was contemplating her rather blankly. She had not taken off her outdoor things, hat, gloves. She was like a caller. And she had a movement suggesting the end of a not very satisfactory business call. "Perhaps it would ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... an extraordinary and disconcerting impulse to seize his hand—she knew not why, whether it was to thank him, to express her sympathy, or to express her submission. She struggled against this impulse, but the impulse was part of herself and of her inmost self; She was afraid, but her fear was pleasurable. She was ashamed, but her shame was pleasurable. She wanted to move away from where she stood. She thought: "If only I willed to move away, I could move away. But, no! I shall not will it. I like remaining just here, in this fear, this shame, and this agitation." She had a clear, dazzling ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... them the importance of maintaining joyous, healthful, mental conditions; consequently, of carefully avoiding all emotions of selfishness, cruelty, anger, envy, or melancholy. In this connection, for the purpose of creating in the minds of our club mothers, as many good and pleasurable emotions as possible, and of repeating these anabolic emotions so often, that they may become dominant during the entire gestative period; Gertrude Gerrish has wisely planned for them, a great deal of open air exercise, study ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... basin of running water. He was so occupied with spitting out the blood that rushed down to choke him that he hadn't time to cry before the acute pain had ceased. The rush of cool air through his nostrils was such a pleasurable sensation that he smiled as the school nurse escorted him out into the hall to wait for his companions. At 3.30 P.M. all seven children were out in the hall, all seven mouths were closed, and all seven faces were clothed with the sleepy, peaceful expression ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... the following Italian words for his text:—"Tanto e il ben che aspetto, che d'ogni pena mi diletto:" which means—"the good which I hope for is so great, that to obtain it all suffering is pleasurable." He proved his text by this passage from St. Paul:—"The sufferings of this life are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come;" by the example of the apostles, who were filled with joy for having been found ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... it," she answered. "But it has an effect as if I could see this countenance gradually brightening while I look at it. It gives the impression of a growing intellectual power and moral sense. Donatello's face used to evince little more than a genial, pleasurable sort of vivacity, and capability of enjoyment. But here, a soul is being breathed into him; it is the Faun, but advancing towards a ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... always produced in Bonaparte pleasurable sensations, which I could never account for. When we were at Malmaison, and walking in the alley leading to the plain of Ruel, how many times has the bell of the village church interrupted our most ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... resulting from the influence of the United States. In addition the Japanese inhabitants, though they have a larger meal than they can speedily digest in Formosa, are not touched with unqualified pleasurable feeling because we have the Philippines in our grasp. If Japan is to be the great power of the Pacific, it is inconvenient to her for us to hold the Hawaiian, the Aleutian and the Philippine groups of islands. The Philippines have more natural resources than all the islands of Japan, and our Aleutian ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... sensitive, earnest, kind men, large in their views of life, and full of various intellectual power. And farther, when you examine the men in whom the gifts of art are variously mingled, or universally mingled, you will discern that the ornamental, or pleasurable power, though it may be possessed by good men, is not in itself an indication of their goodness, but is rather, unless balanced by other faculties, indicative of violence of temper, inclining to cruelty and to irreligion. On the other hand, so sure as you find any man endowed ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... are glaring flaws in the personality which would delight to charm, and successfully preclude the possibility of popularity among refined people. Many a man and woman of character have been barred from the pleasurable enjoyment of society, even by people of less character though of more surface refinement than themselves, because they lacked the intelligence and the good sense to abolish certain mannerisms of act or expression, which, though they may have ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... preserving the self-determination of abstract thinking and willing, maintaining an identity with themselves: the Epicureans endeavored to do the same, with this difference however, that they strove after a positive satisfaction of the senses by filling them with concrete pleasurable sensations. As a consequence of this, the Stoics isolated themselves in order to maintain themselves in the exclusiveness of their internal unconditioned relation to themselves, while the Epicureans lived in companies, because they achieved ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... "Something" was properly vague, as praise should be, and allowed the imagination free scope. Under the stimulus, everything came easy; he mastered a passage of bound sixths that had baffled him for days. And in this elated frame of mind, there was something almost pleasurable in the pang with which he would become conscious of a shadow in the background, a spot on his ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... most beautifully, Miss Sydney. It is truly pleasurable to see her," murmured von Rittenheim, though his expression was one of approval ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... grew pale when I advanced with the instrument; when I tried to open his mouth, he began to whimper, and finally, struggling out of my grasp, fled. I afterwards gave him sixpence, however, for affording me, as I told him, so much pleasurable anticipation. ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... failing, have walked the distance, six or seven miles. True, Oyster Creek, the shallow western outlet of the Gambia, has still a ferry: a bridge was lately built, but it fell before it was finished. It would, however, have been pleasurable to pass a night away from the ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... hour apart. He gathered leaves and placed them here, and here he paused in the lateness of each day though his bring was frugal and his belly would rumble that night. But to that he was accustomed, and this was pleasurable. ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... to try to make clear the importance of such secrecy and confidence between parents and child. There is a secrecy which adds a glamour of pleasurable naughtiness, leading straight to prudery and pruriency with all their consequences. Such secrecy is the sort that develops when parents do take the child into their confidence. Such harmful secrecy is not to be confounded ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... spender, experienced little difficulty now in procuring promptly the very best accommodation which the house afforded. That this arrangement was accomplished somewhat to the present discomfort of two vociferous Eastern tourists did not greatly interfere with his pleasurable interest ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... commented upon, have added considerably to our knowledge of a fascinating subject. But far be it from us to steal the professor's thunder. We are not writing a book upon primitive psychology. We are interested only in the sigh of pleasurable satisfaction with which the professor's secretary closed her fat note-book and ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... hedge becoming known in the course of expeditions, now in the spring seeking birds' nests, now gathering violets or dog-roses, and later in the year collecting sometimes mushrooms, sometimes blackberries, sometimes hips and haws, crab-apples and other wild products. Beyond the pleasurable exercise and the gratification to my love of adventure, there was gained during these excursions much miscellaneous knowledge of things, and the perceptions were beneficially disciplined. Of all the occupations, however, to which holidays ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... Are pleasurable affairs. There is no light furnished except by an open fire. The guests sit around in a circle and tell stories. Each one is provided with a bunch of twigs, or fagot to be thrown on the fire, the guest being expected to sing a song, tell ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... created quite a pleasurable excitement in the neighborhood, and the families flocked to Ford House to welcome her among them as one of themselves, all anxious to see if the Ethiopian of North Aston had shed her skin, if the leopardess had changed her spots. They ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... dreams and aspirations, he desired to make a world his confidant; when from the living nature, and the lore of books, and the mingled result of inward study and external observation, he sought to draw forth something that might interweave his name with the pleasurable associations of his kind. His easy fortune and lonely state gave him up to his own thoughts and contemplations; they suffused his mind, till it ran over upon the page which makes the channel that connects the solitary Fountain with the vast Ocean of Human Knowledge. The temperament ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... distributing the powers of life, and the placenta for the purpose of oxygenating the blood, and the additional absorbent vessels, for the purpose of acquiring aliment, are first formed by the irritations above mentioned, and by the pleasurable sensations attending those irritations, and by the exertions in consequence of painful sensations similar to those of hunger and suffocation. After these an apparatus of limbs for future uses, or for the purpose of moving the body in its present natant state, and of lungs ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... announces a new victory we are happy; when our front in the Argonne advances we are satisfied; when our faithful Landsturm beats back a French attack in the Vosges, it awakes a pleasurable pride in our breasts. But when progress is announced in Flanders, when a single square yard of earth is captured by our brave troops in the Ypres district, then all Germany is beside herself with pure joy. The seventy millions ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... upon a clear frosty morning, when a bright blue sky and a sharp but bracing air seem to exercise upon the feelings a sense no less pleasurable than the balmiest breeze and warmest sun of summer, that I whipped my leader short round, and entered the precincts of "Gurt-na-Morra." As I proceeded along the avenue, I was struck by the slight ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... evolved a new and startling train of thought. At first it seemed wild enough; but when the two bottom drawers joined in the synthetic process, a complete and consistent scheme began to appear. A flush of pleasurable excitement swept over me, and as I raced upstairs fresh details added themselves and fresh difficulties were propounded and disposed of. I slid open the panels, stepped through and, holding my breath, ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... himself, and which gives to his leisure, perhaps, its greatest charm: he may be sure that there are many of his people who could be made to share in some degree that pleasure, or pursuit, with him. It is a large, a sure, and certainly a most pleasurable beneficence, to provide for the poor such opportunities of recreation, or means of amusement, as I have mentioned above. Neither can it be set down as at all a trifling matter. Depend upon it, that man ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... light' of our later poetry there are hours in which we may look to the daffodil and rose-tints of Herrick's old Arcadia, for refreshment and delight. And the pleasure which he gives is as eminently wholesome as pleasurable. Like the holy river of Virgil, to the souls who drink of him, Herrick offers 'securos latices.' He is conspicuously free from many of the maladies incident to his art. Here is no overstrain, no spasmodic ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... friend, Mr. Cullen, I detested, and the reference to Bow Street puzzled me. However, I had no doubt that in a few minutes everything would be explained. Meantime I permitted myself to indulge in certain very pleasurable anticipations. ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... building whose evil fame had run round the world, she stared at it fascinated. Its restaurant overhung the sea. On this side the blinds were down. It looked as if awaiting the undertaker. She pictured Howard's horror when she told him of her close contact with vice, and anticipated with a pleasurable thrill the scolding he would give her. They had never quarrelled and it would be delightful to ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... expect to have her pay retrenched. Upon which the good Lord was dismissed, and has not attended the drawing-room since. You know one cannot help laughing, when one sees him next, and I own I long for that pleasurable moment." ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... distractingly slow about beginning the tale any child could have guessed he was eager to tell. For once the hard, intent quietness, the soul of labor, pain, and endurance so plain in his face was softened by pleasurable emotion. He poked at the burning logs with the toe of his boot. Helen observed that he had changed his boots and now wore no spurs. Then he had gone to his quarters after whatever ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... always like to cross swords with you, Madame la Vicomtesse, yet this encounter has been more pleasurable than any I have had since I came to Louisiana. But, diable," he cried, "just as I was congratulating myself that I was to have one American the less, you come and tell me that he has refused to flee. Out of consideration ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... society by the pathological liar is very striking. The characteristic behavior in its unreasonableness is quite beyond the ken of the ordinary observer. The fact that here is a type of conduct regularly indulged in without seeming pleasurable results, and frequently militating obviously against the direct interests of the individual, makes a situation inexplicable by the usual canons of inference. To a certain extent the tendencies of each separate case must be viewed in their environmental context to be well understood. ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... Sometimes above four hundred persons were thus huddled together here; the power which their savage and ungrateful chieftain exercised over them was despotic; and Ferguson himself had occasionally the pleasurable sight of some half dozen of them hung up by the heels for hours, on a few trees near ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... friend I rest for a day or two, enjoying his companionship, the reminiscences of old times, and the gossip of the hour. So, on my long and fatiguing journeyings, I have always looked forward to these meetings with pleasurable anticipation and remembered them with ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... had finished, we rose from table, astonished to find we had been engaged for three hours in a pleasurable occupation, which all would willingly have prolonged; but at last we had to part, and after many compliments they all went upon their way, in order to be in time for the theatre. As well pleased as my guests, I left twenty ducats with the steward, for ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... a suburban village of Fonda, about twenty-six miles from Schenectady, Dr. Veeder and Congressman Schermerhorn parted with us, wishing us a pleasurable voyage. ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... practical wisdom that enables one to live consistently with his real intention. But what is the real intention, the end or good of life? In the "Protagoras," where Plato represents Socrates as expounding his position, virtue is interpreted to mean prudence, or foresight of pleasurable and painful consequences. He who knows, possesses all virtue in that he is qualified to adapt himself to the real situation and to gain the end of pleasure. All men, indeed, seek pleasure, but only virtuous men seek it ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... circumstances of the celebration of the day. As he sank into a sleep, pleasant with all the influences of long hours in the open air, he seemed still to be moving in procession through the fields, with a kind of pleasurable awe. That feeling was still upon him as he [12] awoke amid the beating of violent rain on the shutters, in the first storm of the season. The thunder which startled him from sleep seemed to make the solitude of his chamber almost painfully complete, as if ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... he had conferred on his rival an essential service; and the whole world rang with his applause. He began rather to like Millbank; we will not say because Millbank was the unintentional cause of his pleasurable sensations. Really it was that the unusual circumstances had prompted him to a more impartial judgment of his rival's character. In this mood, the day after the visit of Buckhurst and Henry Sydney, Coningsby called ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... of Nastasia Philipovna. For the first two years or so he had suspected that she wished to marry him herself, and that only her vanity prevented her telling him so. He thought that she wanted him to approach her with a humble proposal from his own side, But to his great, and not entirely pleasurable amazement, he discovered that this was by no means the case, and that were he to offer himself he would be refused. He could not understand such a state of things, and was obliged to conclude that it was pride, the pride of an injured and imaginative woman, which had gone to such ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... great discovery of mine, life has been a more pleasurable business. We feel now that there are romantic possibilities about Letters setting forth on their journey from our floor. To start life with so many flipperties might lead to anything. Each time that we ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... Amid such pleasurable sensations passed the winter, at the end of which Varvara Pavlovna was even presented at Court. As for Fedor Ivanovich, he was not exactly bored, but life began to weigh heavily on his shoulders at ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... than when it is due to dialogue. Of course there is no sharp line of demarcation. One understands, however, why successful farce is more popular than a successful comedy, even if afterwards the audience suffer a little from aching sides; the ache itself causes a pleasurable memory. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... placed her conspicuously in that galaxy of brilliant women who shone and sparkled about the sun of the European firmament—Le roi soleil, or "the King," par excellence, who took the blazing sun for his crest. The Fronde had been a time of pleasurable excitement to the high-spirited girl, whose mixed blood ran like quicksilver, and who delighted in danger and party strife, stratagem and intrigue. The story of her courage and gaiety of heart in the siege of Paris, she being then little more than a child, had reached the Flemish convent ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... that at the thought of mimicking Gilby Zilda was roused to an unwarranted glow of excitement showed, had any one been wise enough to see it, that she felt some inward cause of pleasurable excitement at the mention of his name. A narrow nature cannot see absurdity in what it loves, but Zilda's nature was not narrow. She had learnt to love little Gilby in a fond, deep, silent way that was her ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... simple association of ideas, Mr Verloc was brought face to face with the necessity of going to bed some time or other that evening. Then why not go now—at once? He sighed. The necessity was not so normally pleasurable as it ought to have been for a man of his age and temperament. He dreaded the demon of sleeplessness, which he felt had marked him for its own. He raised his arm, and turned off the flaring gas-jet ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... this feeling of security, of pleasurable anticipation, increased. This little break in its life would do the town good; things would whirl away with recharged energy when the doors were opened again. Money would simply accumulate in the period of stagnation to be thrown into the mill with greater ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... she drew a number of pictures of various objects, and made me repeat their names, and then she cut out the alphabet in cardboard, by which means I very soon knew my letters. If I was sick she never attempted to teach me, so that all the means offered me of gaining knowledge were pleasurable, and I thus took at once a strong liking to learning, which has never deserted me. Before the termination of the voyage. I could express myself in English, so as to be understood as well as are most children of my age; and as Sir Charles would not allow me to be taught nonsense, I put a right signification ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... "That was the pleasurable part of it I have been so, used to looking on at shows that bored me, listening to conversations that wearied me, attempting sensations which were repellent, that I just welcomed feeling, when it came—feeling of any sort. I was excited. ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pastoral). From this analysis of "the Nature of the Human Mind," the characteristics of the true pastoral, such as the avoidance of the hardships and vulgarities of rural life, follow logically. Similarly, since a minutely drawn description deprives the reader's fancy of its naturally pleasurable exercise, pastoral descriptions should only set "the Image in the finest Light." Rapin, on the other hand, had determined the proper length of descriptions by examining Virgil and Theocritus. For the association of the pleasure ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... at the protester, whose presence he had not noticed in the pleasurable excitement of the moment. It was a Jewish young man, indifferently attired in a pepper-and-salt suit. The muscular hostler measured him ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking. It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart. I am going to unexplored regions, to "the land of mist and snow," but I shall kill no albatross; therefore do not be alarmed for my safety or if I should come back to you as worn ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... SHAKSPEARE in the possession of Earl Spencer; which owes its magic to the perseverance and taste of the Dowager Lady Lucan, mother to the present Countess Spencer. For sixteen years did this accomplished Lady pursue the pleasurable toil of illustration; having commenced it in her 50th, and finished it in her 66th year. Whatever of taste, beauty, and judgment in decoration—by means of portraits, landscapes, houses, and tombs—flowers, birds, insects, heraldic ornaments, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... least little feeling of regret that the boys didn't feel "crazy" about her. She was sitting bolt upright, with her cheeks flaming a little when she felt Kent's arm stealing round her. She did not resist when he pulled her softly against him. She was utterly surprised at the pleasurable sensation she experienced at having Kent's arm about her. The others were singing but for once Lydia's throaty contralto did not ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... faculty of self-deception. Winding up the alarm clock (the night before) I meditate as to the exact time to elect for its disturbing buzz. If I set it at 6:30 that will give me plenty of time to shave and reach the station with leisure for a pleasurable cup of coffee. But (so frail is the human will) when I wake at 6:30 I will think to myself, "There is plenty of time," and probably turn over for "another five minutes." This will mean a hideous spasm of awakening conscience about 7:10—an unbathed and unshaven tumult ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... with the joys and sorrows of his Italian life, and it had almost inevitably passed out of his consideration. During years of his residence in London he never thought of the country as a source of pleasurable emotions, other than those contingent on renewed health; and the places to which he resorted had often not much beyond their health-giving qualities to recommend them; his appetite for the beautiful had probably dwindled for lack of food. But when a friend ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... selection, the net result of which, after six weeks' work, was one mummified cat! To sit over the work day after day, as did the unfortunate promoter of this particular enterprise, with the flies buzzing around his face and the sun blazing down upon him from a relentless sky, was hardly a pleasurable task; and to watch the clouds of dust go up from the tip-heap, where tons of unprofitable rubbish rolled down the hillside all day long, was an occupation for the damned. Yet that is excavating as it is ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... clearly. When we give attention to the picture we want to see more details, when we give attention to the problem we want to recognize more of the factors involved, when we give attention to the banquet we want to grasp more of the pleasurable features. This aim of attention involves that, as part of such reactions, the sense organs become adjusted; we fixate the eyeball, we listen, and in consequence the object itself becomes clearer, and through the easy passage into the motor channels the whole ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... man's executive faculties, and thus are said to improve upon, while in a certain sense they imitate nature; so the fine arts extend and exalt man's faculty of expression, or self-utterance, regarded not precisely as useful and propter aliud; but as pleasurable and propter se. Even the most uncultivated savage finds pleasure in some discordant utterance of his subjective frame of mind; and it is really hard to find any tribe so degraded as to show no rudiment ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... enigmatic moments of a fearful yet pleasurable dread. There was the ocean, on which an apparently abandoned vessel, a small spot in infinity, was staggering forward with no visible goal ahead and no visible starting-point behind. There were the heavens lying heavily upon it, grey and dismal. There was Frederick himself, ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... nervous on the first night. He was fairly certain that he was word-perfect; and if only the ostrich didn't kick him in the back of the neck—as it had tried to once at rehearsal—the evening seemed likely to be a triumph for him. And so it was with a feeling of pleasurable anticipation that, on the morning after, he gathered the papers round him at breakfast, and prepared to read what ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... not bring herself to do it; it would mean that she distrusted M. de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken a great fancy to this very Valleroy estate, where he was making plantations and improvements. She would not deprive him of a piece of pleasurable routine-work, such as women always wish for their husbands, and even ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... are brought to think of the creator of this sublime work. But it is denied that he understood grace, young and innocent beauty, the forms which express the tender and delicate feelings, those which the divine pencil of Raphael so admirably represented. I own that he took little heed of the pleasurable aspect of things; his austere genius was at ease only in grave thoughts; but I do not agree that he was always a stranger to gentle beauty, to feminine beauty in particular. I shall not cite the "Virgin" of the London Academy, nor in another ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... Joseph for ever. It was Rachel coming into the room that awoke him. She too! he muttered. He began to fuss about, seeking for writing materials, for he was now intent to send Joseph a letter of recommendation to the High Priest, having already forgotten the gulf that awaited him, in the pleasurable recollection of the courtesy and consideration he received from the most distinguished men the last time he was in Jerusalem—from Hanan the son of Seth and father-in-law of Kaiaphas: Kaiaphas was now High Priest, the High Priest of that ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... clear ideas, one may question whether he would pursue it with such ardor except for the continual lover's touch with picture and statue and poem which it demands. For the intelligent lover of beauty, aesthetic theory requires no justification; it is as necessary and pleasurable for him to understand art as it is compulsive for him to seek out beautiful things to enjoy. To love without understanding is, to the thoughtful lover, an infidelity to his object. That the interest in aesthetic theory is partly rooted in feeling is shown from the fact ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... had not heard for so long, had an even more pleasurable and exhilarating effect on Rostov than the previous sounds of firing. Drawing himself up, he viewed the field of battle opening out before him from the hill, and with his whole soul followed the movement of the Uhlans. They swooped down close to the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... invariably a sentimental one, so the aunts were to him merely middle-aged women—uninteresting, and useful only so far as their efforts contributed to render the lives of young people easy and pleasurable. In abrupt and passing impressions he concluded that Aunt Mary was bright and pleasant, but tediously voluble, given to wasting that time which he would have liked to spend talking to the young ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... into its symbolical language is a pleasurable task. The three doors and three gable ends signify the Trinity, the Catherine-wheel window (if I mistake not) the Unity, as concentrated in Christ, the Light of the Church, from whose Greek monogram its shape was probably adopted. The monsters that support the pillars of the porch stand ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... and have been educated and accustomed to good social influences, moral and social, but whose temperament and physical constitution are such, that, when they once indulge in the use of stimulants, which they find pleasurable, they continue to habitually indulge till they cease to be moderate, and become excessive drinkers. A depraved appetite is established, that leads them on slowly, ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... room and a passage to the kitchen. They shared a pleasurable sense of adventure and secrecy. At the kitchen door she paused and spoke to an ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... sun was setting when, on their way back, with the body lashed to the komatik, they passed over the rapid where Hubbard that beautiful July morning had sprung vigorously into the water to track the canoe into Grand Lake. How full of hope and pleasurable anticipation he had been when we paddled through the Little Lake! Over the snow and ice that now hid the lake the seven dogs that were hauling his corpse strained and tugged, ever and anon breaking into a trot as George and Duncan, running on their snowshoes on either side of the komatik, urged ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... recount many experiences which prove a brand-new condition of mind, but one will be sufficient. Without the slightest feeling of annoyance or impatience, I have seen a train that I had planned to take with a good deal of interested and pleasurable anticipation move out of the station without me, because my baggage did not arrive. The porter from the hotel came running and panting into the station just as the train pulled out of sight. When he saw me, he looked as if he feared a scolding. and began to tell of being blocked in a crowded ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... and believe, my advice will have the same weight with you from choice that my authority had from necessity. My advice is just eight-and-twenty years older than your own, and consequently, I believe you think, rather better. As for your tender and pleasurable passions, manage them yourself; but let me have the direction of all the others. Your ambition, your figure, and your fortune, will, for some time at least, be rather safer in my keeping than ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... part of it. Here, owing to the thickness of the hollies and the projecting arms of other large overhanging timber, added to the uncertain light above, the gloom was almost impervious, and he could scarcely see a yard before him. Still, he pressed on unhesitatingly, and with a sort of pleasurable sensation at the difficulties he was encountering. Suddenly, however, he was startled by a blue phosphoric light streaming through the bushes on the left, and, looking up, he beheld at the foot of an enormous oak, whose giant roots protruded ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... dismissed it with the conviction that it was another strange happening in the string of events that had turned his steps toward White Slides Ranch. Wade's mind stirred to the probability of an early sight of Columbine Belllounds. He would welcome it, both as interesting and pleasurable, and surely as a relief. The sooner a meeting with her was over the better. His life had been one long succession of shocks, so that it seemed nothing the future held could thrill him, amaze him, torment him. And yet how ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... away to the wardrobe to get his coat. There was a wonderful change in him; he felt little or no reluctance to pay the visits now. The pleasurable excitement of answering Mr. Darth had put him in a fine aggressive frame of mind for asserting himself in the neighborhood. "Whatever else they may say of me, they shan't say I was afraid to face them." Heated red-hot with that ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... leaving me weak and almost powerless, and really almost obliged to depend for support upon the arm which encircled me. If my partner failed from ignorance, lack of skill, or innocence, to arouse these, to me, most pleasurable sensations, I did not dance with ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... grin, (3) laugh, (4) loud laughter, (5) paroxysms of uncontrolled laughter, a man or woman can prevent all indication by muscular movement of a desire to laugh or even to smile. Usually laughter is excited by certain pleasurable emotions, and is to be regarded as an "expression" of such emotion just as certain movements and the flow of tears are an "expression" of the painful emotion of grief and physical suffering, and as other movements of the face and limbs are an "expression" of anger, others of ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... recognize the feeling, for it was a strange one to her. She was only conscious of a sensation half pleasurable, half sad, of which Mark Ray had been the cause, and which she tried in vain to put aside, wondering what he thought of them all, and if he did not secretly despise them even while making himself so familiar. And then there swept over her a feeling of desolation such as ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... chains!" said the aged person, as though the words formed a pleasurable taste upon his palate. "The young beggar! ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... filled; and if she wore only second-best finery, it was because she had lent her very best to somebody else. All that her doting father asked was to pay for her dresses, and to see her wear them; and if her friends wore a part of them, it only made necessary a larger wardrobe, and more varied and pleasurable shopping. She was as good a manager in wealth as in poverty, wasted nothing, took exquisite care of everything, and saved faithfully for some one else all that was not needed for her ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... those too who spoke under their breath of the miraculous efficacy of these nostrums. Had not Don Victor Arguello, whose respectable digestion, exhausted by continuous pepper and garlic, failed him suddenly, received an unexpected and pleasurable stimulus from the New England rum, which was the basis of the Jones Bitters? Had not the baker, tremulous from excessive aguardiente, been soothed and sustained by the invisible morphia, judiciously hidden in Blogg's Nerve ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... the pleasurable excitement of unfolding and tasting the wedding cake, but it quickly gave way to a look of pensive sadness, which somehow had fallen over the girl rather frequently of late; the haunting thought of Gethin's ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... been seen, the days of the Holy Father's journey were not all spent in pleasurable greetings or official receptions. He never forgot or neglected the work of reform and improvement. Nor were such care and labor new to him. It had often been said that the Popes were hostile to all modern improvements. Why did they not favor railways? Why did they not drain the Pontine Marshes, ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... were many outside pleasures, and Janice, in a happier mood this time, remarked that school really did interfere with the real business of life—such as the picnics that the beautiful spring days made so thoroughly pleasurable. ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... useless and apparently harmless work, such as carrying water from the river and letting it flow in again, a distinct violation of the divine law, in which, however, I could never find any reference to the matter; but there has recently risen a sect which holds that all labor being pleasurable, each kind in its degree is immoral and wicked. This sect, which embraces many of the most holy and learned men, is rapidly spreading and becoming a power in the state. It has, of course, no churches, for these cannot be built without labor, and its members commonly dwell in caves and live upon ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... idea of having Julia Brabazon for his love; and now he had to ask himself whether he intended to be made permanently miserable by her wordly falseness, or whether he would borrow something of her wordly wisdom, and agree with himself to look back on what was past as a pleasurable excitement in his boyhood. Of course we all know that really permanent misery was in truth out of the question. Nature had not made him physically or mentally so poor a creature as to be incapable of a cure. But on this ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... to receive double pay. Now I felt a hero, and no mistake. All this time I had been a keen observer of both men and manners, and I had really seen all there was to be seen in Edinburgh and neighbourhood. It was, therefore, with pleasurable feelings that I heard that No. 7 Company, to which I belonged, was to be sent to the military garrison at Greenlaw—a bonny little village some ten miles from Edinburgh. I think the scenery in this district is about the ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... matter within herself, or considered whether this common tone was or was not faulty; but she was sick of it without knowing that she was so. And now she found to her surprise and not without a certain pleasurable excitement, that this new comer among them spoke in a manner very different from that to which ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... drunk so much in his life. His elation was extreme, and so pleasurable that whenever it flagged he ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... It was with much pleasurable anticipation that the picnic party set out on Whit Monday for Pendle Tor. The four younger Greenwoods were left at home, as the walk would be too far for them, but they announced their intention of climbing a small hill behind the Vicarage in the afternoon, and having an alfresco tea on their own ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... aforehand with events. But who would wish to drain off or dry up a refreshing current, because it now-and-then puts us to some little inconvenience by its over-flowings? In other words, who would not allow for the liveliness of a spirit which for one painful sensibility gives an hundred pleasurable ones; and the one in consequence of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the past to the future. He tried to look forward with pleasurable sensations to his return to the jungle of his birth and boyhood; the cruel, fierce jungle in which he had spent twenty of his twenty-two years. But who or what of all the myriad jungle life would there be to welcome his return? Not one. Only Tantor, the elephant, ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... basis of the above excellent rule quoted from Aristotle, which bids us direct our aim, not toward securing what is pleasurable and agreeable in life, but toward avoiding, as far as possible, its innumerable evils. If this were not the right course to take, that saying of Voltaire's, Happiness is but a dream and sorrow is real, would be as false as it is, ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... two, it would have been more to my American tastes. However, I arose, conscious that I was blushing, and offered the beauty my hand. She could scarcely speak a word of English and I scarcely a word of French, but we managed to make each other understand that it was a pleasurable greeting. She was soon on her way joyfully waving her flags, and I—well, I charged myself up with a lost opportunity for not being more proficient in the polite use of the ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... the physiological problem of the impression produced on the instinctive element in man, and giving rise to a current of painful or pleasurable sensations diametrically opposed to those which the thinking man desires, aims at, and regards as right and wholesome, when he has risen superior to himself by the cultivation of his intellect. He tried to picture to himself ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... almost has been the watching of the elaboration by this double-natured period of things of little weight, mere trifles of artistic material bequeathed to it by one or by the other of its spiritual parents. The charm for me—a charm sometimes pleasurable, but sometimes also painful, like the imperious necessity which we sometimes feel to see again and examine, seemingly uselessly, some horrible evil—the charm, I mean the involuntary compulsion of attention, has often been as great in following the vicissitudes of a mere artistic item, like the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... should be glad to find that miracle of nature, a friend which not all the disadvantages I labour under would hinder from taking the pains to cultivate and improve my mind; but since God has cut me off from the pleasurable parts of life, and rendered me incapable of attracting the love of my relations, I must use my utmost endeavour to secure an eternal happiness, and He who is no respecter of persons will require no more than He has given. You may now think that I am uncharitable ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... for some prohibited dainty. At last the Doctor relented, took it down, and indulged himself in the gratification of letting her taste from his hand; his eyes, always expressive in the revelation of pleasurable feelings, luminously and smilingly avowed that it was a gratification; and he prolonged it by so regulating the position of the cup that only a drop at a time could reach the rosy, sipping lips by which its ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... nationality find the propaganda of Esperanto most pleasurable. Our readers will appreciate the beautiful words of Dr. Busuttil (Malta), and doubtless it will give equal pleasure to read the following letter of ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 3 • Various
... much in savage life, calculated to inspire the mind of civilized man, with pleasurable sensations. Many of the virtues practised by them, proceed rather from necessity or ignorance than from any ethical principle existing among them. The calm composure with which they meet death ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... aspects of life than a person of my limited means can afford to do. The body, you say, is a subtle instrument to be played upon in every variety of manner and rendered above all things as sensitive as possible to pleasurable impressions. In fact, you want to be a kind of Aeolian harp. I admit that this is more than a string of sophisms; you may call it a philosophy of life. But it is not my philosophy. It does not appeal to me in the least. You will get no satisfaction out of me, Keith, with your hedonism. You are up ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... word is one of Hugo's favourite adjectives, and is used to suggest a bright vivid red, and almost invariably in connexion with objects that have pleasurable associations. ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... arises is: "Why does he not divide all feelings into pleasurable and not-pleasurable, rather than into 'painful and not-painful'?" A Westerner will not be at a loss to answer that: "Oh, the Hindu is naturally so very pessimistic, that he naturally ignores pleasure and speaks of painful and ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... to its pupils until October first and closed them the first week in June. This was at the option of Miss Woodhull, the principal, who went abroad each June taking with her several of her pupils for a European tour, to return with her enlightened, edified charges in September. It was a pleasurable as well as a profitable arrangement for the lady who was absolutely free of encumbrance and could ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... seem possible—that I'm going to have folks at last," murmured Joe. "And maybe not only a father, but brothers and sisters—Uncle Bill Duncan said he didn't know. I may have more than Blake, if I keep on," and then, with more pleasurable thoughts than worrying about an indefinable something, the lad ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton
... much; to mingle with my fellow-man, with youths of my own age, perhaps with maidens like Luisina, to see cities and the ways of cities; here indeed was matter for excitement. Yet it was an excitement not altogether pleasurable; for with my very natural curiosity, and with my eagerness to have it gratified, were blended certain fears imbibed from the only quality of reading that ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful. In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... senses of taste and touch, it is often pointed out, are less pleasurable than the other senses when revived by memory. Your dinner is your dinner—your exclusive proprietorship of lower pleasure—in a sense in which the snowy linen and gleaming silver and radiant flowers upon the table are not yours only because they are sharable. ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... a pleasurable glow of excitement. It was his nature to throw himself into everything he did and to at once become a partisan. It was a quality which made his writings attractive to the reader, and an object of concern to his ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... us, the chances of a visit, divided among so many, would have been too small to distress the most timid; while to young and high-spirited people, with courage to spare for ordinary trials, such a state of expectation would have sent pulses of pleasurable anxiety among the nerves. But murderers! exterminating murderers!—clothed in mystery and utter darkness—these were objects too terrific for any family to contemplate with fortitude. Had these very murderers added to their ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... restricted or conventions irksome or privileges unequal, but it was no "licentious or extravagant desire" or flitting from pleasure to pleasure that filled that valley with sober, pale-faced, lean- featured men and tired, gentle women who enjoyed the "liberty" not of a choice of pleasurable indulgences but of interminable struggles, the "equality" of being each on the same social, economic, and political footing as his neighbor. The sequent democracy was derived of neighborliness and good fellowship, the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... eschew, if he do not wish to offend or disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of truth sanctify and maintain them. We thrill, for example, with the most intense of "pleasurable pain" over the accounts of the Passage of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at Lisbon, of the Plague of London, of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or of the 123 prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts it is the fact—it is ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... the meaning of the word. I had been resting all my life and did not know it. But now, could I sit still for one half-hour and do nothing, not even think, it would be the most pleasurable thing in the world. But it is a revelation, on the other hand. I shall be able to appreciate the lives of the working people hereafter. I did not dream that work was so terrible a thing. From half-past five in the morning till ten o'clock at night I am everybody's slave, with not one ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Christ, to which the gypsies listened with attention, but apparently not much profit. The promise that they would soon be able to obtain the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in their own tongue interested them far more on account of the pleasurable strangeness of the idea, than from any anticipation that they might derive spiritual ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... misfortunes are good for nothing but to be forgotten. I am not of his opinion: I think that they are good to make us know our winter from our summer friends, and to make us feel for those who have sustained us in adversity, that most pleasurable sensation of ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... and jewels sparkled. There was the music, not of the quadrille band, for it had not yet commenced," &c. Here Bantam, M.C., arrived at precisely twenty minutes before eight, "to receive the company." And such company! "Brilliant eyes, lighted up with pleasurable expectation, gleamed from every side, and, look where you would, some exquisite form glided gracefully through the throng, and was no sooner lost than it was replaced by another as dainty and bewitching"; the warmth of which description showing how delighted was the young man with ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... and embroidered, and the cheapest were fifteen francs a pair. It had to be decided whether these should be upheld by suspenders or by garters. Owen's taste was for garters, and the choice of a pair filled them with a pleasurable embarrassment. In the next shop—it was a glove shop—as she was about to consult him regarding the number of buttons, she remembered, in a sudden moment of painful realisation, the end for which ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... of letters from strangers who have found something in a story of mine to commend or to condemn. My interest in this department of my correspondence is ever fresh. I opened this particular letter with all the zest of pleasurable anticipation with which I had opened so many others. The post-mark (Algiers) had aroused my interest and curiosity, especially at this time, since it was Algiers that was presently to witness the termination of my coming sea voyage in search of ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... uproar ceased, and a few seconds later Nobby came padding out of the gloom with the cheerful demeanour of the labourer who has done well and shown himself worthy of his hire. Wise in his generation, he had learned that it is a hard heart which the pleasurable, if mistaken, glow of faithful service will not disarm. Sternly I set the miscreant upon my knee. For a moment we eyed one another with mutual mistrust and understanding. Then he thrust up a wet nose ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... with perfect sang-froid. If at home she had occasionally allowed her natural excitement to appear, it had been of a pleasurable kind and fully sympathised with by Morgan. In the mere commercial transactions that had relation to the enterprise, she had shown herself as calm and unshakable as a rock, but as soon as the actual fact of her chosen art began to be concerned, she commenced to reveal other sides of her nature ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... as in England so in Bloemfontein, is a Bank holiday, and usually devoted to picnicking in The Glen, till the war put its foot thereon, as well as on much else that was pleasurable. My most urgent duty that day was the conducting of another military funeral; and thereupon in the cemetery I saw a triple sight ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... the room vacant. The odour of drugs mingled with the other smells of the chamber, which she mitigated, in some measure, by opening the window as far as she was able. She pulled off her tight boots, enjoying for some moments a pleasurable sense of relief; then she tumbled into bed, soon to fall asleep. She was awakened by the noise of voices raised in altercation. Miss Potter and Miss Impett were having words. The girls were in bed, although no one had ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... the thought had filled him with a strange exhilaration: the prospect of a final accounting with the intriguing fly-by-night who had wronged him past all forgiveness had set his blood to leaping. But, exactly because that wrong went so deep, his pleasurable excitement ebbed faster than it had mounted. The wound that he had had from Higginson was one that no vengeance would heal. And with the recurrence of this knowledge his battle-joy flickered and went out like a spent match, and the little alley was a war-list ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... being should do his duty under any conceivable circumstances. You see, there are two kinds, the pleasurable ones, and the painful ones. Pleasurable duties are done, not because they are duties, but because they are pleasurable. So they do not count. And a painful duty can not be a duty or it would not be painful. My idea is, that there must be a happy adjustment of every necessity, so when a duty is ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... it. The sentiment of recognition was wholly genuine and almost rapturously pleasurable. It is true that in the confusion of our flight I had not been able to give a thought to our friend, who was, unless I am much mistaken, absent from her palace. Nor will I be so absurd as to pretend that I have, for a long while ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... and interesting in conversation, but not without his usual faults of violence and pretension. Nor was he always as decorous as an old man ought to be; especially one whose turn of mind is not of the lighter and more pleasurable cast. The licenses he took were coarse, and had not sufficient regard to his company. Certainly they went a great deal beyond his friend Armstrong; to whose account, I believe, Fuseli's passion for swearing was laid. The poet condescended to be a great swearer, and Fuseli thought ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... anybody, that the nephew of Richard Smallwood would not be considered a fitting mate for a daughter of the house of Farringdon; but the fact that he did not mention the circumstance in no way prevented him from dwelling upon it in his own mind, and deriving much pleasurable pain and much painful pleasure therefrom. In short, he dwelt upon it so exclusively and so persistently that it went near to breaking his heart; but that was not until his heart was older, and therefore more capable of ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... complains that British readers find such a catalogue of horrors positively distasteful! Did he expect even Englishmen to become enthusiastic over the hiring of British troops to the infamous Surajah Dowlah for the massacre of the brave Rohillas? Did he expect them to peruse with pleasurable pride the robbery of the Princesses of Oude, the brutal execution of Nuncomar, or the forged treaty by which Ormichund was entrapped? Having painted the atrocities and craven cowardice of Chief Justice Impey, could he reasonably expect them to be proud of this ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of them would suggest to a pure and benevolent mind; yet still neither we nor the writers call such a work a poem, though no work could deserve that name which did not include all this, together with something else. What is this? It is that pleasurable emotion, that peculiar state and degree of excitement, which arises in the poet himself in the act of composition;—and in order to understand this, we must combine a more than ordinary sympathy with the objects, emotions, or incidents ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge |
