"Voluptuousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his words. In 1813, with regard to "The Monk," by Lewis, which he had just read, Lord Byron wrote in his memoranda:—"These descriptions might be written by Tiberius, at Caprera. They are overdrawn; the essence of vicious voluptuousness. As to me, I can not conceive how they could come from the pen of a man of twenty, for Lewis was only that age when he wrote 'The Monk.' These pages are ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... hourly renewed and rooted in the very centre of his head-quarters. "Daphne, by Orontes," a suburb of Antioch, was infamous for its seductions; and Daphnic luxury had become proverbial for expressing an excess of voluptuousness, such as other places could not rival by mere defect of means, and preparations elaborate enough to sustain it in all its varieties of mode, or to conceal it from public notice. In the very purlieus of this great nest, or sty of sensuality, within sight and touch of its pollutions, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... called "The Divine." The book was illustrated as well, not unskilfully, with sketches that professed to be illuminative of the text in the manner of Giulio Romano. These might have pleased the Biscayan, for if he had no Italian, and could, therefore, make nothing of the voluptuousness of the Scourge of Princes, he could, at least, see as well as another savage the meaning of a lewd image. But the privilege was denied him. Scarcely had he got the book in his fingers when it was plucked from them again, and thereafter, while with his left hand the hunchback ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 28. "Neither draped Diana nor naked Venus pleases me. One has too much voluptuousness about ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... this mountain man have been something of a 'canny Scot' or a shrewd Swiss?" In the getting, Titian was certainly all this, but in the spending he was large and liberal, inclined to splendour and voluptuousness, even more in the second than in the first half of his career. Vasari relates that Titian was lodged at Venice with his uncle, an "honourable citizen," who, seeing his great inclination for painting, placed him under Giovanni Bellini, in whose style he soon became a proficient. Dolce, apparently ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... when not obscured by grand, vague ideas, and incidentally sells like hot cakes. Thenceforward the Casa Prometeo becomes an exporting house dealing in the good Spanish products of violence and sunshine, blood, voluptuousness and death, as another ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... impulses fierce and wild, yet peculiarly belonging to man. It was a succession of lights and shadows of human character, contrasted in the most powerful degree, as they passed before the eye of Europe—the ambition of man, the rage of man, the voluptuousness, the ferocity, the gallantry, and the fortitude of man, in all the varieties of human character. It was man in the robes of tragedy, comedy, and pantomime, but it was every where man. Every great event on which the revolution was suspended for the time, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... warning and his well-known ferocity of nature, would beat him so severely that he would never offend again. In the gathering dusk of an autumn evening, Tabby came, half-triumphantly, half-tremblingly, but in great wrath, to tell Emily that Keeper was lying on the best bed, in drowsy voluptuousness. Charlotte saw Emily's whitening face, and set mouth, but dared not speak to interfere; no one dared when Emily's eyes glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her lips were so compressed into stone. She went upstairs, and Tabby and Charlotte stood in the gloomy passage ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... inclinations. Young Moireau (for such was the shopman's name) was not long ere he arrived with his parcel. Madame d'Egmont was ready to receive him: she had had sufficient time to exchange her shabby walking dress for one which bespoke both coquetry and voluptuousness; the softness of her smile, and the turn of her features announced one whose warmth of passions would hold out the most flattering hopes of success to him who should seek her love. Madame Rossin and the young shopman were soon engaged in conversation, further ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... special—with blasting and mildew, whereby much of it was spoiled and became profitable for nothing, and much of it worth little, being light and empty. This was looked upon by the judicious and conscientious of the land as a speaking providence against the unthankfulness of many,... as also against voluptuousness and abuse of the good creatures of God by licentiousness in drinking and fashions in apparel, for the obtaining whereof a great part of the principal grain ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... spoken of himself, but she felt that he would gladly take her with him into the earth. They would there be able to love each other more freely than under the sun. Aunt Dide would die likewise and join them. It was, so to say, a rapid presentiment, a desire for some strange voluptuousness, to which Heaven, by the mournful accents of the tocsin, was promising early gratification. To die! To die! The bells repeated these words with increasing passion, and the lovers yielded to the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... of Cromwell, on the 24th August, 1648, at the time they had brought Charles I. prisoner to Hampton Court. There it was that the king, intoxicated with pleasure and amusement, held his court—he who, a poet in feeling, thought himself justified in redeeming, by a whole day of voluptuousness, every minute which had been formerly passed in anguish and misery. It was not the soft greensward of Hampton Court—so soft that it almost resembled the richest velvet in the thickness of its texture—nor ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... occurrences in his life that he went to Rome when society was not only in the most favourable state for the improvement of his mind, and for convincing him of the deleterious influence of the arts when employed as the embellishments of voluptuousness and luxury; but also when the state of the arts was so mean, that the full effect of studying the antique only, and of grouping characters by academical rules, should appear so striking as to satisfy him that he could never hope for any eminence, if he did not attend more to the phenomena ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... gods of classical antiquity live again. Debussy is much more than merely the sensuous Frenchman. He is the man in whom the old Pagan voluptuousness, the old untroubled delight in the body, warred against so long by the black brood of monks and transformed by them during centuries into demoniacal and hellish forms, is free and pure and sweet once more. They once ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... maintaining that any injury done to a neighbor is wrong, they multiplied instances in which a neighbor may be injured. Instead of holding firm to Christ's verdict that sexual vice is implicit in licentious desire, they analyzed the sensual modes of crude voluptuousness, taxed each in turn at arbitrary values, and provided plausible excuses for indulgence. Instead of laying it down as a broad principle that men must keep their word, they taught them how to lie with spiritual impunity and with credit to their reputation as sons of the Church. Thus the inventive ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... man to dream of a Jewess, denotes that his desires run parallel with voluptuousness and easy comfort. He should constitute himself ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... Achmed III. was full of all manner of fantastic sentiments. Faith, hope, and love, which make others strong, had in him degenerated into superstition, frivolity, and voluptuousness—already he was but ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... brains, their limbs, their every feature, end in enjoyment; innocent and radiant wantonness is the condition of their whole existence. Correggio conceived the universe under the one mood of sensuous joy: his world was bathed in luxurious light; its inhabitants were capable of little beyond a soft voluptuousness. Over the domain of tragedy he had no sway, and very rarely did he attempt to enter on it: nothing, for example, can be feebler than his endeavour to express anguish in the distorted features of Madonna, S. John, and the Magdalen, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... morality sermon kept the youth on the paths of clean life; the new-fashioned sexual instruction stimulates not only their sensual longings, but also makes it entirely clear to the young that they have nothing whatever to fear if they yield to their voluptuousness but make careful use of their new physiological knowledge. From my psychotherapeutic activity, I know too well how much vileness and perversity are gently covered by the term flirtation nowadays in the circle of those who have learned early to conceal the traces. The ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... was that K'ung K'ung, the Taoist, in consequence of his perception, (in his state of) abstraction, of passion, the generation, from this passion, of voluptuousness, the transmission of this voluptuousness into passion, and the apprehension, by means of passion, of its unreality, forthwith altered his name for that of "Ch'ing Tseng" (the Voluptuous Bonze), and changed the title of "the Memoir ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... And accordingly during the reign of Yudhishthira who was ever devoted to virtue, his dominion grew in prosperity. Indeed, the prosperity of the kingdom was increased not by these alone but even by persons wedded to voluptuousness and indulging in all luxuries to their fill. And the king of kings, Yudhishthira, whose sway extended over all, was possessed of every accomplishment and bore everything with patience. And, O king, whatever countries the celebrated and illustrious ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... The bouquets were exchanged every half-hour, and music soft and subdued, but constant and thrilling, wound them up by exquisite gradations to that pitch of refined excitement which is so strange a union of delicacy and voluptuousness, when the soul, as it were, becomes sensual, and the body, as it were, dissolves into spirit. And in this choice assembly, where all was youth, and elegance, and beauty, was it not right that every sound should be melody, every sight a sight of loveliness, and every ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... music, and he says: "The world must indeed be empty for him who has never been unhealthy enough for this 'infernal voluptuousness'; it is allowable and yet almost forbidden to use a mystical expression in this behalf. I suppose I know better than any one the prodigies Wagner was capable of, the fifty worlds of strange raptures to which no one save him could soar; and as I stand to-day—strong enough to convert even ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... want of them considered by the men as a defect in the female character. They are regarded, I believe, as an inferior species of animals; and seem to be brought up for no other purpose than that of administering to the sensual pleasures of their imperious masters. Voluptuousness is therefore considered as their chief accomplishment, and slavish submission ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... the Drama was a Religious Worship consisting only of a Chorus, which was nothing else but an Hymn to a Deity. As Luxury and Voluptuousness prevailed over Innocence and Religion, this Form of Worship degenerated into Tragedies; in which however the Chorus so far remembered its first Office, as to brand every thing that was vicious, and recommend every thing that was laudable, to intercede with Heaven for the Innocent, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... had nothing about it of that oriental voluptuousness one reads of so much. It was more suggestive of the county hospital than any thing else. The skinny servitor brought a narghili, and I got him to take it out again without wasting any time about it. Then he brought the world-renowned Turkish coffee that poets have ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... had acquired a new charm; her eyes seemed larger, her glance gentler, calmer, more profound; her cheeks fresher, softer, and rosier; and her smile more tender, innocent, and enchanting. Her figure had acquired a majestic ease, which gave to her movements voluptuousness and firmness. It seemed as if youth had made a supreme effort, and in giving the last touch to her beauty had obtained a masterpiece. She was in the ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... repair of the majestic edifices of religion as in the painted booths and sordid sties of vice and luxury? as honorably and as profitably in repairing those sacred works which grow hoary with innumerable years as on the momentary receptacles of transient voluptuousness,—in opera-houses, and brothels, and gaming-houses, and club-houses, and obelisks in the Champ de Mars? Is the surplus product of the olive and the vine worse employed in the frugal sustenance of persons whom the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... piece, the 'Sorceries of Sin', is an 'Auto Sacramental', or Morality, of which the actors represent Man, Sin, Voluptuousness, etc., Understanding, and the Five Senses. The Senses are corrupted by the influence of Sin, and figuratively changed into wild beasts. Man, accompanied by Understanding and Penance, demands their liberation ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... not more free than his conduct was licentious. He could not think, he gravely told Bishop Burnet, "God would make a man miserable for taking a little pleasure out of the way." Accordingly he followed the free bent of his desires, and his whole life was soon devoted to voluptuousness; a vice which an ingenious courtier obligingly describes as a "warmth and sweetness of the blood that would not be confined in the communicating itself—an overflowing of good nature, of which he had such a stream that it would not be restrained within ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... dream to De Marsay, but one of those dreams which, even when they fade away, leave a feeling of supernatural voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous divinity; ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... even the uncountable figures of stone in the bas-reliefs which, appearing to turn and whisper to each other, seem in the shadows to take a delight in portraying by pantomimic gestures a love wholly allied to voluptuousness and license. ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... general is divided into two factions; although subordinate to these, others are not wanting, of which some appeal to the high intelligence and splendour of rectitude, while others incite and force in a certain manner to the low, to the uncleanness of voluptuousness and compliance with natural desires. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... so timid and downcast, Felton reproached himself. By degrees the enchantress had clothed herself with that magic adornment which she assumed and threw aside at will; that is to say, beauty, meekness, and tears—and above all, the irresistible attraction of mystical voluptuousness, the most ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... very short time indeed after her repentance: her yellow brocades and flaring satins are still those which she wore when she was of the world; her body has not yet lost the marks of the feasting and voluptuousness in which she used to indulge, according to the legend. Not one of the Rubens's pictures among all the scores that decorate chapels and churches here, has the least tendency to purify, to touch the affections, or to awaken the feelings of religious ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which once was the mistress of twenty-five dependent cities, fifty stadia in circumference, and capable of sending an army of three hundred thousand [Footnote: Anthon, Geog. Diet.] men into the field, —a city so prosperous and luxurious that the very name of Sybarite was synonymous with voluptuousness. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... her; how beautiful she was! Her body was quivering; her eyes languid with love and moist with voluptuousness; her bosom was bare, her lips burning. I raised ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... of man, I see not any virtue contrary to justice, whereby it may be resisted and opposed. But one whereby pleasure and voluptuousness may be resisted and opposed, I ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... towards the younger, who listened to this discourse in tremors and panic. I took her hand with an air of humility and reverence. "Here," said I, "there seems to be purity, innocence, and condescension. I took this house to be the temple of voluptuousness. Females I expected to find in it, but such only as traded in licentious pleasures; specious, perhaps not destitute of talents, beauty, and address, but dissolute and wanton, sensual and avaricious; yet in this countenance and carriage there are tokens ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... irregularities of conduct, even to those regarded as least culpable in the opinion of the world, we render ourselves liable to commit the most reprehensible actions. We perceive, from the most frightful examples, that voluptuousness leads to crime." ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... Roman Empire, those seasons of trials, tribulations, and struggle for existence are those of health and progress and healthy life, and the periods of luxury and idleness are those of degeneracy and decay. So with the prepuce, the luxury and idleness, voluptuousness and consequent feasting incident to its being supplanted in its original functions by the perineal cloth, which left it thenceforth unemployed, led it in the pathway of disease and death. This first innovation in civilization ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... by the fancies, opinions, theories or attitude of men. The first and only rule is the will of God which is sufficiently clear to anyone who scans the sacred pages whereon it is manifested. And the reason of His uncompromising hostility to voluptuousness can be found in the intrinsic malice of the evil. In man, as God created him, the soul is superior to the body, and of its nature should rule and govern. Lust inverts this order, and the flesh lords it over the spirit. ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... livelong night sings the mock-bird—screams the "loreto." From dark till dawn, you hear the hoarse baying of the "coyote," and the dismal howl of the gaunt gray wolf. The cicada fills the air with its monotonous and melancholy notes. In all these sounds there is a breathing, a wild voluptuousness that tells you you are wandering in the clime of the sun—amidst scenes like those rendered classical by the pen of St. Pierre. They who have read the sweet French romance, will recognize his faithful painting of tropical pictures. The sunny glades—and shady arbors—the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... do many other relations of the same kind, as founded upon some mistake or misrepresentation. All agree, however, in saying that so great was the abhorrence which the ancient Egyptians expressed for whatever tended to promote luxury, expense, and voluptuousness, that in order to expose it as much as possible they erected a column in one of the temples of Thebes, full of curses against their king Meinis, who first drew them off from their former frugal and parsimonious course of life. The immediate cause for the erection ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... watered by the Rio Santa Clara and numerous arroyos, and is one of the most fertile and picturesque plains in California. For pastoral charms, fertility of soil, variety of productions, and delicious voluptuousness of climate and scenery, it cannot be surpassed. This valley, if properly cultivated, would alone produce breadstuffs enough to supply millions of population. The buildings of the Pueblo, with few exceptions, ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... other; she was the daytime, the daylight, he was the shadow, put aside, but in the darkness potent with an overwhelming voluptuousness. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... all she had made me suffer. This sacred fire burned in my soul without growing dim for one instant during the whole six years of our separation. In spite of the rich vitality which pulsed through my veins; in spite of the promptings of an external nature full of voluptuousness; in spite of the bad examples and numerous opportunities which tempted mortal weakness in the freedom of a roving, military life, I call God to witness that I preserved my robe of innocence undefiled, and that I never felt the kiss of a woman. Arthur, whose calmer organization was less susceptible ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... the passage of his hawklike gaze. This brown-skinned, broad-shouldered priest, hitherto condemned to the austere virginity of the cloister, was quivering and boiling in the presence of this night scene of love and voluptuousness. This young and beautiful girl given over in disarray to the ardent young man, made melted lead flow in his-veins; his eyes darted with sensual jealousy beneath all those loosened pins. Any one who could, at that moment, have seen the face of the unhappy man glued to the wormeaten bars, would have ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... gluttonness, is the daughter of hypocrisy, and employs every matter to satisfy carnal desires, and raises to these predominant passions, altars, upon which she maintains, without ceasing, the light of iniquity, and sacrifices continually offerings to luxury, voluptuousness, hatred, envy, and perjury. Behold, my dear brother, what you must fight against and destroy before you can come to the knowledge of the true good and sovereign happiness! Behold this monster which you must conquer—a serpent which we detest as an idol, that ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... mere principles of human science. It is distinctly stated by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, where he draws a striking comparison between a man who, being first misled by sophistical reasonings, has gone into a life of voluptuousness, under an impression that he was doing no wrong,—and one who has followed the same course in opposition to his own moral convictions. The former he contends might be reclaimed by argument; but the latter he considers as incurable. In such a state of mind, therefore, it follows, ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... the house of Onesiphorus the Elder was blazing with torches, alive with music, and all the hurry and stir of a sumptuous banquet. All the wealth and fashion of Laodicea were there, Christian and heathen; and all that the classic voluptuousness of Oriental Greece could give to shed enchantment over the scene was there. In ancient times the festivals of Christians in Laodicea had been regulated in the spirit of the command of Jesus, as recorded by Luke, whose classical Greek had made his the established version in Asia ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... robbery, cruelty, covetousness, lust, slander, anger, voluptuousness, revenge, lying, prostitution, and envy are sins which arise from a consumption of a large quantity of aliments containing a higher percentage ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... embroidered at the top with pearls, showed their golden bronze bodies which moved with the ease of an adder. They twisted, turned, swayed their hips, bound with a narrow black girdle, threw themselves back, bowed down, inclined their heads to right and left as if they found a secret voluptuousness in touching their polished chins with their cold, bare shoulders, swelled out their breasts like doves, knelt and rose, pressed their hands to their bosom or voluptuously outspread their arms, which seemed to flutter ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... of thought or style of writing which cannot be paralleled in ancient Greece, only they will there be seen, as it were, in their earlier and simpler forms. Traces of all the things that seem most un-Greek can be found somewhere in Greek literature: voluptuousness, asceticism, the worship of knowledge, the contempt for knowledge, atheism, pietism, the religion of serving the world and the religion of turning away from the world: all these and almost all other points of view one can think ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... physically attractive in him—some curious magnetism. She had a well of sensuousness which might one day become sensuality; she had a richness of feeling and a contour in harmony with it, which might expand into voluptuousness, if given too much sun, or if untamed by the normal restraints of a happy married life. There was an earthquake zone in her being which might shake down the whole structure of her existence. She was unsafe, not because she was deceiving ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... extremely bright, though striped with brown rays, gave to her glance the cruel fixity of a beast of prey, and betrayed the cold maliciousness of the courtesan. The eyes were gray, fringed with black lashes,—a charming contrast, which made their expression of calm and contemplative voluptuousness the more observable; the circle round the eyes showed marks of fatigue, but the artistic manner in which she could turn her eyeballs, right and left, or up and down, to observe, or seem to mediate, ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... into Edwin's bedroom. Edwin began to read, as it were voluptuously. Not that he had a peculiar interest in Irish politics! What he had was a passion for great news, for news long expected. He could thrill responsively to a fine event. I say that his pleasure had the voluptuousness of ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... he is little more than a disciple of Lebrun. His Elegies are rather Franco-Roman than Greek; these, together with beauties of their own, have the characteristic rhetoric, the conventional graces, the mundane voluptuousness of their age. His philosophical poem Hermes, of which we have designs and fragments, would have been the De Rerum Natura of an admiring ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... with violence, extortion, and discontent. The priests were hirelings; the Pharisees were hypocrites; the ruling classes had set aside their primitive simplicity and purity, and were given up to the voluptuousness and licence of the Empire. "Brood of vipers" was apparently not too strong a phrase to use of the foremost religious leaders of the day—at least, when used, ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... situations, to all fortunes, high or low, the mind gives their character. They are, in effect, not what they are in themselves, but what they are to the feeling of their possessors. The King may be mean, degraded, miserable; the slave of ambition, fear, voluptuousness, and every low passion. The Peasant may be the real Monarch, the moral master of his fate, a free and lofty being, more than a Prince in happiness, more than a King ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... ghastly form of Rodin, clad in his long black gown, whilst his eyes seemed to sparkle with diabolic fire. Overcome by the violent emotions occasioned by this story, in which thoughts of death and voluptuousness, love and horror, were so strangely mingled, Hardy remained fixed and motionless, waiting for the words of Rodin, with a combination of curiosity, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... superadded this to his paradisaical possessions. The reverse, however, was obviously the case. Polygamy violates the constitution of nature, and produces contests, jealousies, distracted affections, a voluptuousness which dissolves the vigour of the intellectual and corporeal faculties, neglect of children, with other lamentable evils, for which it furnishes no compensation. "Whether," says Dr. Paley, "simultaneous polygamy was permitted by the law of Moses, seems doubtful; but whether ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... vacancy with his voluptuousness, Full surfeits, and the dryness of his bones, Call on ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may lie amongst the common dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young, and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken. The shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... songs of Cashmire's vale, The rose, the lute, and the nightingale, From flow'rs, whose odours were too divine; From gems of beauty whose souls were mine; From floating eyes, that could wound, yet bless, In their warm, dark, deep, voluptuousness; I'm come, in young iv'ry breasts to lie, Betray'd like Love, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... curious to be going to give one's self to this silent silver thing that waited so calmly for the gift. He felt a sort of dull voluptuousness stealing over him as he stared at the water. He wanted to get away from his companions, from the boat, to ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... lust, concupiscence;.hots, horns [coll]; arousal, heat, rut, estrus, oestrus; tumescence; erection, hard-on, boner. masturbation, self-gratification, autoeroticism, onanism, self-abuse. orgasm, climax, ejaculation. sexiness, attractiveness; sensuality, voluptuousness. [sexual intercourse outside of marriage] fornication, adultery. [person who is sexy] sex symbol, sex goddess; stud, hunk. one-night stand. pornography, porn, porno; hardcore pornography, softcore pornography; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... forbids a divorced man to enter into second espousals during the life of his former partner. This is the inflexible law she first proclaimed in the face of Pagan Emperors and people and which she has ever upheld, in spite of the passions and voluptuousness of ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... that she struggled." We might compare these passages with a letter of July 10, 1836, in which she tells how she throws herself, all dressed as she is, into the Indre, and then continues her course through the sunny meadows, and with what voluptuousness she revels in all the joys of primitive life, and imagines herself living in the beautiful times of ancient Greece. There are days and pages when George Sand, under the afflux of physical life, is pagan. Her genius then is that of the greenwood divinities, who, at certain times ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... who scatter abroad your all, even unto the raiment of your poverty, and did gird sack-cloth about your loins, and did resolve as beggars to endure the gibes and the kicks wherewith brutal insolence and swilling voluptuousness drive away misery from their tables, that by so doing ye might thoroughly purge yourselves from the ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... quiet beauty and voluptuousness around him, Walter's thoughts assumed a more gentle dye, and he broke out into ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her appearance, a Greek, only her face was not Grecian. It was wanting in the noble forms, the still cheerfulness and repose of Grecian beauty, modest even in its voluptuousness. It was only the face of a sensual and passionate Roman woman, and no Lais would have ventured such a smile as played upon the dark-red lips of this Roman woman, or such glowing glances as she shot like arrows from ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... the clear complexion of a brunette. Her features were not perhaps very regular, but her glossy black hair was a beauty in itself. She had a pair of dark, melting eyes, and her wide, high forehead showed that she was gifted with great intelligence. There was an air of restrained voluptuousness about her, and she seemed the ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... another ambition, a third study, a fourth voluptuousness and a mistress. Why do these men take ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... eyebrows gave, at times, an imposing gravity to her face. The same contrast was to be found in the mouth; the short distance which separated it from the nose would indicate, according to Lavater, unusual energy; but the prominent underlip impregnated her smile with enchanting voluptuousness. Her rather clearcut features, the exceeding brilliancy of her brown eyes, which seemed like diamonds set in jet, would, perhaps, have given to the whole rather too strong a character had not these eyes when veiled given to their dazzling rays ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... vomit; which things are altogether opposite to the purity and sanctity of that fountain, or of conjugial love: from which opposition comes conjugial cold, and according to this cold is the lascivious voluptuousness of adulterous love, which consumes itself of its own accord. The reason why this is an evil of sin is because the holy principle is covered and thereby its channel into the body is obstructed, and in the place thereof a profane principle succeeds, and its channel into the body is opened, whence ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... into great discredit. Thus in the allegorical Vishnuite drama called Prabodhacandrodaya and written at Kalanjar near the end of the eleventh century Buddhists and Jains are represented as succumbing to the temptations of inebriety and voluptuousness. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... occasionally be in which we are passive, it is not these, but the latter class of our pleasures, (8) which constitutes satisfaction, (e) (38) which supply that regular stream of moderate and miscellaneous enjoyments in (10 c) which happiness, as distinguished from voluptuousness, consists." ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... austerity, morality, sobriety, and submissiveness. All arts, except military music and war dances, will be eliminated from the city. She needs neither poets nor painters not yet musicians, who corrupt morals by softening them, and by making all feel the secret pang of voluptuousness. All theories, whether aristocratic or tending more or less to communism, are derived from the politics of Plato either by being evolved from them or by harking ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... which a mulatto might avenge the insult of a white,—prohibiting the freed from wearing the same dress as their former masters or mistresses wore;—"the belles affranchies found, in a costume whereof the negligence seemed a very inspiration of voluptuousness, means of evading that social inferiority which the law sought to impose upon them:—they began to inspire the most ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... is good to be said of George the First. He had a certain prosaic honesty, and was frugal amid all his vulgar voluptuousness. He managed the expenses of his court with creditable economy and regularity. The officers in his army, and his civil servants, received their pay at the properly-appointed time. It would be hardly worth while recording these particulars to the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... six months the pressure of normal appetites has begun to reassert itself—and to shop is one of the normal appetites of woman. I say "shop" instead of buy, to distinguish between the dull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiring things one might do without. It is evident that many of the thousands now fighting their way into the great shops must be indulging in the latter delight. At a moment when real wants are reduced to a minimum, how else ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... I will expound this meaning of mine through the medium of a parable. In Babylon of old, there dwelt a king whose name was Belshazzar, who, having fallen into habits of voluptuousness and luxury, was so enslaved by them as to feast and make merry whilst a certain Darius, King of the Medes, was marching in arms against his capital. At a feast one night the fingers of a man's hand were seen to write upon the wall, and the words they wrote were a belated ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... passes, he will not easily return. It is certainly most wise, as it is most safe, to stop before he touches the utmost limit, since every step of advance will more and more entice him to go forward, till he shall at last enter into the recesses of voluptuousness, and sloth and despondency close the passage ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... reproach of heresy. Saint Epiphanius, in the third century, claimed that they used first to tickle each other, the men and the women; that then they gave each other very immodest kisses, and that they judged the degree of their faith by the voluptuousness of these kisses; that the husband said to his wife, in presenting a young initiate to her: "Have an agape with my brother," and that they had ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... and effeminacy in which the family of the shogun was reared, had dragged the house down to the usual impotent level. The government was conducted by a system of bureaucracy which relieved the titular shoguns from all responsibility and allowed them to live in profitless voluptuousness. So that one died and another reigned in his stead without causing more than a ripple upon the ...
— Japan • David Murray
... certain flash in his light eyes and a transient uncovering of the teeth, on the Irish type of female beauty suddenly suggested to me a stanza of an ancient Polish ballad, very full of milk-and-blood imagery, of alternating ferocity and voluptuousness. This I quoted to the astounded foreigner in the vernacular, and this it was that metamorphosed his mere perfection of civility into sudden warmth, and, in fact, procured me the invitation ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... been described. In spite of Sulla's colonies the ruin of the country must have been vastly accelerated by his civil wars and those which followed them. And, while the honest country class was dying out, the town class was ever plunging deeper into frivolity and voluptuousness. To defray the cost of the sumptuous life of the capital the fashionable spendthrift was forced to resort to extortion in the provinces, which, as we have seen, became so crying an evil that a permanent court existed for dealing with it before ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... on the wings of thought, they were in the great city, and the names of the dying sinners shone from the walls of the houses in letters of fire: "Arrogance, Avarice, Drunkenness, Voluptuousness;" in short, ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... informal than that of college boys. What man has ever heard the moral reflections and the corrupting confidences of these young girls? They alone know the sports at which honor is lost in advance, those essays in pleasure, those promptings in voluptuousness, those imitations of bliss, which may be compared to the thefts made by greedy children from a dessert which is locked up. A girl may come forth from her boarding school a virgin, but never chaste. She will have discussed, time and time again at secret meetings, the important ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... of the priesthood. The use he makes of his religious reminiscences is familiarly illustrated in "Faust." The contrast between two opposing principles is marked in all of Gounod's dramatic works, and in "Faust" this struggle of "a soul which invades mysticism and which still seeks to express voluptuousness" not only colors the music with a novel fascination, but amounts to an interesting ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... late hath summoned the other worlds, the stars, to come nearer to him, and to give an account of themselves') and Kepler ('who hath received it into his care, that no new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge'). He rebukes himself for his abandonment to 'the worst voluptuousness, which is an hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages.' At twenty-three he was a soldier against Spain under Raleigh, and went on the 'Islands Voyage'; later on, at different periods, he travelled over many parts of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... extent it fortifies the democratic element in giving the people of the cities greater influence in the government. It arrives at nearly the same result by impoverishing the peasant and land owner, by the many new pleasures offered him and by displaying to him the ostentation and voluptuousness of luxury and ease. It tends to create bands of mercenaries rather than those capable of worthy personal service. It introduces into the nation luxury, ease, and avarice at the same time ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... clear estimate of the property I was to administer and account for. Ormond's easy habits satisfied me that he was not a man of business originally, or had become sadly negligent under the debasing influence of wealth and voluptuousness. My earliest task, therefore, was to make out a minute inventory of his possessions, while I kept a watchful eye on his stores, never allowing any one to enter them unattended. When I presented this document, which exhibited a large deficiency, the Mongo received it with indifference, begging ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... the oak mantel, in a gold frame, was a large coloured print of a Magdalen, doubled up in grief, with a glory of loose, Titian hair, chosen by Ditmar himself as expressing the nearest possible artistic representation of his ideal of the female form. Cora Ditmar's objections on the score of voluptuousness and of insufficient clothing had been vain. She had recognized no immorality of sentimentality in the art itself; what she felt, and with some justice, was that this particular Magdalen was unrepentant, and that Ditmar knew it. And the picture remained an offence to her as long as she ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... abandoned his judgment to his freedmen, and gave them a complete ascendency over his mind. Felix was one of those freedmen. "He exercised in Judea the imperial functions with a mercenary soul." Voluptuousness and avarice were the predominant vices of his heart. We have a proof of his avarice immediately after our text, where it is said he sent for Paul,—not to hear him concerning the truth of the gospel which this apostle had preached with so much power; not to inquire whether this religion, ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... suspicion; but if this is combined with large expanded eyelids or fixed eyebrows, as we see it in Titian's pictures, it will denote calm contemplation or piercing sagacity, without anything of meanness or fear of being observed. In other cases it may imply merely indolent, enticing voluptuousness, as in Lely's portraits of women. The languor and weakness of the eyelids give the amorous turn to the expression. How should there be a rule for all this beforehand, seeing it depends on circumstances ever varying, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... to warn him against this ambition. Here and there are apt indications of his proneness to those vicious levities and debasing luxuries which afterwards ripened into such a gigantic profligacy. He has not yet attained to that rank and full-blown combination of cruelty, perfidy, and voluptuousness, which the world associates with his name, but he is plainly on the way to it. His profound and wily dissimulation, while knitting up the hollow truce with the assassins on the very spot where "great Caesar fell," is managed with admirable skill; his deep ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... of their ways and days, and their naive blending of Christian and Maori beliefs. His description of the festival called Areosis is startling. Magical practices, with their attendant cruelties and voluptuousness, still prevail in Tahiti, though only at certain intervals. Very superstitious, the natives see demons and fairies in ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Every self-transcending passion has in it a divine promise and pledge; even the passion of the senses if it has hidden within it one spark of self-annihilating love may be the salvation of a soul. It is Ottima, lifted above her own superb voluptuousness, who cries—"Not me—to him, O God, be merciful." The region of untrammelled, unclouded passion, of spiritual intuition, and of those great words from heaven, which pierce "even to the dividing asunder of the ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Nineveh and Assyria, noted for his luxury and voluptuousness. Arb[a]c[^e]s, the Mede, conspired against him, and defeated him; whereupon his favorite slave, Myrra, induced him to immolate himself on a funeral pile. The beautiful slave, having set fire to the pile, leaped into the blazing mass, and was burnt to death with the king, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... bloody, Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful, Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin That has a name: but there's no bottom, none, In my voluptuousness: your wives, your daughters, Your matrons, and your maids, could not fill up The cistern of my lust; and my desire All continent impediments would o'erbear, That did oppose my will: better Macbeth Than such an ...
— Macbeth • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Margaret Woffington's. In person she was considerably above the middle height, and so finely formed that one could not determine the exact character of her figure. At one time it seemed all stateliness, at another time elegance personified, and flowing voluptuousness at another. She was Juno, Psyche, Hebe, by turns, and for aught ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... essentially a Greek city, with inhabitants superior in all culture to their kinsmen on the Western shore, and perhaps proportionally weaker on the practical or moral side, and with an element of languid Ionian voluptuousness in them, typified by the cedar and gold of the chamber of Paris—an element which the austere, more strictly European influence of the Dorian Apollo will one day correct in all genuine Greeks. The Aegean, with its islands, is, then, a bond of union, not a barrier; and we must think ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... halls of the Alhambra; surrounded with the insignia of regal sway, and the still vivid, though dilapidated traces of oriental voluptuousness, I was in the strong-hold of Moorish story, and every thing spoke and breathed of the glorious days of Granada, when under the dominion of the crescent. When I sat in the hall of the Abencerrages, I suffered my mind to conjure up all that I had read of that illustrious line. ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... an individual. Something was needed for the jaded boulevardiers of Paris to leer at while they feebly clapped their hands and piped "Ah, charmante! Ravissante!" It may be that the fine command of Oriental color which is supposed to have affinity in the idioms of music with voluptuousness in all its forms, had something to do with the case, but the whole structure of the piece, superb as it is in its contrasting elements, and theatrically ingenious and effective, points nevertheless to the unfortunate Sanderson. And in the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the protectrice of musicians, embroiderers, perfumers, classic modellers, and all who work in elegant attire or administer to the luxuries of the great; but when she is afflicted, she represents 'the lower orders of the votaries of voluptuousness.' ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Marlowe, Shakspere, and Webster. How monstrous in the latter did tragedy necessarily become! yet more repulsive in his tenderer companion-spirit, Ford. In Greek sculpture, passing into convulsed and muscular forms or forms of relaxed voluptuousness, in Italian painting, in the romantic poetry of this century with us, the same stages are manifest. Age parallels age. Tennyson in artistic technique is Virgilian, we are aware of the style; but both Virgil and Tennyson remain classic in matter, in universality, and ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... at all theatres, music-halls, etc., had grown rapidly worse and worse, in character,—licentiousness, animalism, voluptuousness, debauchery, these were the main features of the newer type of performances. Salome dances, and even the wildest, obscenest type of the "can-can" of the French, in its most promiscuous lascivious forms, were common fare on the varied ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... adopted from a MS., written about 1770, which accidentally fell into my possession. The close of the preceding Sonnet 'On Monastic Voluptuousness' is taken from the same source, as is the verse, 'Where Venus sits,' &c., and the line, 'Once ye were holy, ye are holy still,' in a ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... beauties of Nature. Our feelings sally forth and dissipate themselves over the sunny landscape and we "live abroad and everywhere." The song of the bird, the murmur of the stream, the breathing fragrance of spring, the soft voluptuousness of summer, the golden pomp of autumn; earth with its mantle of refreshing green, and heaven with its deep delicious blue and its cloudy magnificence—all fill us with mute but exquisite delight, and we revel in the luxury of mere sensation. But in the depth of winter, when Nature ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... proof or argument; or else his subsequent repentance is cited to bear testimony to his former misdoings. Thus one writer asserts;[297] "This monarch, in the former part of his life, was remarkable for dissipation and extravagance of conduct; in the latter, he became the slave of the popedom. Voluptuousness, ambition, superstition, each in their turn had the ascendant in this extraordinary character." Thus does another sum up the whole question in one short note:[298] "The assertions of his reformation are so express, that the fact cannot be justly questioned without doubting all history; and, if there ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... Most of his poems are short, and present a picture of nature, or of some delicate, fleeting psychical emotion, but they are all filled with enchanting, artistic charm. His poetry is the quintessence of aesthetic voluptuousness, such as was evolved on the soil of the sybaritism of the landed gentry in the circles of the '40's of the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... every sentence in his discourse, 'my most dear and lovely sisters, whom I love from the deepest bottom of my heart.' When a monk becomes Preacher or Chaplain to a Nunnery, his days are passed in constant voluptuousness; for the Nuns will gratify their Confessor in every thing, that he may be equally indulgent to them." ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... people will naturally place it higher than the unmusical would. In other words, popular music needs to be simple, although elaborate music may be beautiful to the few. When elaborate music is the fashion among people to whom all music is a voluptuous mystery, we may be sure that what they love is voluptuousness or fashion, and not ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 'standing in need of a vehement diversion for the sake of distraction, he made himself amorous by art and study.' Elsewhere he tells what great things he was able, as a young man, to achieve in this line. [73] He, therefore, does not agree with the sage who praises age because it frees us from voluptuousness. [74] ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... present, ... let us fill ourselves with costly wine and ointments; and let no flower of the spring pass by us; let us crown ourselves with rosebuds, before they be withered; let none of us go without his part of our voluptuousness; let us leave tokens of our joyfulness ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... we find a fierce smoldering voluptuousness, expressed with a hard and brutal realism which recalls the frescoes on the walls of ancient Pompeii. In "The Flame of Life" we have in superb rhetoric the most colored and ardent description of Venice to be found in all literature. Perhaps the finest ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... relate, but persistent efforts to maintain the disinterested claim on American friendship which we Germans have always (when in need of it) advanced, continue to be misrepresented in that stronghold of atheistical materialism and Byzantine voluptuousness, New York. To the gifted Professor von Schwank's challenge, that he could not fill a single "scrap of paper" with the record of acts of war on our part which were incompatible with Divine guidance ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... dress with the narrow folds hid a distracted fear, of whose torment those chaste lips said nothing. She was in love with Leon, and sought solitude that she might with the more ease delight in his image. The sight of his form troubled the voluptuousness of this mediation. Emma thrilled at the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and afterwards there remained to her only an immense ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... the bishop at Rome." There was a change in the form of government and this change was followed by a train of vices. "Many of those who had the administration of the church affairs were sunk," he says, "in luxury and voluptuousness, puffed up with vanity, arrogance and ambition; possessed with a spirit of contention and discord. They appropriated to their evangelical function the splendid ensigns of temporal majesty: a throne, surrounded with ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... Sobriety (Sobrietas) lifts the standard of the Cross towards the sky. Lust falls from her chariot, and Sobriety fells her with a stone. Then all her saturnalian army is scattered. Love casts away his quiver. Pomp strips herself of her garments, and Voluptuousness (Voluptas) fears not to tread upon thorns, &c. But Avarice disguises herself in the mask of Economy, and succeeds in deceiving all hearts until she is overthrown finally by Mercy (Operatica). All sorts of things happen, but eventually the poem ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... flowers are perpetually alluded to in the writings of eastern poets. The Turks, and indeed the Orientals in general, have few images of voluptuousness without the richest flowers contributing towards them. The noblest palaces, where gilding, damask, and fine carpeting abound, would be essentially wanting in luxury without flowers. It cannot be ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... might steal along at night, when all were asleep, and thus I could enjoy the whole of her exquisite charms, without hindrance. She did not reply, but I could see her eye sparkled, and her cheek flushed as if already in imagination she was revelling untrammelled in all the luxury of voluptuousness such a plan opened out. However, she did not at once accept, but kissing me fondly, called me her dear and ingenious boy, and said she would think over my suggestion. We resumed our lessons on my sisters' return. Miss Evelyn was again four days before she gave me another ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... and, to celebrate their triumph, caused them to live upon a diet equally recherché, but consisting entirely of fish. A few days afterwards they were again subjected to the united powers of youth and beauty, but this time nature was too strong, and the too happy cenobites forgot, in the arms of voluptuousness, their ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... the living image of my adored Valerie! Oh! why are we separated by such an immense distance? Why have I not wings that I might fly to your feet and fall into your arms, full of the sweetest voluptuousness! No! never as at this moment have I cursed the fatal union imposed upon me by an inexorable family, whom my tears could not move. I cannot help hating this woman, who, in spite of me bears my name, innocent ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... curiosity for visiting Venetian beauties, so justly celebrated for their seducing manners and soft address. They accompanied their voices with the forte-piano, and sung a thousand buffo songs, with all that gay voluptuousness for which ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... palace. Lebrun had painted on the vaulted ceiling the happy as well as the unhappy dreams which Morpheus inflicts on kings as well as on other men. Everything that sleep gives birth to that is lovely, its fairy scenes, its flowers and nectar, the wild voluptuousness or profound repose of the senses, had the painter elaborated on his frescoes. It was a composition as soft and pleasing in one part as dark and gloomy and terrible in another. The poisoned chalice, the glittering dagger suspended over the head of the sleeper; ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... any gentleman who is not strait-laced, who loves a pretty girl, a bottle, and a jolly companion, he is the very thing. He is also a past master in gastronomy, and a connoisseur in voluptuousness generally. He was educated at Athens, and has served royalty in Sicily [Footnote: See Aristippus in Notes.], where he had a very good character. Here are his principles in a nutshell: Think the worst of things: make the most of things: get all ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... These shops once made a part of the speculation, of their mercenary, and abandoned master, to whom they each paid a rent after the rate of two or three hundred pounds sterling per annum. This place presents a scene of profligate voluptuousness, not to be equalled upon any spot in Europe. Women of character are almost afraid to appear here at noon day; and a stranger would conceive, that at night, he saw before him, one third of ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... beside the countess, sinking into the perfumed atmosphere which surrounded her with a sort of nimbus of keen voluptuousness. ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to him his soul, So he will spare him four and twenty years, Letting him live in all voluptuousness. ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... influence of thy happy climate that she certainly was indebted for that almost incompatible harmony of voluptuousness and decency which diffused itself over all her person, and accompanied all her motions. A statuary who would have wished to represent Voluptuousness, would have taken her for his model; and she would equally have served for him who might have had a figure of Modesty ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... of your Duerer and your Cranach.[36] But one day a picture-dealer brought a small picture of the Madonna by old Albrecht to the Duke's gallery, and it made a powerful and wonderful impression upon me, so that I turned away completely from the voluptuousness of Italian art, and from that very hour determined to go back to my native Germany and study there the masterpieces upon which my heart was now set I came to Nuremberg here, and when I beheld Rose I seemed to see the Madonna who had so wonderfully stirred my heart, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... surface of dainty Italian traceries—Chenonceaux, Blois, Chambord, and the church of Brou. In painting, there came from Italy workmen like Maitre Roux and the masters of the school of Fontainebleau, to have their later Italian voluptuousness attempered by the naive and silvery qualities of the native style; and it was characteristic of these painters that they were most successful in painting on glass, an art so essentially medieval. Taking it up where the middle age had left it, they found their whole work among ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... (which is, after all, but an unhealthy flush produced by destruction,) so surely does winter come. In the Arts, the winter has been exaggerated action, conventionalism, gaudy colour, false sentiment, voluptuousness, and poverty of invention: and, of all these characters, that which has been the most infallible herald of decease, voluptuousness, has been the most rapid and sure. Corruption lieth under it; and every school, and indeed every individual, that has pandered to ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... are almost all strong men in the prime or past the prime of life, chosen for their salient display of vital structure. Signorelli was the first, and, with the exception of Michael Angelo, the last painter thus to use the body, without sentiment, without voluptuousness, without any second intention whatsoever, as the supreme decorative principle. In his absolute sincerity he made, as it were, a parade of hard and rugged types, scorning to introduce an element of beauty, whether sensuous or ideal, that should distract him from the study ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... She lived; her breast rose and fell. Her gown had the same voluptuousness. Her temperament was still emanating the same aura. She was the same new Concepcion, strange and yet profoundly known to him. But ineffable tragedy had marked her down, and the sight ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... the coarsest food, that their proud and licentious rulers might be "clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day." Such was the home to which the beautiful Maria Antoinette, the bride of fifteen, was introduced; and in the midst of temptations to which such voluptuousness exposed her, she entered upon her dark and gloomy career. This, however, was but one of her abodes. It was but one even of her country seats. At Versailles there were other palaces, in the construction and the embellishment of which ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott |
