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More "Ascetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to temperament. He was of a cheerful, even sanguine disposition, and his countenance faithfully reflected the ordinary bent of his humour. Seeing him at a distance, the casual observer would at once have judged him to be either an athlete or an ascetic. There was no superfluous flesh about him; he was tall and muscular, with well- knit limbs, broad shoulders, and a head altogether lacking in the humble or conciliatory 'droop' which all worldly-wise parsons cultivate for the benefit of their rich patrons. It was ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... plan, which was first adopted by St Bruno and his twelve companions at the original institution at Chartreux, near Grenoble, was maintained in all the Carthusian establishments throughout Europe, even after the ascetic severity of the order had been to some extent relaxed, and the primitive simplicity of their buildings had been exchanged for the magnificence of decoration which characterizes such foundations as the Certosas ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... I heard one hailing me, and glancing round, saw that in the hedge was a wicket-gate, and over this gate a man was leaning. A little, thin man with the face of an ascetic, or mediaeval saint, a face of a high and noble beauty, upon whose scholarly brow sat a calm serenity, yet beneath which glowed the full, bright eye of the ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... earlier Florentine art, Titian might well have conceived, might well have painted thus. Strange to say, the influence is not that of Michelangelo, but, unless the writer is greatly deceived, that of Donatello, whose noble ascetic type of the Precursor is here modernised, and in the process deprived of some of its austerity. The glorious mountain landscape, with its brawling stream, fresher and truer than any torrent of Ruysdael's, is all Titian. It makes the striking figure of St. John, for all ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... Lady Price's entreating summons, wrenched himself from a murmuring home, and, starting by an early train, arrived half through the St. Michael's Day Service, it was to see Mr. Underwood looking indeed like some ethereal ascetic saint, with his bright eyes and wasted features, and to hear him preach in extempore—as was his custom—a sermon on the blessedness of angel helps, which in its intense fervour, almost rapture, was ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... vicar of the bishopric of Seez. Maternal uncle, guardian, guest, and boarder of Madame du Bousquier—nee Cormon—of Alencon; he died in 1819, almost blind, and strangely depressed by his niece's recent marriage. Entirely removed from worldly interests, he led an ascetic life, and an uneventful one, entirely consumed in thoughts of salvation, mortifications of the flesh, and secret works of charity. [Jealousies of a ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... the ascetic principle of self-mastery. It is best brought before us by the familiar practice of fasting, which is very mildly recommended to us in its lowest terms in the table in the Book of Common Prayer. Naturally, its value is not the value of going without this or that, but the ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... hill country, from the Mohawk Valley to the Canadian line and to Lake Champlain, he had one name, The Shepherd of the North. From Old Forge to Ausable to North Creek men knew his ways and felt the beating of the great heart of him behind the stern, ascetic set of his countenance. ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... directly the clergy succeeded in occupying a more than ordinary amount of public attention, they availed themselves of that circumstance to propagate those ascetic doctrines which, while they strike at the root of human happiness, benefit no one except the class which advocates them; that class, indeed, can hardly fail to reap the advantages from a policy which by increasing the apprehensions to which the ignorance ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... and only four, Gospels in general use with Christians ("Evidences," pp. 154, 155). Paley does not state, until later, that the "follower of Justin Martyr" turned heretic and joined the Encratites, an ascetic and mystic sect who taught abstinence from marriage, and from meat, etc.; nor does he tell us how doubtful it is what the Diatessaron—now lost—really contained. He blandly assures us that it is a harmony ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... her tastes. So absolute was her empire, that, when she became a devotee, he became a mystic: he followed her, as the satellite accompanies the planet, from the worldly gayeties of her youth, even to the foot of the altar, and the ascetic self-denial of Port-Royal. He survived her, as though he had survived himself, and lived to the extraordinary age of one hundred and four years, animated to unusual life by his gentle and amiable feelings. Such was Madame de Sevigne's principal friend. If his name were erased from her ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... bitter creed of a worn-out debauchee, who has wasted his life in hunting shadows, and is left with a cynical spirit and a barbed tongue. It may be the passionless belief of a retired student, or the fanatical faith of a religious ascetic. It may be an argument for sensuous excess, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die'; or it may be the stimulus for noble and holy living, 'I must work the works of Him that sent me while it is day. The night cometh.' The other accompanying beliefs determine whether it ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and change. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... to the cure of Naaman, the Syrian, and the restoration to life of the son of the Shunamite woman, in reward for her hospitality, and the interview with Hazael before he became king. All his predictions came to pass. He seems to have lived an isolated and ascetic life, though he had great influence with the people and the king, like other prophets of ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... a missionary into a country like this who is not well versed in English—a country where they think, so far from understanding any language besides his own, scarcely one individual in ten speaks his own intelligibly; or an ascetic person where, as they say, high and low, male and female, are, at some period of their lives, fond of a renovating glass, as it is styled, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... applause of men, may devote himself to much benevolence and usefulness of a public and ostensible kind; while he neglects duties of a higher, though more private nature,—and overlooks entirely, it may be, his own moral condition. The ascetic, on the contrary, shuts himself up in his cell, and imagines that he pleases God by meditation and voluntary austerities. But this is not the part of him who truly feels his varied relations, and correctly estimates his true responsibilities.—It is ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... with his hands folded in his sleeves, the great book upon his knees, a slight and thoughtful smile playing around the corners of his finely-cut mouth. His whole face was intensely spiritual in expression. The features were delicately cut, and bore the impress of an ascetic life, as well as of gentle birth and noble blood. He was, in fact, a scion of an ancient and powerful house; but it was one of those houses that had suffered sorely in the recent strife, and whose members had been scattered and cut off. ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Barbara and St. Elizabeth.[27] I do not know among the pictures of the great sacred schools any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically expressive of the need of the heart that conceived them. Not ascetic, nor quaint, nor feverishly or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities of thought. Only entirely true—entirely pure. No depth of glowing heaven beyond them—but the clear sharp sweetness of the northern air: no splendor of rich color, striving to ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... crossed behind him, and his thin face thrust as far as it would go into the air outside. It is possible that some intelligence might have seen in this priest a caricature of his profession, a figure to be copied for the curate of burlesque, so accurately did he reproduce the common signs of the ascetic school. His face would have been womanish in its plainness but for the gravity that had grown upon it, only occasionally dispersed by a smile of scholarliness and sweetness which had the effect of being permitted, conceded. ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Grace of clay disclose.' 'What! limbs that cannot move!' 'What! lips that melt away!' 'Keep thou thy Maid of air!' 'Shroud up thy Grace of clay!' 'Twas thus, contending hot, they went before the Sage, And knelt at the wise wells of cold ascetic age. 'The fairest of the twain, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... To the purest ascetic temper a struggle of this kind is hardly real. Catherine felt a bitter surprise at her own pain. Yesterday a sort of mystical exaltation upheld her. What ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... princesses as a nest is of young sparrows. All love me dearly at once.—Charming idea of life, but too high-colored for the reality. I have outgrown all this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive,—almost, perhaps, ascetic. We carry happiness into our condition, but must not hope to find it there. I think you will be willing to hear some lines which embody the subdued and limited ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... when this extraordinary and romantic order came into existence, the contrasting spirits of warlike enterprise and monastic retirement were drawing men, some from the field to the cloister, others from the life of ascetic piety to the scenes of strife. There appeared a strange blending of these two tendencies, which indeed was the leading characteristic of the time. This union of the religious with the militant spirit ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... who undertook the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, when the dangers attending it were the greatest, was a native of Amiens in France, named Peter, who had become a monk and an ascetic, being called from his solitary manner of life, Peter the Hermit. He arrived safely at Jerusalem, and visited all the scenes sacred to a Christian's eyes. As he walked along the streets, looking at this and that holy spot, insolent and contemptuous ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... fathomless scorn of the self-mastering ascetic for the sodden debauchee, Bill proceeded coldly with his task of "crowding" Jan out and away from the safety of that place and into the wilderness. In a few minutes he ventured to hasten matters by actually nipping one of Jan's hind legs with his teeth. ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... humour into which Stoicism at all times tends to fall, the tendency to cry, Abase yourselves! There was here the almost inhuman impassibility of one who had thought too closely on the paradoxical aspect of the love of posthumous fame. With the ascetic pride which lurks under all Platonism, [201] resultant from its opposition of the seen to the unseen, as falsehood to truth—the imperial Stoic, like his true descendant, the hermit of the middle age, was ready, in no friendly humour, to mock, there ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... expatriated Lord Mayor. I will not willingly consent to accept it as qualification for a high trust that a man has a good cook and an admirable cellar, and an ostentatious tendency to display the merits of both. Mind, I am no ascetic who say this: I like good dinners; I like occasionally—only occasionally though—very good dinners. I feel with a clever countryman who said he liked being asked out to dine, "it was flattering, and it was ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... recognized the significance of the button. They thought it meant that David belonged to the Y. M. C. A. or was a teetotaler. David, with his gentle manners and pale, ascetic face, was liable to give ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... contains some truth and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered. There is a time to dance and a time to mourn; to be harsh as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as to glorify the appetites; and if a man were to combine all these extremes into his work, each in its place and proportion, that work would be the world's masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Partiality is immorality; for ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... breakfast at a club, as Vincent had said. It was a plain meal—cold bacon, a vast dish of scrambled eggs kept hot by a spirit lamp and a hot-water arrangement. You could make toast for yourself if you wished, and there was a big fresh loaf, with excellent butter, marmalade, and jam—not an ascetic breakfast at all. There were daily papers on the table, and no one talked. I did not see Father Payne, who ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... equally bad and enervating. An experience far wider than any we yet possess is necessary to enable us to say how far this influence is capable of extension. How far, that is, the mind may be directed on the one hand to ascetic abnegation by the systematic use of certain music, or on the other to illicit and dangerous pleasures by melodies of an opposite tendency. But this much is, I think, certain, that after a comparatively advanced standard of culture ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... by itself; it was secretly supported by the recondite reason that the preposterous hour of 6 a.m. appealed powerfully to something youthful, perverse, silly, fanatical, and fine in the youths. They discovered the ascetic's joy in robbing themselves of sleep and in catching chills, and in disturbing households and chapel-keepers. They thought it was a great thing to be discussing intellectual topics at an hour when a town that ignorantly scorned ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... transformed into the purely spiritual festival which we celebrate to-day' (Montefiore, op. cit., p. 160). But the day is none the less associated with a strict rite, the fast. It is one of the few ascetic ceremonies in the Jewish Calendar as known to most Jews. There is a strain of asceticism in some forms of Judaism, and on this a few words will be said later. But, on the whole, there is in modern Judaism a tendency to underrate ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... they had regained their former spirits. "Where shall I take you?" said the stranger quietly. There was a hurried whispering; and then Kate said boldly, "To the Institute." They drove silently up the hill, until the long, ascetic building loomed up before them. The stranger reined up suddenly. "You know the way better than I," he said. "Where do you go in?"—"Through the back-window," said Kate with sudden and appalling frankness. "I see!" responded their strange driver quietly, and, alighting quickly, removed the ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... and impulsive? Moreover, had not Mother Nature endowed him with the gifts of a seer and made him chivalrous as well as intensely sympathetic, while his early training inclined him to be serious, and even ascetic? Nor were the rebuffs he met with throughout his career calculated at this stage to make him court the applause of his fellow-men or be mindful of the world's censure or approval. Nor can one well quarrel with what he had now to say on many a subject, visionary and enthusiast as he always was, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... cheap cotton cloth on the table; these, with a set of bookshelves, frankly constructed of grocer's boxes, formed the entire suite. And yet, despite its poverty, the place exhaled an air of homely if rather ascetic comfort, and the taste was irreproachable. The quiet russet of the tablecloth struck a pleasant harmony with the subdued bluish green of the worn carpet; the Windsor chairs and the legs of the table had been carefully denuded of their glaring ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... struggled with himself to do so. The high cheek bones with the hollows beneath were the same, yet the texture of the hollows seemed different. The thin-lipped mouths were from the same mould, but George's lips were firm and muscular, while Al's were soft and loose—the lips of an ascetic turned voluptuary. There was also a sag at the corners. His flesh hinted of grossness, especially so in the eagle-like aquiline nose that must once have been like the other's, but that had lost the ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... After practising the most severe austerities for the space of three years, Siva, mounted on his bull, with his spouse Parvati by his side, appears before the hermit, who is overjoyed at the sight of the deity. Siva bids him ask any boon and it should be granted. The royal ascetic desires to have a son. Then says Siva: "For thy long penance we grant thy request. Choose then—a son who shall always be with thee till death, but shall be the greatest fool in the whole world, or four daughters ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... extracted, in the courts of justice, by the help of such periodical memoranda. The Church of Rome, with its unerring skill in absorbing and insinuating itself into all the business or pleasures of mankind, did not overlook these popular gatherings. And if the ascetic Anthony, the sturdy Christopher, or that "painful martyr," St. Bartholomew, minded earthly matters in the regions of their several beatitudes, they must have been often more scandalized than edified by the boisterous amusements of those who celebrated their respective ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... to call attention. But this is Burton, by some accounted a morose person, but by those who knew him intimately a cheery and witty companion. Here, too, with slow and faltering step comes Pusey in extreme old age, and Liddon of ascetic mien. Hark to the laughter! It is Stubbs—historian Bishop—with witty saying falling from his lips. And there is Liddell, feared of the undergraduate, but splendid both in figure and in face. And many another shade would ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... of deities, the generation of Danavas and Yakshas of great prowess, and serpents, Gandharvas, birds, and of all creatures; and lastly, of the life and adventures of king Bharata—the progenitor of the line that goes by his name—the son born of Sakuntala in the hermitage of the ascetic Kanwa. This parva also describes the greatness of Bhagirathi, and the births of the Vasus in the house of Santanu and their ascension to heaven. In this parva is also narrated the birth of Bhishma uniting in himself portions of the energies of the other Vasus, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the same way. Some of them would set out to do one thing and some another. Some would prefer to walk alone high up on the ridge; others would choose a bevy of companions and chatter along the road under the hill. Some would be thin, ascetic persons, who liked to stride along and see how far they could go without eating or drinking; some would be pleasant, good-tempered creatures, who would amble by dusty places and be thankful for cool beer; some would ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... thou seest, beautiful as the moon, and like it, full of arts[14], and above all, a dancer that would turn even Tumburu green with envy, all this nectar has become poison by the curse of that old ascetic, and the very perfection of her beauty has become the means of undoing us both. For about two years ago, as we were walking together at midnight, on the terrace of the palace, that forms the edge of the city ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... the Vadstena Chapter a tract in refutation of the Lutheran doctrines, and along with it a sermon preached by Petri, "in which," so wrote the bishop, "you will observe his blasphemy of the Holy Virgin." Brask, despite his spiritual duties, was no ascetic, and, though suffering at the time from illness, added a postscript begging the Chapter to let him have a box of nuts. Apparently these delicacies came; for the bishop's next letter, written to the pope, was in a happier vein. "I have just ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... unintentionally began to preserve and use the ancient Roman books, and from using them at first as models for style, an interest in their contents was later awakened. While many of the monasteries remained as farming, charitable, and ascetic institutions almost exclusively, and were never noted for their educational work, a small but increasing number gradually accumulated libraries and became celebrated for their literary activity and for the character ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... cayuses an' I wants 'em right now. Yu an' me will amble off an' get 'em. I won't bore yu with tellin' yu what'll happen if yu gets skittish. Slope along an' don't be scared; I'm with yu," assured Mr. Cassidy as he looked over at Mr. Connors, whose ascetic soul pined for the flapjacks of which his olfactories caught ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... modern days when the novel wanders even as far as the nuns in their cells (I have good authority for making this statement), perhaps I may be able to count upon an aged Mother Abbess to be, outwardly perhaps a disapproving, but at heart a sympathetic reader. Indeed, I count upon the ascetic more than upon any other class for appreciation, for the imagination of those who have had no experience in love adventures will enkindle, and they will appreciate perhaps more intensely than any other the mental trouble that a journey to ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... sycamores, into Old Chester, to Dr. Lavendar's church. "I like to come to your church," she told him, "because you don't preach quite such long sermons as Mr. Fenn does." But when it rained or was very hot she chose the shorter walk and sat under John Fenn, looking up at his pale, ascetic face, lighted from within by his young certainties concerning the old ignorances of people like Dr. Lavendar—life and death and eternity. Of Dr. Lavendar's one certainty, Love, he was deeply ignorant, this honest boy, who was so concerned for Philippa's father's soul! But Philippa did not listen ...
— The Voice • Margaret Deland
... recognise him for the same man. The secular vigour of the Hesperides, the spiritual vigour of the Noble Numbers, has rarely been equalled and never surpassed by any other writer. I cannot agree with Mr. Gosse that Herrick is in any sense "a Pagan." They had in his day shaken off the merely ascetic temper of the Middle Ages, and had not taken upon them the mere materialism of the Aufklaerung, or the remorseful and satiated attitude of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. I believe that the warmest of the Julia poems and the immortal "Litany" ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... The Abbot of San-Lucar was chosen by Don Juan to be the director of the consciences of the Duchess of Belvidero and her son Felipe. The ecclesiastic was a holy man, well shaped, and admirably well proportioned. He had fine dark eyes, a head like that of Tiberius, worn with fasting, bleached by an ascetic life, and, like all dwellers in the wilderness, was daily tempted. The noble lord had hopes, it may be, of despatching yet another monk before his ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... fifty-four candidates for six vacancies. The cook has run away and left us liable, which makes our committee very plaintive. Master Brook, our head serving-man, has the gout, and our new cook is none of the best. I speak from report,—for what is cookery to a leguminous-eating ascetic? So now you know as much of the matter as I do. Books and quiet are still there, and they may dress their dishes in their own way for me. Let me know your determination as to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... social life wore no ascetic form, He loved all beauty, without fear of harm, And in his veins his Teuton ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and drive, Prompt the dense herd to butt, and set the snare Witching them into pitfalls for hoarse shouts. More now, and hourly more, and of the Lord Thou lead'st to, doth this rebel heart discern, When pinched ascetic and red sensualist Alternately recurrent freeze or burn, And of its old religions it has doubts. It fears thee less when thou hast shown it bare; Less hates, part understands, nor much resents, When the prized objects it has raised for prayer, For fitful prayer;—repentance dreading fire, Impelled ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dropped away as she saw his face more clearly and knew he had not slept. She knew, too, that his mind was as firmly fixed as hers, and she felt as if the whole world were sliding from her, for this was not her lover: this was some ascetic who had not yet forgotten his desires. He looked haggard, fierce with renunciation and restraint, and she cried out, "Zebedee, darling, don't ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... entirely constructed of them. Some of the stones were of enormous size, beautifully cut, of amazing brilliance and fabulous value. Above, was suspended a golden representation of a crocodile—the god Zomara. Lolling lazily among the pink silk cushions was a woman, tall, thin-faced and ascetic, with a complexion white as my own, high cheek bones, small black, brilliant eyes, and hair plentifully tinged with grey. Her personality was altogether a striking one, for her brow was low, her face hawk-like, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... ascetic, n. hermit, recluse, eremite, anchoret, solitary. Antonyms: voluptuary, sensualist, sybarite, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the only useful friend who was left to her. He was a thin, gray-eyed, fair-haired young man, who practised largely among the poor, from choice rather than from necessity, since Dr. Morton had given him an excellent start in life. His pale, ascetic face had attracted Gabriella from their first meeting; there was the flamelike enthusiasm of the visionary in his eyes; and he had, she thought, the most beautiful and sympathetic hands she had ever seen. Even Fanny, who was usually impervious to sensitive impressions, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... want is inward rest; rest of heart and brain; the calm, strong, self-contained, self-denying character; which needs no stimulants, for it has no fits of depression; which needs no narcotics, for it has no fits of excitement; which needs no ascetic restraints, for it is strong enough to use God's gifts without abusing them; the character, in a word, which is truly temperate, not in drink or food merely, but in all desires, thoughts, and actions; freed from the wild lusts and ambitions to which that old Adam yielded, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... which underlay Kantian as well as Christian ethics. He asserted that the true motive of morality is not the salvation of the individual man but the Progress of humanity. In fact, with Fichte Progress is the principle of ethics. That the Christian ideal of ascetic saintliness detached from society has no moral value is a plain corollary from the idea of earthly Progress. [Footnote: X. Leon, La Philosophie de Fichte (1902), ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... this to himself as he sat on the oak bench that ran around the room, polished by serge gowns and the rough broadcloth of cassocks. Notwithstanding the early hour, several persons beside himself were waiting. A Dominican striding back and forth, ascetic and serene of face, two nuns buried in their hoods, telling their beads on long rosaries which measured their time of waiting, priests from the diocese of Lyon, recognizable from the shape of their hats, and other persons of stern and meditative mien seated by the great table of black wood ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... ladies appeared before me; one very tall, almost as tall as Miss Ingram—very thin too, with a sallow face and severe mien. There was something ascetic in her look, which was augmented by the extreme plainness of a straight-skirted, black, stuff dress, a starched linen collar, hair combed away from the temples, and the nun-like ornament of a string of ebony beads and a crucifix. This I felt sure was Eliza, though I could trace little ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Christianity as mainly, if not exclusively, a religion of the other world, as it has been called, a religion whose God is not the principle of all life and nature and for which nature and life are not divine. In the second place, it was due to the prominence of the negative or ascetic element in Christianity as commonly presented, to the fact that in that presentation the law of self-sacrifice bore no relation to the law of self-realisation. In both of these respects he would have found himself much more at home with the apprehension of Christianity which we have inherited ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... which city he repeatedly returned with increasing affection. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, for Gogol never departed from the pious Christian faith taught him by his mother; in fact, toward the end of his life, he became an ascetic and a mystic. The last years were shadowed by illness and—a common thing among Russian writers—by intense nervous depression. He died at Moscow, 21 February 1852. His last words were the old saying, "And I shall ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... his parents, when he has been three days without water or congee, takes a staff to enable himself to rise [2]."' While he thus condemned the severe discipline of Tsang, Tsze-sze appears, in various incidents which are related of him, to have been himself more than sufficiently ascetic. As he was living in great poverty, a friend supplied him with grain, which he readily received. Another friend was emboldened by this to send him a bottle of spirits, but he declined to receive it.' You receive your corn from other people,' urged the donor, 'and why should you decline ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... seized by the temptation to enter at once into Nirvana, without proclaiming his doctrine to the world. But putting the temptation from him, he began his ministry by announcing the tidings of release to the companions of his ascetic life, who, after scoffing for awhile, were at length convinced. In the course of this, his first sermon, Buddha proceeded to enunciate the eight steps on the path which leads to Nirvana—(i) Right faith, (ii) right resolution, (iii) right speech, (iv) right action, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... chronicle the ascetic sternness of the old Norman castles had been humanized and refined so that the new dwellings of the nobility, if less imposing in appearance, were much more comfortable as places of residence. A gentle race had built their houses rather for peace than for ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... little of her father till late years, when she had come to reside with him, and, though devout by nature, she could ill reconcile herself to the gloomy notions of religion he entertained, or to the ascetic mode of life he practised. With no desire to share in the pomps and vanities of life, she could not be persuaded that cheerfulness was incompatible with righteousness; nor could all the railings she heard against them make her hate those who differed ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... sense of convenience is as slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of the field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over and constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau, expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt warranted ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... and a few moments later a tall, spare figure in a black robe with a belt about the waist appeared. Robert's heart gave a great leap. The wearer of the black robe was an elderly man with a thin face, ascetic and high. The captive recognized him at once. It was Father Philibert Drouillard, the priest, whose life had already crossed his more than once, and it was not strange to see him there, as the French priests roamed far through the great wilderness of ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... battle. He loved courage, enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue; everything that lifts us above the table where we eat or the bed we sleep upon. This with no touch of the motive-monger or the ascetic. He loved his virtues to be practical, his heroes to be great eaters of beef; he loved the jovial Heracles, loved the astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and Wesleys. A fine buoyant sense of life and of man's unequal character ran through all his thoughts. He could not tolerate ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... feel satisfied that you are doing right, Mrs. Penn," said the minister, helplessly. His thin gray-bearded face was pathetic. He was a sickly man; his youthful confidence had cooled; he had to scourge himself up to some of his pastoral duties as relentlessly as a Catholic ascetic, and then he ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... unostentatious, and even ascetic life during these years was noted. He was known as a man of extremely refined tastes and sensitive though not querulous nature. A commentator ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... man "who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... the town because he called himself a "Socialist," but Samuel did not know that. His wife was a little mite of a woman, completely swamped by child-bearing. Most interesting to Samuel was Friedrich, who played the violin; a pale ascetic-looking boy of fifteen, with wavy ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... William is the youngest of the group, but the oldest-fashioned Friend, still clinging very closely to the old doctrines and the old ritual of silent simplicity, and wearing the straight-cut, collarless coat, above which his youthful face looks strangely ascetic and serene. I can imagine him taking joyfully any amount of persecution for his faith, in the ancient days; but in these tolerant modern times, he has the air of waiting very tranquilly and with good humour for the world ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... stood cold food, wine and fruit. The music-room was familiar to her late husband's associate. Patel's portrait hung over the fireplace. It represented in hard, shallow tones the face of a white-haired, white-bearded man whose thin lips, narrow nose and high forehead proclaimed him an ascetic of art. The deep-set eyes alone told of talent—their gaze inscrutable and calculating; a disappointed life could be read in every seam ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... of Fertility, and the Goddess of Chastity, became, as the impersonation of motherhood, all beauty, bounty and graciousness; and at the same time, by virtue of her perpetual virginity, the patroness of single and ascetic life—the example and the excuse for many of the wildest of the early monkish theories. With Christianity, new ideas of the moral and religious responsibility of woman entered the world; and while these ideas were yet struggling ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... is the central figure. He stands out clothed with all the noble attributes accredited to him in the Bible,—'stern and inflexible in his teaching, yet bowing before him whose message he had to promulgate.' A halo of grandeur surrounds the ascetic of the desert as he hurls anathemas upon the corruptors of Israel; or as, in the true spirit of the ancient prophets of his race, he rebukes Herod under the roof of that monarch's palace. No greater hero could a musician ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... precedence of even the minister, had been uncompromisingly opposed to them. He was a stern, deeply religious Scotchman, with a horror of the emotional form of religion. As long as Uncle Jerry's spare, ascetic form and deeply-graved square-jawed face filled his accustomed corner by the northwest window of Avonlea church no revivalist might venture therein, although the majority of the congregation, including the minister, would have ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Titian's greatest works, the one in which he attains his highest flight: the composition is balanced and distributed with infinite art. The upper portion, which is arched, represents Paradise, Glory, as the Spanish say in their ascetic language: garlands of angels floating and submerged in a wave of light of uncalculable depth, stars scintillating in the flame, and brighter glints of the everlasting light form the aureole of the Father, who arrives ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... fulfilment of this prophecy, is seen descending the palace stairs of the Can Grande, at Verona, during his exile. He is dressed in sober grey and drab clothes, and contrasts strongly in his ascetic and suffering aspect with the gay revellers about him. The people are preparing for a festival, and splendidly and fantastically robed, some bringing wreaths of flowers. Bowing with mock reverence, a jester gibes at Dante. An ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... him justice we must admit that he led an ascetic and saint-like life, renouncing all worldly pleasures. An Englishman who saw much of him about 1851 declared that his goodness of soul surpassed even his brilliancy ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... 1817, and was rediscovered there in 1874. It is supposed to be this San Giovannino by Michael Angelo, though it has nothing of the large quality of Michael Angelo's work. Donatello has been suggested as the author, but it has still less of the square planes and ascetic character of the great Donato. It is a charming, almost a cloying statue. St. John seems to find his honeycomb ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... Mlle. de Scudery to outlive her literary reputation. The interminable romances which had charmed the eloquent Flechier, the Grand Conde in his cell at Vincennes, the ascetic d'Andilly at Port Royal, as well as the dreaming maidens who signed over their fanciful descriptions and impossible adventures, passed their day. The touch of a merciless criticism stripped them of their already fading glory. Their subtle analysis and etherealized sentiment were declared ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... penetrated this, and was revealed in it: thought and sense, spirit and nature, were reconciled. These thinkers made room for man, as against the Puritans, and for God, as against their successors. Instead of the hopeless struggle of ascetic morality, which divides man against himself, they awakened him to that sense of his reconciliation with his ideal which religion gives: "Psyche drinks its ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... animates the codes and constitutions of Europe—it was moulded to the habits, the manners, and the condition of the people whom it was intended to enlighten, to harmonize, and to guide. He was no gloomy ascetic, such as a false philosophy produces, affecting the barren sublimity of an indolent seclusion; open of access to all, free and frank of demeanour, he found wisdom as much in the market-place as the cell. He aped no coxcombical contempt ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... slavery, rejoices and mounts upwards, lay an irresistible bait for such as have once tasted of their philosophy." The ideas which the sect cherished were popular in a certain part of Greco-Roman society, which, sated with the luxury of the age, turned to the ascetic life and to the pursuit of mysticism. Pliny the Elder, who was on the staff of Titus at Jerusalem, appears to have been especially interested in the Jewish communists, and briefly described their doctrines in his books; and the circle for whom Josephus wrote would have been glad to ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... she considers the accomplishment of an imperious duty; but she suffers continually, for she is not formed for those mystical contemplations, in the midst of which certain people, forgetting all affection, all earthly remembrances, are lost in ascetic delights. No; Fleur-de-Marie believes, prays, submits herself to the rigorous and harsh observance of her order; she pours out the most evangelical consolations, the most humble cares upon the poor ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... parallel is pretty close for an historical parallel, despite the differences between the ascetic of Wolf-town and the sage of Bolt Court, ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... the old nations which have perished with their gods, Greece appeals to our closest sympathies. She looks upon us with the smile of childhood, free, contented, and happy, with no ascetic self-denials to check her wild-flower growth, no stern religion to bind the liberty of her actions. All her external aspects are in harmony with the weakness and the strength of human nature. We recognize ourselves in her, and find all the characteristics ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... shockingly as the effigy has suffered, it still preserves something of its original beauty and stateliness. The attitude is simple; the gloved hands of the bishop are joined over his breast in an attitude of prayer. The face is thin and ascetic, its saintly austerity being rendered more noticeable owing to the rich mitre that crowns the head. The folds of the robe are managed with a consummate simplicity and skill. In Leland's "Itinerary" the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Exeter - A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • Percy Addleshaw
... likely were, assembled at their theatre and laughing at their games—as Sallust and his friends, and their mistresses protested—crowned with flowers, with cups in their hands, against the new, hard, ascetic, pleasure-hating doctrine, whose gaunt disciples, lately passed over from the Asian shores of the Mediterranean, were for breaking the fair images of Venus, and flinging the altars ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as it were, for the pursuit of its legitimate ends—all those higher and wider interests in life which are comprised under the one comprehensive name of "the kingdom of God." And the teaching of Christ is: Neither hate nor fear this part of your nature with the ascetic, nor pamper and stimulate it with the Hedonist, but let it alone to act on its own plane; trust it, trust God who made it, while you throw all your conscious energies into the higher concerns of life; and you will find, when left to its own unconscious activity, it is neither ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... sacraments no salvation. The ecclesiastical institution is therefore indispensable to the believer. The canonical priesthood, the canonical hierarchy is necessary to him for the exercise of his faith.—He must have yet more, if fervent and animated with true old Christian sentiment, ascetic and mystic, which separates the soul from this world and ever maintains it in the presence of God. Several things ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... observation of nature he proposes to interpret and guide his life. He is convinced that this combined authority of reason and observation will lead to the summum bonum of the golden mean in which unbridled self-expression will be seen as equally unwise and indecent and ascetic repression as both unworthy and unnecessary. It is important to again remind ourselves that confidence in the human spirit as the master of its own fate, and in reason and natural observation as offering it the means of this self-control and understanding, are essential humanistic principles. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... affairs. She had civilised the Court, in matters of costume at least; she had read books to the devoted Malcolm, who could not read; and he had been her interpreter in her discussions with the Celtic-speaking clergy, whose ideas of ritual differed from her own. The famous Culdees, originally ascetic hermits, had before this day united in groups living under canonical rules, and, according to English observers, had ceased to be bachelors. Masses are said to have been celebrated by them in some "barbarous rite"; Saturday was Sabbath; on Sunday ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... costume to his face, the prisoner recognised that his visitor was indeed not a Korean, but a Chinaman, and a Chinaman of the highest grade, too—without doubt, a mandarin. There was no mistaking the thin, ascetic, high-bred face, the prominent cheek-bones, the almond-shaped eyes; and the long but scanty moustache scarcely concealed a strong, resolute-looking mouth, the lips of which were, however, rather too thin, lending an expression ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... science and the vocabulary of the peasant agree. Both represent the Mantis as a priestess delivering oracles, or an ascetic in a mystic ecstasy. The comparison is a matter of antiquity. The ancient Greeks called the insect [Greek: Mantis], the divine, the prophet. The worker in the fields is never slow in perceiving analogies; he will always generously supplement ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... fervour of Verlaine almost gross. He seems afraid to give any artistic expression to his own faith, lest he should falsify it by over-expression, lest it should seem to be more accomplished than it is. He will not even try to take delight in it; he is almost fanatically an intellectual ascetic; and yet again and again he affirms a faith which he will hardly consent to specify by uttering the name of God. He is shy about it, as if it might be refuted if it were expressed in any dogmatic terms. So ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... fool month after month eat his food (like an ascetic) with the tip of a blade of Ku['s]a-grass, yet is he not worth the sixteenth particle of those who have ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... long robe of black velvet from head to heel, sat bending his fingers gracefully together and looking at me. His head was thrown back, I have said, and the lights of the colored windows striking on his gray hair and black skull-cap, caused him to look much more like some lean ascetic ecclesiastic and prince of the church than the chief lawyer of the ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... he starts from London for Malbourne, stopping at Belminster, through which he had made his last free journey with Cyril, when he told him that "an ascetic is a rake turned monk." Passing the gaol in which he had suffered so much, he goes to the cathedral. He asks who ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the opponents of Christianity. It is, in essence, the basis of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's whole distinction between Christianity and Paganism. I mean, of course, the virtue of humility. I admit, of course, most readily, that a great deal of false Eastern humility (that is, of strictly ascetic humility) mixed itself with the main stream of European Christianity. We must not forget that when we speak of Christianity we are speaking of a whole continent for about a thousand years. But of this virtue even more than of the other three, I would maintain ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... annoyance or reproach. Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who happened to call, saw us at table, and stayed to have some dessert with us. She has often told me afterwards how calm and serene the Duchess looked. One would never have thought she was about to quit a brilliant Court for the hair shirt of the ascetic, and all the death-in-life of a convent. I grieved for her, I wept for her, and I got her a grand gentleman ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... guaranteed free from such deleterious substances or adulterants as yeast, chemicals, artificial colouring matter, mineral salt, &c. The variety of biscuits and cakes ranges from the plainest sorts, to suit the dyspeptic or ascetic, to the most delectable dainties for afternoon tea, not forgetting Oaten Shortcakes to specially delight the "Canny Scot." Nor need any one be at a loss to obtain supplies, for, besides the various Health Food Depots mentioned (see inside front cover), customers can obtain 5s. ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... gaiety and sudden smiles; unconsciously you sing low songs of happiness; you suggest brightness and hope; you have suddenly come into your long-delayed girlhood. You give me affectionate glimpses of the woman God meant you to be some day. It can only be a man who works such a miracle in an ascetic of nineteen years. When the lucky fellow gathers courage to speak, I shall be glad to pass ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... more chaste made the knights more valorous and famous." We have here a new conception of love which has profoundly influenced life and thought ever since—love no longer a weakness as in the ancient world, or a sin as it seemed to the ascetic spirit of the Church, but a conscious source of strength, an avowed motive of heroism. And it was round Arthur and his court that the French poets of the next generation wove their romances inspired by this conception—the offspring of the union of ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... hide their heads and be forgotten and fall asleep, with the prayers of other sufferers to console and support them in their passage through the valley of the shadow of death. The gentlest spirits here could taste the bliss of a holy tranquillity; the ascetic could indulge his most fantastic self-immolation; the morbid visionary could dream at his will and give his imagination full play, none hindering him; evil demons might chatter and gibe and twit him at his prayers; choirs of angels might calm his despair with celestial lullabies; awful ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... to be in the wrong, to whatever side we turn. The happy red-faced monk with his barrel of beer is a caricature of our joy. Can this, it is asked, be a follower of the Man of Sorrows? And the long-faced ascetic with his eyes turned up to heaven is the world's conception of our sorrow. Catholic joy and Catholic sorrow are alike too ardent and extreme for a world that delights in moderation in both sorrow and joy—a little melancholy, but not too much; a ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... few moments a tall, spare figure appeared in the doorway, and paused an instant before entering. He had a keen, smooth-shaven, ascetic face, topped with a mass of ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... best gymnosophist among men, that they suffice to themselves, and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being. I declare, although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to women for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or indeed to any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when I think of the slim and lovely maidens, running the woods all night to the ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the mood which they were designed to produce remains. Jochanaan sings phrases, which are frequently tuneful, and when they are not denunciatory are set in harmonies agreeable to the ear. But by reason of that fact Jochanaan comes perilously near being an old-fashioned operatic figure—an ascetic Marcel, with little else to differentiate him from his Meyerbeerian prototype than his "raiment of camel's hair and a leather's girdle about his loins," and an inflated phrase which must serve for the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... especially with his mother, who held rigid Presbyterian views. From this time dates his friendship with Robert Leighton (1611-1684), who greatly influenced his religious opinions. Leighton had, during a stay in the Spanish Netherlands, assimilated something of the ascetic and pietistic spirit of Jansenism, and was devoted to the interests of peace in the church. Burnet wisely refused to accept a benefice in the disturbed state of church affairs, but he wrote an audacious letter to Archbishop Sharp asking him to take measures to restore peace. Sharp sent for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... An ascetic on the road to success, he dedicated himself to a term of hard drinking under a reverse; and the question addressed to the chief towns in the sketch counties his head contained was, which one near would be likely to supply the port wine ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this chronicle the ascetic sternness of the old Norman castles had been humanized and refined so that the new dwellings of the nobility, if less imposing in appearance, were much more comfortable as places of residence. A gentle race had built their houses rather for peace than for war. He who ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were human must love something, so they loved this child whom they looked upon as their ward, and who, as there was none other of her age and sex in their community, had no rival in their hearts. She was the one joy of their laborious and ascetic hours; she represented all the sweetness and youth of this self-renewing world, which to them was so grey and sapless. Moreover, she was a lovely maid, who, wherever she had been placed, would have bound all ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... musing the young Brahman priest who served the temple. Since I had joined Vanna I had begun with her help to study a little Hindustani, and with an aptitude for language could understand here and there. I caught a word or two as she spoke with him that startled me, when the high-bred ascetic face turned serenely upon her, and he addressed her as "My sister," adding a sentence beyond my learning, but which she willingly translated later.—"May He who sits above the Mysteries, ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... of material prosperity. As the sun of freedom shone upon their way, the Brethren drifted further still from the old Puritan ascetic ideas of Peter and Gregory the Patriarch. They had now all classes in their ranks. They had seventeen rich and powerful barons, of the stamp of John Zerotin; they had over a hundred and forty knights; they had capitalists, flourishing tradesmen, mayors, and even ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... way was to bring men out from the pits which cynicism on the one side, and asceticism on the other, had dug so deep for them, back to the warm precincts of the cheerful day. The cynic and the ascetic had each looked at life through a microscope, exaggerating blemishes, distorting proportions, filling the eye with ugly and disgusting illusions.[40] Humanity, as was said, was in disgrace with the thinkers. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... the Greeks, and where Asoka had ruled in his youth as Viceroy of Western India. It owes its birth to the gods themselves. When Uma wedded Shiva her father slighted him, not knowing who he was, for the mighty god had wooed and won her under the disguise of a mere ascetic mendicant, and she made atonement by casting herself into the sacrificial fire, which consumed her—the prototype of all pious Hindu widows who perform Sati—in the presence of gods and Brahmans. Shiva, maddened with grief, gathered up the bones of his unfortunate consort ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... mean to be a Christian, after all! Now just reflect how very absurdly you are choosing. Leave the Bible to that class of fanatics who may hope to be saved under its system, and, in the name of common sense, study the Koran, or some less ascetic tome. Don't be gulled by a plausible slave, who wants nothing more than to multiply professors of his theory. Why don't you read the Bible, you miserable, puling poltroon, before you hug it as a treasure? Why don't you read it, and learn out of the mouth of the founder ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... irony, but later, under the influence of his critical antagonism to Brunetiere, growing keener, stronger, and more bitter. In 'Thais' he has undertaken to show the bond of sympathy that unites the pessimistic sceptic to the Christian ascetic, since both despise the world. In 'Lys Rouge', his greatest novel, he traces the perilously narrow line that separates love from hate; in 'Opinions de M. l'Abbe Jerome Coignard' he has given us the most radical ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... he was surrounded. He sat with his two hands clasped round his knee, his head slightly bent, and an expression of impatience and of trouble upon his clear, well-chiselled features. Behind the thrones there stood two men in purple gowns, with ascetic, clean-shaven faces, and half a dozen other high dignitaries and office-holders of Aquitaine. Below on either side of the steps were forty or fifty barons, knights, and courtiers, ranged in a triple row to the right and the left, with a clear ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue; with only that one ornament,—the scarlet letter,—which it was her doom to wear. The child's attire, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wide flowing breeches gathered at the ankles. In place of sandals, his feet were clad in half-slippers of red leather, pointed at the toes. Save the slippers, the costume from head to foot was of white linen. The air of the man was high, stately, severe. Visvamitra, the greatest of the ascetic heroes of the Iliad of the East, had in him a perfect representative. He might have been called a Life drenched with the wisdom of Brahma—Devotion Incarnate. Only in his eyes was there proof of humanity; when he lifted his face from the Egyptian's breast, they were glistening ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the monastery. It was a privilege that they had enjoyed time immemorial, and it had never been gainsaid by the abbots who were dead and gone, but Anselm von Lowenberg, the then superior of the convent, an austere, ascetic man, who looked with disdain and dislike on all popular recreations, had long set his face against it, and had, moreover, tried every means short of actual prohibition to put an end to the profane amusement. The rustics, however, were not to be debarred by his displeasure from ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... ones. Nothing, however, can be more unlike nature, than the grim Madonna and the weird starved Child in her arms (see 'Wornum's Catal. Nat. Gal.', for a description of this painting). Margaritone's favorite subject was the figure of St. Francis, his style being well suited to depict the chief ascetic saint. Crucifixions were also much to his taste, and he represented them in all their repulsive details. Vasari relates that he died at the age of 77, afflicted and disgusted at having lived to see the changes that had taken place ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... my labors preparatory to writing a history of the Sinaitic peninsula, the study of the first centuries of Christianity for a long time claimed my attention; and in the mass of martyrology, of ascetic writings, and of histories of saints and monks, which it was necessary to work through and sift for my strictly limited object, I came upon a narrative (in Cotelerius Ecclesiae Grecae Monumenta) which seemed to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... altars, the persecutions and blasphemies—had imprinted the stamp of melancholy on his face. It was easy to see that he lamented the barbarities of the times, and that his life had been full of anguish. He embodied all the sufferings of the Church. With his ascetic air, his deep-set eye, his complexion as pallid as ivory, his white robes tinged with red, the Sovereign Pontiff had in his whole person something strange and imposing. He occupied the apartment on the first floor of the Pavilion of Flora, where Madame Elisabeth had lived from ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Portuguese Melique Cufegurgij, had made himself especially obnoxious from the cruelties wreaked by his Turkish garrison on the citizens. Yusaf Adil Shah was not dead, as Timoja told Albuquerque, but was absent in the interior, and the time was really favourable for a sudden assault. A Jogi or Hindu ascetic had prophesied that a foreign people coming from a distant land would conquer Goa, and the inhabitants were therefore ready to surrender the city without much ...
— Rulers of India: Albuquerque • Henry Morse Stephens
... seemed a good story to tell at mess of this human weakness of his handsome, reserved, and ascetic-looking leader. ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... thing among all these quasi-ascetic sects that has ever been in advance of the great mass of humanity from which they are detached parts: they have given woman her rights; whereas, the mass has always prated, and does yet, mentioning it in statute law, that the male has certain natural "rights," ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... teetotaller and a man of ascetic views, James, in his first shallow moments, before he thought about it, assumed that his house should be entirely non-alcoholic. A temperance house! Already he winced. We all know what a provincial ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... young couples who in reality had far more cause to be careful of their money. Those who held this view belonged to the old, patriarchal class, the still flourishing remnant of the last generation, who prided themselves upon good management, good morals, and ascetic living; the class of people in whose marriage-contracts it was stipulated that the wife was to have meat twice a-day, excepting on fast days, a drive—the trottata, as it used to be called—daily, and two new gowns every year. Even in our ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... Rodriguez, Nigronius, and Cassian. True, it is written for Superiors of Religious Communities, yet it will prove eminently useful to Pastors and Directors of Souls. Father Mueller exhibits a knowledge of Religious and Ascetic Economy truly wonderful. We bespeak for this work a wide circulation. It is a book of that enticing class that, once taken up, it will not be laid down until read through, from A to Z. Dry as the subject may appear, it is so handled that the Utile Dulci must needs be felt by all readers. Again ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... almost ascetic man sets before us of to-day an almost impossible standard of living. One idea mastered him—to give Africa to the world. His life was a success, as all lives must be which have a single aim. Life was clear, elemental almost to him, and to the man whose ambition is a unit; who sees ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... piety and self-renunciation. Angelo's descendants were still living in Assisi in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Whether they shared their ancestor's contemptuous opinion of the Saint has not been recorded; but it seems probable that the homage of the world, rendered to the poor ascetic for several centuries, may have made some impression on their minds, if not ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... and master of cadenced lyric prose, urged young writers to lead ascetic lives that in their art they might be violent. Chopin's violence was psychic, a travailing and groaning of the spirit; the bright roughness of adventure was missing from his quotidian existence. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... into three classes: the Brahmachari; the Gharbari; and the Bhope. The Brahmachari are the ascetic members of the sect who subsist by begging and devote their lives to meditation, prayer and spiritual instruction. The Gharbari are those who, while leading a mendicant life, wearing the distinctive black dress ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... very painful one. St. Thomas a Kempis, Drelincourt's Defence against Death, and Law's devotional works had all their part in kindling his piety into a flame. He was haunted with gloomy and superstitious fancies, and his religion assumed the darkest and most ascetic character. He always chose the worst food, fasted twice a week, wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes, and was subject to paroxysms of a morbid devotion. He remained for hours prostrate on the ground ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... be less perfect. It is a portion of the duke's life which cannot be entirely passed over in silence, since it must be conceded, that much of his unpopularity may be traced to this source. Neither the court nor the people of England are so ascetic as not to extenuate the indiscretions of royalty; but this charitable estimate of misgivings does not extend to approbation of any culpable dereliction of social and moral duties. The fact of his royal highness having a large family, by a lady now no more, is too well ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - No. 291 - Supplement to Vol 10 • Various
... or so people in the church, but this made no difference. The priest would not feel slighted, as an Anglican curate might. He had a serious ascetic face, and seemed not to know that any was present ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... temple, where all the Bairagis, Gosavis and Fakirs of the Indian continent from time to time congregate. "Do you walk to Nasik or go by rail" we asked. "By rail" replied the silver-man. "But surely the true Sadhu should walk, taking no heed of horse-vehicle or fire-carriage," whereat the little fat ascetic with the gourd smiled pleasantly and made some remark to the effect that all methods of conveyance are permitted to ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... corruptions into which we have fallen; it is an atmosphere rich for the development of industrial values. The Jews have never fallen into this hateful denial of life. Judaism still considers it a command of God to increase and multiply: the unmarried life, not the married life, is regarded as sinful. The ascetic view of marriage, as well as the romantic view that love is everything, are ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... struggled toward that light and came to our shores with an eager desire to realize it, and a hunger for it such as some of us no longer felt, for we were as if satiated and satisfied and were indulging ourselves after a fashion that did not belong to the ascetic devotion of the early devotees of those great principles. Strangers came to remind us of what we had promised ourselves and through ourselves had promised mankind. All men came to us and said, "Where is the bread of life with which you promised to feed us, and have you partaken of it yourselves?" ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... for moderation, during the latter years of his life, he had but one answer,—that he had six generations of long-lived farmers behind him, and had their strength to draw upon. All his physical habits, except in this respect, were unexceptionable: he was abstemious in diet, but not ascetic, kept no unwholesome hours, tried no dangerous experiments, committed no excesses. But there is no man who can habitually study from twelve to seventeen hours a day (his friend Mr. Clarke contracts it to "from six to twelve," but I have Mr. Parker's own statement ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Court, in matters of costume at least; she had read books to the devoted Malcolm, who could not read; and he had been her interpreter in her discussions with the Celtic-speaking clergy, whose ideas of ritual differed from her own. The famous Culdees, originally ascetic hermits, had before this day united in groups living under canonical rules, and, according to English observers, had ceased to be bachelors. Masses are said to have been celebrated by them in some "barbarous rite"; Saturday was Sabbath; on Sunday ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... been objected, that the piety which it inculcates is of the ascetic kind, and that the spirit of penance, voluntary mortification, and contempt of the world, which it breathes everywhere, is neither required nor recommended by the gospel. But no difference can be found between the spirit of piety inculcated by our author, and that inculcated ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... big meeting in our temple pavilion. We women are sitting there, on one side, behind a screen. Triumphant shouts of Bande Mataram come nearer: and to them I am thrilling through and through. Suddenly a stream of barefooted youths in turbans, clad in ascetic ochre, rushes into the quadrangle, like a silt-reddened freshet into a dry river-bed at the first burst of the rains. The whole place is filled with an immense crowd, through which Sandip Babu is borne, ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... wholesome ingredients, guaranteed free from such deleterious substances or adulterants as yeast, chemicals, artificial colouring matter, mineral salt, &c. The variety of biscuits and cakes ranges from the plainest sorts, to suit the dyspeptic or ascetic, to the most delectable dainties for afternoon tea, not forgetting Oaten Shortcakes to specially delight the "Canny Scot." Nor need any one be at a loss to obtain supplies, for, besides the various ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... "Yeah, but I don't think he's so ascetic that he wouldn't marry." His grin broadened. "Now, if we were still at ol' Chilblains, you'd really have competition. After all, you can't expect that a gal who's stacked ... pardon me ... who has the magnificent physical and ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... great public in general know of what the singer often suffers in the way of nervousness or stage fright before appearing in front of the footlights, nor that his life, outwardly so feted and brilliant, is in private more or less of a retired, ascetic one and that his social pleasures must be ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... and ascetic in her treatment of it. An ascetic tone runs through all her work, the result of her theories of renunciation. The same sternness and cheerlessness is to be seen in the poetry and painting of the pre-Raphaelites. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... was the very element that attracted Spencer to them. Obsessed by the fear—and it turned out to be well-grounded—that he would not live long enough to complete his work, he regarded all joy as a temptation, a corruption, a sin of scarlet. He was a true ascetic. He could sacrifice all things of the present for one thing of the future, all things ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... and great action; and yet," said I, coloring, "how small a place those feelings which have tyrannized over me and made all else seem blank and void, hold in that life! It is not as if the man were a cold and hard ascetic it is easy to see in him, not only remarkable tenderness and warm affections, but strong self-will, and the passion of all vigorous natures. Yes; I understand better now what existence in a true man ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... born in Cappadocia about four years before the Christian era. After being early educated in the circle of philosophy, and in the practice of the ascetic discipline of his predecessor Pythagoras, he imitated that philosopher in spending the next portion of his life in travel. Attracted by his mysticism to the farthest East as the source of knowledge, he set out for Persia and ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... so intense as in the home of the Orthodox Jew. His descendant is clean-shaven and no longer observes (or observes only perfunctorily or with many a gross inconsistency) the dietary and household laws. He is a free spender and luxurious in his habits as compared with his economical, ascetic forefathers. He marries late and the birth rate drops with most astonishing rapidity, so that in one generation the children of parents who had eight or ten children have families of one or two or three children. He becomes a follower of sports, and with his love for scholarship ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... saying, "This seems to me the best thing," strong opposition has been aroused, shown even in antiquity by the sharp protest of Plato and Lucian. Still this Phaeacian enjoyment is innocent enough; not ascetic is the trait, yet not sensual; to-day good people usually eat and drink without the song of bard or other spiritual entertainment accompanying the ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Lord Mayor. I will not willingly consent to accept it as qualification for a high trust that a man has a good cook and an admirable cellar, and an ostentatious tendency to display the merits of both. Mind, I am no ascetic who say this: I like good dinners; I like occasionally—only occasionally though—very good dinners. I feel with a clever countryman who said he liked being asked out to dine, "it was flattering, and it was nourishing;" but with all this I should ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... but her anger dropped away as she saw his face more clearly and knew he had not slept. She knew, too, that his mind was as firmly fixed as hers, and she felt as if the whole world were sliding from her, for this was not her lover: this was some ascetic who had not yet forgotten his desires. He looked haggard, fierce with renunciation and restraint, and she cried out, "Zebedee, darling, don't ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... connected with the papal brief dragged on till January or February 1591.[254] To all who saw Luis de Leon at this time it must have occurred that his career was drawing to a close. He had never been robust; his sedentary habits, his ascetic practices, and his prolonged imprisonment combined to wear him down. His last years were packed with troubles. The Inquisition watched him with suspicious eyes; he had always regarded the Dominicans and Jeromites as his enemies; he had contrived to ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... less vain, or has less hope of pleasing, and therefore lays himself less out to please. There is an air of condescension in his civility. With a tall, loose figure, a peaked austerity of countenance, and no inclination to embonpoint, you would say he has something puritanical, something ascetic in his appearance. He answers to Mandeville's description of Addison, "a parson in a tye-wig." He is not a boon companion, nor does he indulge in the pleasures of the table, nor in any other vice; nor are we ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... to poor mortals wrestling with their deepest problems. Yet in the very negation of happiness he discovers a positive religion—the religion of the Cross, the Worship of Sorrow. Expressed crudely, this seems to endorse the ascetic fallacy of the value of self-denial for its own sake. But from that it is saved by the divine element in sorrow which Christ has brought—"Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved: wherein ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... slightest degree to their power), the St. Barbara and St. Elizabeth.[27] I do not know among the pictures of the great sacred schools any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically expressive of the need of the heart that conceived them. Not ascetic, nor quaint, nor feverishly or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities of thought. Only entirely true—entirely pure. No depth of glowing heaven beyond them—but the clear sharp sweetness of the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... not fit to teach children, or to be with them: I had already reduced the boy to little better than an automaton; I had broken his fine spirit with my rigid severity; and I should freeze all the sunshine out of his heart, and make him as gloomy an ascetic as myself, if I had the handling of him much longer. And poor Rachel, too, came in for her share of abuse, as usual; he cannot endure Rachel, because he knows she has ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Sprong suggested to Lady Vinsear for them. Of late the dowager had taken what she considered to be a religious turn; but unhappily the supposed religion was as different from real piety as light from darkness, and consisted mainly in making herself and all around her miserable by a semi-ascetic puritanism of observances, and a style of conversation fit to drive her little nephews ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... In some of them we find the "amoris desiderium"—the thirst of the soul for God—which is the characteristic note of mystical devotion; in others, that longing for a safe refuge from the provoking of all men and the strife of tongues, which drove so many saints into the cloister. Many a solitary ascetic has prayed in the words of the 73rd Psalm: "Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... boisterous physical vitality which, as Fielding presents it and as Marlowe presented it, acquires value for the spirit and is acceptable to the imagination. It is the original pagan assertion of life, which finds its opposite in Euripides' conception of the ascetic Hippolytus; an assertion which Propertius repeated in the language of mockery when he speaks ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... mediaevalism, particularly by reason of its firm evangelical foundation, its scriptural warp and woof, its fervent piety, and its fresh and original treatment, it is not less entitled to a high place in the devotional and ascetic literature of the Church than the much better known Imitatio Christi. In this sense it is herewith offered anew to the English reader, with the hope that "the diligent reading and contemplation of these 'images' may minister ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Gwenda. And as she looked at him it was as if she saw vividly and for the first time the profound unspirituality of her father's face. She knew from what source his eyes drew their darkness. She understood the meaning of the gross red mouth that showed itself in the fierce lifting of the ascetic, grim moustache. And she conceived ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... favourite article of diet with both Mussulmans and Hindoos. Many of the latter take a vow to touch no flesh of any kind. They are called Kunthees or Boghuts, but a Boghut is more of an ascetic than a Kunthee. However, the Kunthee is glad of a fish dinner when he can get it. They are restricted to no particular sect or caste, but all who have taken the vow wear a peculiar necklace, made generally of sandal-wood beads ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... complaint—the same, perhaps, that will terminate one day in his sudden and frightful death. There is a wild look about him, which at first sight is startling. His dress and demeanor are those of a rigid ascetic. He wears a long coat with short sleeves, and a scarf of only half size, such as was the mark of an austere life; and his hair hangs in a tangled mass over his head. He is usually silent, but at times breaks out into fierce excitement, such as will give the impression of madness. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... the opinion of my See, that it would hardly do to send a missionary into a country like this who is not well versed in English—a country where they think, so far from understanding any language besides his own, scarcely one individual in ten speaks his own intelligibly; or an ascetic person where, as they say, high and low, male and female, are, at some period of their lives, fond of a renovating glass, as it is styled, in other words, ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... are told, looked upon the world after he had created it and pronounced it good; but ascetic pietists, in their wisdom, cast their eyes over it, and substantially pronounce it a dead failure, a miserable ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... feel this with respect to the emotions of pleasurable excitement with which you left Lady M.'s ball? I am no fanatic, nor ascetic; and I can imagine it possible (though not probable) that among the visitors there some simple-minded and simple-hearted people, amused with the crowds, the dresses, the music, and the flowers, may have felt, even in ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... bravest man in Belgium. Six feet five in height, a thin, scholarly face, with grayish white hair, and a forehead so white that one feels one looks on the naked bone, he presented the appearance of some medieval ascetic. But there was a humorous look about his mouth, and an expression of sympathy and comprehension which gave the effect of a keenly intelligent, as well as gentle, ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... of his watch-chain in speaking to him; she trusted that she might be preserved from putting her face very close to his at dinner in studying the bill of fare; getting out of carriages, she forbade him ever to take her by the waist. All ascetic resolutions are modified by experiment; but if Isabel did not rigorously keep these, she is not the less to be ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... dark mountains. He was quickly losing his popularity among them; for whereas, while he was himself happy and honored, he had not seen clearly all the evils, and wrongs, and excesses of his parish, now he was growing, as they said, more fanatical and ascetic than Mr. Warden had been, who had won the name of a puritan among them. Why could he not leave the Upton Arms and the numerous smaller taverns alone, so long as the landladies and their daughters attended church, as they had been need to do? His ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... or Tirechan.' Communion was partaken of in both kinds, the wine being mixed with water in the chalice, and sucked through a fistula. Prayers and fasting on behalf of the dead were indulged in, and much virtue was attached to severe fastings and ascetic mortifications of body and soul. Every day was consecrated to unremitting labours in the Gospel. Sunday was, indeed, a day of worship, divided into eight watches, like the other days of the week, and was fully observed in the saying of mass, the chanting of the 150 psalms, ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... did not possess. The latter had something of an ascetic nature, and was, if I may say so, a scrupulously pious character; but Brutus had no such scrupulous timidity; his mind was more flexible and lovable. Cato spoke well, but could not be reckoned among the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... ekasa{t}{t}hiy arahantesu jtesu vutthavasso pavretva "caratha bhikkhave crikan" ti sa{t}{t}hi{m} bhikkh dissu pesetv..... "Seeing that the young nobleman Yasa was ripe for conversion, in the night, when weary with the vanities of the world he had left his home and embraced the ascetic life,—he called him, saying, 'Follow me, Yasa,' and that very night he caused him to obtain the fruition of the first path, and on the following day arhatship. And fifty-four other persons, who were friends of Yasa's, he ordained with the formula, 'Follow me, priest,' and caused them to attain ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... unpardonable trangressions into which young people generally, and this young person in particular, were likely to run, to hold up examples of those who had fallen into evil ways and come to an evil end, to present the most exalted standard of ascetic virtue to the lively girl's apprehension, leading her naturally to the conclusion that a bright example of excellence stood before her in the irreproachable relative who addressed her. Especially with regard to the allurements which the world offers ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... marriages; and at the same time facilitate in a reasonable degree divorce. Apply both these remedies and you would go far to wipe out prostitution, which I think perfectly horrible—I—I should like to penalize it. Perhaps it is the Irish ascetic in my constitution. A good many early marriages might be failures. Well then, at the end of ten years these should be dissolvable, with proper provision made for the children. I think many a couple if they knew that after a time and without scandal their partnership could be dissolved ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... I'm no ascetic; I'm as pleasant as can be; You'll always find me ready with a crushing repartee; I've an irritating chuckle, I've a celebrated sneer, I've an entertaining snigger, I've a fascinating leer; To everybody's prejudice I know a thing or ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... but Ned saw them very distinctly now. One was a boy but little older than himself, his face pale and worn. Near him was an old man, with a face very uncommon on the border. His features were those of a scholar and ascetic. His cheeks were thin, and thick white hair crowned a broad white brow. Ned felt instinctively that he was ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... thought of the other world. Religion would have grown to superstition, ecstasy would have ruled in the hearts of the religious devotees, weakening their hold on the real, and wafting them away into misty regions of paradise. We should have had every exaggeration of ascetic practice, hermitages multiplying among the rocks and islands of the sea, men and women torturing their bodies for the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... bitterly against the observance of the Kalends; she condemned repeatedly the unseemly doings of Christians in joining in heathenish customs at that season; she tried to make the first of January a solemn fast; and from the ascetic point of view she was profoundly right, for the old festivals were bound up with a lusty attitude towards the world, a seeking for ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... independent, and he sometimes lashed the critics into a buzzing, bluebottle fury by his sarcastic speech. "He affronted polite society, conformed to no one's dictates, lived like an ascetic and worked like ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... of youthful romance, but "The Progress of the Soul," a study of transmigration. Years of wandering and poverty followed, until Sir George More forgave the young lovers and made an allowance to his daughter. Instead of enjoying his new comforts, Donne grew more ascetic and intellectual in his tastes. He refused also the nattering offer of entering the Church of England and of receiving a comfortable "living." By his "Pseudo Martyr" he attracted the favor of James I, who persuaded him to be ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Jochanaan sings phrases, which are frequently tuneful, and when they are not denunciatory are set in harmonies agreeable to the ear. But by reason of that fact Jochanaan comes perilously near being an old-fashioned operatic figure—an ascetic Marcel, with little else to differentiate him from his Meyerbeerian prototype than his "raiment of camel's hair and a leather's girdle about his loins," and an inflated phrase which must serve for the tunes sung by the rugged Huguenot soldier. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... sun; the illusion of the shadow-casting hills; the illusion of waters, formless and multiform; the illusion of—Nay, nay I what impious fancy! Accursed girl! yet, yet! why should he curse her? Had she ever done aught to merit the malediction of an ascetic? Never, never! Only her form, the memory of her, the beautiful phantom of her, the accursed phantom of her! What was she? An illusion creating illusions, a mockery, a dream, a shadow, a vanity, a vexation of spirit! The fault, ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... of her Caste being seen in a wood; she was always kept in seclusion. At last we found out the truth. She had shown some sign of a lingering love for Christ, and her mother had taken her to a famous Brahman ascetic who lived in that wood; and there together, mother and daughter stayed in a hut near the hermit's hut, and for three days he had devoted himself to confuse and confound her, and finally he succeeded, and reported ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... of modern peoples among whom they dwell, acted there in the same way; their pride and exclusiveness, their keenness in business, their profession as money-lenders, made them detested in Arabia as in modern Germany. On the other hand, the ascetic view of life which the Christians represented had attractions even for some of the higher minds among the Arabs. A set of men called "Hanyfs" were well known in Mahomet's time, who were seeking for a better religion than the Arab worships afforded, and a better ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... influence of his charming book in this particular direction. But, as a popular imaginative writer, he took a long step in the democratic direction. Frenchmen were already touched in their consciences and beginning to examine the state of their souls with anxiety; but the teachers of the ascetic revival had been too uncompromising. Ordinary mortals could not hope to reach the ascetic ideal of Port Royal, they could only be discouraged by the savage attacks on amour-propre, while in the "Caracteres" they met with a lay-preacher who ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... wore no ascetic form, He loved all beauty, without fear of harm, And in his veins ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that all the bonds will be in our hands by next Tuesday at the latest," said the Minister of the Treasury. He was a thin, ascetic man; his keen eyes were fixed rather steadily upon Mr. Blithers. After a moment's pause, he went on: "We are naturally interested in your extensive purchases of our outstanding bonds, Mr. Blithers. I refer to the big blocks you have acquired ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... thirty feet. Paddling over it, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. Once, in the winter, many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... warmly, charmed for the moment from every thought but that of kindness for the young and soft creature before him,—"who can," he repeated with a sigh, "but an old and withered ascetic like myself? I must leave you indeed; see, my carriage is at the door! Will my beautiful niece, among the gayeties that surround her, condescend now and then to remember the crabbed lawyer, and assure him by a line of her happiness and health? ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Walton's sympathy: his power of portrait-drawing is especially attested by his study of Donne, as the young gallant and poet, the unhappy lover, the man of state out of place and neglected; the heavily burdened father, the conscientious scholar, the charming yet ascetic preacher and divine, the saint who, dying, makes himself in his own ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... commanderies, he did much good service; fighting in their ranks for the glory of heaven and St. Waltheof, and slaying many thousands of the heathen in Prussia, Poland, and those savage Northern countries. The only fault that the great and gallant, though severe and ascetic Folko of Heydenbraten, the chief of the Order of St. John, found with the melancholy warrior, whose lance did such good service to the cause, was, that he did not persecute the Jews as so religious a knight should. He let off sundry captives of that ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... little of him and saw him only in his serious moods might have thought him lacking in that peculiarly human quality, humour. But neither was he an ascetic nor devoid of that element of innocent appreciation of the ludicrous and that keen enjoyment of a good story which seem essential to a complete man. His habit was sobriety, but he relished a joke that was free ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... by the Lord!" replied the old man, bowing his head reverently. "And yet other things were shown to me while I dwelt a devout ascetic, mortifying my flesh under the scorching sun of the desert. Beware my son, beware! Heed my warning, lest it should be fulfilled and the house of Menas vanish like clouds swept before the wind.—Your father, I know, regarded my prophecy ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... famous Bishop Quintard, is my ideal of everything an Episcopal bishop—or I might even say a Church of England bishop—ought to be. The Episcopal Church seems to me to have about it more "style" than most other churches, and an Episcopal bishop ought not to look the ascetic. He ought to be well filled out, well dressed, well fed. He ought to have a distinguished appearance, a ruddy complexion, a good voice, and a lot of what we call "humanness"—including humor. All these qualities ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... day of St. Piran was moved from the 2d of May to the 5th of March. Yet although thus welded into one, nothing could well be imagined more different than the characters of the Irish and of the Cornish saint. The Irish saint lived a truly ascetic life; he preached, wrought miracles, and died. The Cornish saint was a jolly miner, not always very steady on his legs.(74) Let us hear what the Cornish have to tell of him. His name occurs in several names of places, such as Perran Zabuloe, Perran Uthno, in Perran the Little, and in Perran ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... of the French Revolution, as the terrorism of a comite du salut public seems to be necessary physic when we read the confessions of the aristocratic world of France, so we recognize the wholesomeness of ascetic spiritualism when we read Petronius or Apuleius, which are to be regarded as the pieces justificatives of Christianity. The flesh had become so arrogant in this Roman world that it required Christian discipline to chasten it. After ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... voluntary mutilations and the eagerly sought sufferings manifested an ardent longing for {51} deliverance from subjection to carnal instincts, and a fervent desire to free the soul from the bonds of matter. The ascetic tendencies went so far as to create a kind of begging monachism—the metragyrtes. They also harmonized with some of the ideas of renunciation taught by Greek philosophy, and at an early period Hellenic ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... his hands folded in his sleeves, the great book upon his knees, a slight and thoughtful smile playing around the corners of his finely-cut mouth. His whole face was intensely spiritual in expression. The features were delicately cut, and bore the impress of an ascetic life, as well as of gentle birth and noble blood. He was, in fact, a scion of an ancient and powerful house; but it was one of those houses that had suffered sorely in the recent strife, and whose members had been scattered and cut off. ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... corpus of his work had by that time reached a portentous size, wherefore it is quite possible that the official readers may have been lenient, or cursory, over their work; but when Pius V., the strenuous ascetic foe of heresy, stepped into the place of the indolent Pius IV., jurist and politician rather than Churchman, it is more than probable that certain amateur inquisitors at Bologna, fully as anxious to work Cardan's ruin as ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... was called to attend a cavalry officer retired from service. He had a daughter named Pauline; she was beautiful and charming. I thought myself insensible to love, but I had hardly seen her before I conceived a violent passion for her. Bear in mind that I had lived until that time as pure as an ascetic monk; science had been my adored and lofty mistress. When passion fires a chaste heart, it becomes a fury there. I loved Pauline with frenzy, with idolatry. One day she gave me to understand that my folly did not displease her. I declared ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... resolution or industry. At first I longed for natural life and society; but by degrees habit helped me to endure, and finally to conquer. In fact, I was taught that I was doing God service in cultivating an ascetic life. My studies were pursued with success. I rapidly mastered what was placed before me, and my relations were proud of my progress. At the usual period the ordinary craving for female society became strong in me. My mother took great pains to impress on me ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... Marbolt stood for a moment, doing by means of his wonderful hearing what his eyes failed to do for him. And the marvel of it was that he faced accurately, first toward Tresler, then toward Jake. He stood like some tall, ascetic, gray-headed priest, garbed in a dressing-gown that needed but little imagination to convert into a cassock. And the picture of benevolence he made was only marred by the staring ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... accordingly, this man of varied gifts retired. Possessing somewhat of the ascetic spirit, he resolved to devote his life to work of the most serious description. He eschewed all ordinary society, restricting his intimacies to very grave and learned companions, and refusing to engage in conversation ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... checked himself because he was unworthy. What right had he to pry, even in the spirit, upon their bliss? It was no crime to have seen them on the lawn. It would be a crime to go to it again. He tried to keep himself and his thoughts away, not because he was ascetic, but because they would not like it if they knew. This behaviour of his suited them admirably. And when any gracious little thing occurred to them—any little thing that his sympathy had contrived and allowed—they put it down to chance or ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... stint themselves of the necessities of life in order to produce these treatises of calm research. There is a deep gulf, here, between the mundane and the intellectual life. These men are retiring in their habits; and one cannot but revere their scholarly and almost ascetic spirit that survives like a green oasis amid the desert of "politics," ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... of course the ascetic principle of self-mastery. It is best brought before us by the familiar practice of fasting, which is very mildly recommended to us in its lowest terms in the table in the Book of Common Prayer. Naturally, ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... many aspects of his temperament, also finds the foundation of his judgment in exercise and caution. As a player of games he is rather poor, but makes up in enthusiasm for tennis what he lacks in skill. His habits are almost ascetic in their rigour. He drinks nothing, and the finest dinner a cook ever conceived would be wasted on him. A single course of the plainest food suffices his appetite, and he grows manifestly uneasy when faced with a long meal. ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... clergyman whose attendance she had so earnestly desired; and until this object had been attained, he did not venture to put any questions to her, which might possibly, by reviving painful or horrible recollections, increase her agitation. The clergyman soon arrived—a man of ascetic countenance and venerable age—one whom Gerard Douw respected very much, forasmuch as he was a veteran polemic, though one perhaps more dreaded as a combatant than beloved as a Christian—of pure morality, subtle brain, and frozen heart. He entered the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 1 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... however, was a strengthfulness of purpose, a certain pleasant masterfulness, that made me feel that I could trust him, and it was to this aspect of his nature that I yielded. There was something frankly appealing in his long, thin, ascetic looking face, and I found ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... he was the apostle. Widely read, charming every one by his wit and wisdom, his influence spread from mind to mind, and assisted in bringing about the change which has taken place in European thought. His ideas, perhaps, did not spring from the highest sources. He was no ascetic, he loved pleasure, he was tolerant of everything except cruelty; but on that account we should not grudge him his meed. It is in this indirect way that great writers take their place among the forces of the world. In the long run, genius and wit side with the right ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... was by way of being the least bit satirical in her view of things, you felt too that she was altogether good-natured, and even that, at need, she could show herself spontaneously kind, generous, devoted. And if you inferred that her temperament inclined rather towards the sensuous than the ascetic, believe me, it did not ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... may be reached by taking the first turning to the right hand after crossing the bridge on the way from the city down Holywell Hill. This nunnery was founded by Geoffrey of Gorham, sixteenth Abbot, about the middle of the twelfth century. Two women, pious and ascetic, had taken up their abode on this spot in a hut which they built for themselves, and Geoffrey determined to build them a more permanent dwelling, and make them the nucleus of a religious house. They accepted the Benedictine Rule, and gradually the nunnery increased ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... on the rangeside or in the bush, where women are scarce. Vane had lived in Spartan simplicity, practising the ascetic virtues, as a matter of course. He had had no time for sentiment, his passions had remained unstirred; and now he was seven and twenty, sound and vigorous of body, and, as a rule, level of head. At length, however, there was to be a change. He had earned an interlude of leisure, and ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... became subject to periodical attacks of ague, that many exorcisms and spells were performed to effect a cure, but all in vain. At length he was told by a friend that in a certain temple on the northern mountain (Mount Kurama) there dwelt a famous ascetic, and that when the epidemic had prevailed during the previous summer, many people had recovered through his exorcisms. "If," added the friend, "the disease is neglected it becomes serious; try therefore, this method of procuring relief at once, ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... bore patiently all the privations of that ascetic household, assisted in all those external formalities, centred all her intellect within that iron range of existence. But no grace descended on her soul,—no warm ray unlocked the ice of the well. Then, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Cordova, of the 'English-girl' side, of the potential old maid that is dormant in every young northern woman until the day she marries, and wakes to torment her like a biblical devil if she does not. There is no miser like a reformed spendthrift, and no ascetic will go to such extremes of self-mortification as a converted libertine; in the same way, there are no such portentously virginal old maids as those who might have been the most womanly wives; the opposite ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... irritated, and besides—she is so fascinating. So she was shown in. She was veiled as much as only she could be, for mystery and to conceal the slight and ingenious coat of rouge, I guess. The usual feathers, rings and perfumes; and I had thought that I would see an ascetic face tired out by seclusion! She said that she had nothing serious to tell me, but had just run in to say good-bye and calm me; she was not going to call on Maroossia: ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... faces of the soldiers, some lying on the ground enveloped in their cloaks; others keeping guard before the convent gate. This convent is also very large, but not so immense as that of San Francisco. The padre prior is a good little old man, but has not the impressive, ascetic visage of the guardian of the other convent. His room is as simple, though not in such perfect order; and his bed is also furnished with a comfortable mattress. An air half military, half monkish, pervades the convent—aides-de-camp ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... mother." Without a word, but with trembling lips, he stretched forth his arms to embrace her, and I stole away, leaving to her sacred sorrow the poor woman who for the moment, forgetting her self-imposed ascetic restraint, was yielding to every ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... was in great demand, notwithstanding the fact that he talked neither much nor well, and that not even the most brilliant conversation could prevent his taking short naps when in company. But he was extremely fond of social pleasures. His philosophy had made him neither an ascetic nor an anchorite. He worked for only three or four hours each day; and the rest of the time was given up to reading, to visiting, and to the theatre, he being particularly attracted to the latter ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... father took a different view. He declined to take advantage of this opening into the upper world, because, as he said, I don't know from what experience, the conversation turned chiefly upon petty personal gossip. The feasts of the great were not to his taste. He was ascetic by temperament. He was, he said, one of the few people to whom it was the same thing to eat a dinner and to perform an act of self-denial. In fact, for many years he never ate a dinner, contenting himself with a biscuit and a glass of sherry as lunch, and an egg at tea, and ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... ever understood proviso that they could not fall in with many of his views, Nelson and most of his friends loved Mr. Dodwell and were proud of him. They admired his great learning, his fervent and ascetic piety, his deep attachment to the doctrine and usages of the English Church, and many attractive features in personal character. 'He was a faithful and sincere friend,' says Hearne, 'very charitable to the poor (notwithstanding the narrowness of his fortune), free and open in his discourse ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... was a tall, alert man, neatly dressed, who would otherwise have had an almost military air but for his spectacles and an almost painful intellectualism in his lean brown face and bald brow. The contrast was clinched by the fact that, while his face was of the ascetic type generally conceived as clean-shaven, he had a strip of dark mustache cut too short for him to bite, and yet a mouth that often moved as if trying to bite it. He might have been a very intelligent army surgeon, but he had more the look of an engineer or one of those services that combine a ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... little milk-white princesses as a nest is of young sparrows. All love me dearly at once.—Charming idea of life, but too high-colored for the reality. I have outgrown all this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive,—almost, perhaps, ascetic. We carry happiness into our condition, but must not hope to find it there. I think you will be willing to hear some lines which embody the subdued and limited desires ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... hundreds of the opponents of Christianity. It is, in essence, the basis of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's whole distinction between Christianity and Paganism. I mean, of course, the virtue of humility. I admit, of course, most readily, that a great deal of false Eastern humility (that is, of strictly ascetic humility) mixed itself with the main stream of European Christianity. We must not forget that when we speak of Christianity we are speaking of a whole continent for about a thousand years. But of this virtue even more than of the other three, I would maintain the general proposition adopted above. ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... you would like to have me sweeten it," said he, offering it to her; "but I will not humor such ascetic tendencies. I ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... vigils. He sat on a camp-stool, and his business seemed to be not ever to let his rapt gaze wander from several rows of gauges which were screwed to the bulkhead before him. Since I first stepped down into the sub I had spotted him, and had been wondering if his ascetic look was born with him or was a development of his job—whatever his job might be. Now I learned what his job was. He was the man who stood by the automatic safety devices. If anything happened to the regular gadgets and it was life or death to get her at once ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... faculties, but not at the expense of his spiritual; and romantic frivolity and mental dissipation on the one hand, and a too severe repression—dangerous in its after reaction—on the other, were the Scylla and Charybdis between which she had to steer. The ascetic Puritanism of her training and surroundings would naturally have led her to the narrower and more restrictive view, in which her husband, austerer yet, would have heartily concurred; but her broad sense, quickened by the marvelous insight that comes from maternal love, led her to adopt the broader, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... last French war in America, he returned to New France, a changed and reformed man; an ascetic in his living, and, although a soldier, a monk in the rigor of his penitential observances. His professional skill and daring were conspicuous among the number of gallant officers upon whom Montcalm chiefly relied to assist him in his long and desperate struggle ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them was an idiot from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for his ascetic sanctity. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... master at concentration, a master strategist-a great general. With passionate beliefs on all important social questions, she resolutely set herself against being seduced into other paths. Far from being naturally an ascetic, she has disciplined herself into denials and deprivations, cultural and recreational, to pursue her objective with the least possible waste of energy. Not that she did not want above all else to do this thing. She did. But doing it she ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... imperious duty; but she suffers continually, for she is not formed for those mystical contemplations, in the midst of which certain people, forgetting all affection, all earthly remembrances, are lost in ascetic delights. No; Fleur-de-Marie believes, prays, submits herself to the rigorous and harsh observance of her order; she pours out the most evangelical consolations, the most humble cares upon the poor sick women who are taken care of in the hospital of the abbey. She has even refused the assistance ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... for that one? Mr. Fletcher's disciples regenerate themselves by the idea (and the fact) that they are chewing and re-chewing and super-chewing their food. Dr. Dewey's pupils regenerate themselves by going without their breakfast—a fact, but also an ascetic idea. Not every one can use these ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... of the wheel, had made the arbiter of his life. Even to one so young and inexperienced, it was impossible to know Andrew Henderson and not to feel that some strange peculiarity set him apart from other men. In his ascetic face, in his large, light-blue eyes, in his extraordinary air of abstraction and aloofness from mundane things, there was something that fascinated and repelled; and with a wondering interest the boy studied these things, trying in his unformed way to reconcile ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Wilts, Somerset, Dorset, &c.,) or even a village common. Heaths were yet to be found in England, not so spacious, indeed, as the landes of France, but equally wild and romantic. In such a situation my brother lived, and under the tuition of a clergyman, retired in his habits, and even ascetic, but gentle in his manners. To that I can speak myself; for in the winter of 1801 I dined with him, and found that his yoke was, indeed, a mild one; since, even to my youngest brother H., a headstrong child of seven, he used no stronger remonstrance, in ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... a thin, grey-faced, rather ascetic-looking clergyman, the Reverend Edmund Shuttleworth, rector of Middleton, came across the grass and grasped his host's hand in ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... household. Augustin happened to be alone in the house with his friend Alypius. They sat down to talk, and by chance the visitor noticed the Epistles of St. Paul lying on a table for playing games. This started the conversation. Pontitianus, who was a Christian, praised the ascetic life, and especially the wonders of holiness wrought by Antony and his companions in the Egyptian deserts. This subject was in the air. In Catholic circles at Rome, they spoke of little else than these Egyptian solitaries, and of the number, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... longer two worlds, but one; for "the other" world penetrated this, and was revealed in it: thought and sense, spirit and nature, were reconciled. These thinkers made room for man, as against the Puritans, and for God, as against their successors. Instead of the hopeless struggle of ascetic morality, which divides man against himself, they awakened him to that sense of his reconciliation with his ideal which religion gives: "Psyche drinks its stream ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... disciples regenerate themselves by the idea (and the fact) that they are chewing and re-chewing and super-chewing their food. Dr. Dewey's pupils regenerate themselves by going without their breakfast—a fact, but also an ascetic idea. Not every one can use these ideas ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... Accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes, and was toying architecturally with the bones. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol. The Director, satisfied the anchor had good hold, made his way aft and sat down amongst us. We exchanged a few words lazily. Afterwards there was silence on board the yacht. For some reason ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... served, and at dinner M. de Tourville was seen, according to the polished forms of society, humbling himself in all the hypocrisy of politeness; with ascetic good-breeding, preferring every creature's ease and convenience to his own, practising a continual system of self-denial, such as almost implied a total annihilation of self-interest and self-love. All this was strikingly contrasted with the selfishness ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... is of course the ascetic principle of self-mastery. It is best brought before us by the familiar practice of fasting, which is very mildly recommended to us in its lowest terms in the table in the Book of Common Prayer. Naturally, its value is not ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... been a visitant to the house, where she imbibed the doctrines and instructions of this sincere and zealous confessor of the faith. She frequently mingled in the devotions that were there offered up; but her piety was of a more moderate and amiable cast—less violent and ascetic, not unmixed with love and pity for her enemies and the persecutors of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... argument might perhaps have been powerful if adopted earlier, but by that time the agreeable vision of Bleak's ascetic features wreathed in a faintly spiritual benignance was already firmly fixed in the public imagination. The little celluloid button showing his transfigured and endearing smile was worn on millions of lapels. As one walked down the street one met that little badge hundreds of ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... it very rapidly, according to Matthew. Though, like John, he became an itinerant preacher, he departed widely from John's manner of life. John went into the wilderness, not into the synagogues; and his baptismal font was the river Jordan. He was an ascetic, clothed in skins and living on locusts and wild honey, practising a savage austerity. He courted martyrdom, and met it at the hands of Herod. Jesus saw no merit either in asceticism or martyrdom. ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... was a tall, thin, ascetic-looking man of probably sixty or sixty-five years of age. He had doubtless been, in his prime, an exceedingly handsome man, for, even now, his features were well modelled and clean cut, but his sallow skin was ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... he was more human than she had expected. Clarice Wilder had looked upon the Rev. Francis as a hermit, an ascetic, whose comprehension was limited; and her eyes grew keen as ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... is given us to let us see a very striking and commanding figure. We have a picture of him, his dress, his diet, his style of speech, his method of action—in every way he is a signal and arresting man. The son of a priest, he is an ascetic, who lives in the wilderness, dresses like a peasant, and eats the meanest and most meagre of food—a man of the desert and of solitude. And the whole life reacts on him and we can see him, lean and worn, though ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... deeply religious face of John. As the vessel rose on the waves, he passed his hand hurriedly first across his brows and then over his high-buttoned clerical waistcoat, that visible sign of a devoted ascetic life! Then murmuring in his low, deep voice, ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... rendered him a most acceptable companion. He knew the history and achievements of every regiment in the army; of every general and commanding officer. He was known to have been 'out' more than once himself, and had made up a hundred quarrels. He was certainly not a man of an ascetic life or a profound intellectual culture: but though poor he was known to be most honourable; though more than middle-aged he was cheerful, busy, and kindly; and though the youngsters called him Old Goby, he bore his years very gaily and handsomely, and I dare ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... luke-warm rural districts when these measures should go before the people, in the person of their advocates, at the approaching primary elections. However, even the wisdom of a political boss is not infallible, and despite the succulent graces of the barbecue numbers of the ascetic and jeans-clad elder worthies, though fed to repletion, collogued unhappily together among the ox-teams and canvas-hooded wagons on the slope, commenting sourly on the frivolity of the dance. These might ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... these ideas from anyone, he learned them from one Banus—an Ascetic, of the sect of the Essenes, who lived in the desert with no other clothing than the bark and leaves of trees, and no other food save that which grew wild. Josephus lived with him, in like fashion, for three years and, doubtless, learned all that was in his ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe, unless I scorn every ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... was appreciated at her full value by certain ambitious clerks. Any one seeing her for the first time might have shuddered involuntarily at the look of poetic wildness which the clever Valerie had succeeded in bringing out by the arts of dress in this Bleeding Nun, framing the ascetic olive face in thick bands of hair as black as the fiery eyes, and making the most of the rigid, slim figure. Lisbeth, like a Virgin by Cranach or Van Eyck, or a Byzantine Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness, the precision of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... little, to do with Arthur. Nor had Love, in any proper and passionate sense of the word, anything to do with either. Women and marriage and breaches of marriage appear indeed; but the earlier Graal stories are dominated by the most ascetic virginity-worship, and the earlier Arthur-stories show absolutely nothing of the passion which is the subject of the magnificent overture of Mr. Swinburne's Tristram. Even this story of Tristram himself, afterwards ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the shallow old cedar-wood box. He wondered if the colors would prove as bright as those in the window. He fancied the wan, ascetic faces there rejoiced with him. When he got home, he sat under the shadow of the mill, and drew back the sliding lid of the box. Brushes, and twelve hard color cakes. They were Ackermann's, and very good. Cheap paint-boxes were not made then. He read the names ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... white-bearded and clad in scarlet and gold, as he bombastically described to the knot of poor relations and admirers that elbowed him the splendours of the last entertainment at "Peterhof," where Lord Lytton still reigned. I smiled, and Isaacs frowned at the ancient and hairy ascetic believer, who suddenly rose from his lair in a corner, and bustled through the crowd of Hindoos, shouting at the top of his voice the confession of his faith—"Beside God there is no God, and Muhammad ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... the misfortune of Mlle. de Scudery to outlive her literary reputation. The interminable romances which had charmed the eloquent Flechier, the Grand Conde in his cell at Vincennes, the ascetic d'Andilly at Port Royal, as well as the dreaming maidens who signed over their fanciful descriptions and impossible adventures, passed their day. The touch of a merciless criticism stripped them of their already fading ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... an old man, very learned, and of ascetic habits, but he is all indulgence. It will be a sad day when we ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... to do was to turn himself into a young modern ascetic, prick his legs well in going through the furze, and then take a little bark off his shins in climbing twenty feet up on to the great monolith, and there ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... kneeling of the servants looks much more natural and less servile when you see people seated on the floor, and the servants have to kneel to hand them anything. His personality is that of a scholarly type, rather ascetic, not over refined, but not in the least sleek like some of our Hindu swamis, and very charming. When we left he thanked us for coming and expressed his great satisfaction that he had made some friends. His talk was largely moral ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... senior student of the College, who has nothing in his appearance to call attention. But this is Burton, by some accounted a morose person, but by those who knew him intimately a cheery and witty companion. Here, too, with slow and faltering step comes Pusey in extreme old age, and Liddon of ascetic mien. Hark to the laughter! It is Stubbs—historian Bishop—with witty saying falling from his lips. And there is Liddell, feared of the undergraduate, but splendid both in figure and in face. And many another shade would fancy depict taking the old ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... to the ascetic mode of life he adopted, and the extreme of hardship which he so often and so willingly encountered in his work. But he himself often said, and there are many references in his diary to the same effect, that the kind of life he ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... periodical attacks of ague, that many exorcisms and spells were performed to effect a cure, but all in vain. At length he was told by a friend that in a certain temple on the northern mountain (Mount Kurama) there dwelt a famous ascetic, and that when the epidemic had prevailed during the previous summer, many people had recovered through his exorcisms. "If," added the friend, "the disease is neglected it becomes serious; try therefore, this method of procuring relief at once, and before ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... daily life by the side of his unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chapter, we have a picture of the best man who could then be conceived; not a hard ascetic, living in haughty or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room might be left for any possible Calvinistic falsehood, God Himself ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... hat and gray worsted dress made them take him for an Augustine brother. Chance for once seemed to favor them in sending what they were so assiduously seeking. He was a man about twenty-two or twenty-three years old, but who appeared much older from ascetic exercises. His complexion was pale, not of that deadly pallor which is a kind of neutral beauty, but of a bilious, yellow hue; his colorless hair was short and scarcely extended beyond the circle formed by the hat around his head, and his light blue eyes ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Heart Back to the Shah, and looking to the Throne Of Pomp and Glory? What but the Return Of the Lost Soul to its true Parentage, And back from Carnal Error looking up Repentant to its Intellectual Throne. What is The Fire?—Ascetic Discipline, That burns away the Animal Alloy, Till all the Dross of Matter be consumed, And the Essential Soul, its Raiment clean Of Mortal Taint, be left. But forasmuch As any Life-long Habit so consumed, May well recur a Pang for what is lost, Therefore The Sage set in Salaman's ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... gate of the famous labyrinth Ramses was greeted by a company of priests of ascetic exterior, and a small division of troops, every man ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... honorable in all, even the highest and holiest, nurturing some of the loveliest graces of the Christian character. The event for a time caused some stir among the enemies of the truth; but it soon died away, and the old ascetic views of piety are passing away with the social degradation in ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... tastes. So absolute was her empire, that, when she became a devotee, he became a mystic: he followed her, as the satellite accompanies the planet, from the worldly gayeties of her youth, even to the foot of the altar, and the ascetic self-denial of Port-Royal. He survived her, as though he had survived himself, and lived to the extraordinary age of one hundred and four years, animated to unusual life by his gentle and amiable feelings. Such was Madame de Sevigne's ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... grotesque vanity of the anchorite is so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the truth of the picture, though the East has still her parallels to St Simeon. From the almost, perhaps quite, incredible ascetic the poet lightly turns to "society verse" lifted up into the air of poetry, in the charm of The Talking Oak, and the happy flitting sketches of actual history; and thence to the strength and passion of Love ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... that while well pleased at the decision referred to, he knew all about diablotins. Moreover, the father betrays certain tendencies to gormandize not altogether in harmony with the profession of an ascetic.... There were parrots in nearly all of the French Antilles in those days [11] and Pre Labat does not attempt to conceal his fondness for cooked parrots. (He does not appear to have cared much for them as pets: if they could not talk well, he condemned them ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... here says, that from sixteen to nineteen, or for three years, he made trial of the three Jewish sects, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essens, and yet says presently, in all our copies, that he stayed besides with one particular ascetic, called Banus, with him, and this still before he was nineteen, there is little room left for his trial of the three other sects. I suppose, therefore, that for, with him, the old reading might be, with ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... conditions of membership implied the acceptance of "those views of doctrinal truth which for the sake of distinction are called Calvinistic." Thus over the poet's childhood and youth a religious influence presided; it was not sacerdotal, nor was it ascetic; the boy was in those early days, as he himself declared, "passionately religious." Their excellent pastor was an entirely "unimaginative preacher of the Georgian era," who held fast by the approved method of "three heads and a conclusion." Browning's indifference to the ministrations ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the moors; often he had been hidden cunningly in shepherd's cottages, twice he had eluded the dragoons by immersing himself in peat-bogs, and once he had been wounded. His face could never at any time have been otherwise than refined and spiritual, but now it was that of an ascetic, worn by prayer and fasting, while his dark blue eyes glowed when he was moved like coals of fire, and the golden hair upon his head, as the sun touched it, was like unto an aureole. Standing in the embrasure of that gallery, which had so many signs of the world which is, in the pictures ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... spent so many years in solitude, addicted to prayers and ascetic practices, that the gods dreaded his growing power, which was making him like unto them, and to break it they sent down to him some of the seductive apsaras. But the saint held a flower-stalk to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... developed manhood or womanhood involves physical culture. The ascetic idea of college life no longer prevails. The body, as well as the mind, is trained. The value to a student of good health and an alert and vigorous body cannot be overestimated. Educators are coming to realize more fully than in the past that the physical and psychical factors of life ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... an analogy. The feeling that a conflict between sensuous and ascetic feelings, or selfish and moral impulses, or practical and intellectual ambitions, within us not merely lowers the claims of one or both parties and permits neither to come to quite free self-realization but also threatens the unity, the equilibrium, and the total energy ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... inches high, for being the best-sustained character at the Butchers and Meat Workers' annual grand masked ball. And Bill Totts liked the girls and the girls liked him, while Freddie Drummond enjoyed playing the ascetic in this particular, was open in his opposition to equal suffrage, and cynically bitter in his ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... monasteries and carry to them all that was good and beautiful in the classics, was the desire of Benedict. His wish was to reconcile the learning of the past with Christianity, which up to that time had been simply ascetic. It had consisted largely of repression, suppression and a killing-out of all spontaneous, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... in a single glance, and then I turned—to find myself face to face with a tallish, thin, active man, with a pale, shaven, ascetic face, dark hair, and astonishingly quick glittering black eyes. He stood just within the office door, to which he must have come without a sound, looking at me with a mechanical smile of inquiry, while his eyes searched me with a ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... a sudden smile. "He's a queer type, this Captain Stewart. He begins to interest me very much. I had never suspected this side of him, though I remember now that I once saw him coming out of a milliner's shop. He looks rather an ascetic—rather donnish, don't you think? I remember that he talked to me one day quite pathetically about feeling his age and about liking young people round him. He's an odd character. Fancy him mixed up in an affair with Olga Nilssen! Or, rather, fancy her involved in an affair with him! What can ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns" just after he has been talking with his dead father. The poetic dreamer cannot take the trouble to tie up the loose ends of a story: the real purpose of "Measure for Measure," which is the confusion of the pretended ascetic Angelo, is fulfilled, and that is sufficient for the thinker, who has thus shown what "our seemers be." It is no less characteristic of Shakespeare that Duke Vincentio, his alter ego, should order another to punish loose livers—a task which his kindly ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... letter, I have already exemplified, by the case of Henry Engelbrecht, the occurrence of visions of hell and heaven during the deepest state of trance. No doubt the poor ascetic implicitly believed his whole life the reality of the scenes to which his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... heavens. She had declared to herself that she would bear it; but the misfortune to be borne was a broken world falling about her own ears. She had thought of a nunnery, of Ophelia among the water-lilies, and of an early death-bed. Then she had pictured to herself the somewhat ascetic and very laborious life of an old maiden lady whose only recreation fifty years hence should consist in looking at the portrait of him who had once been her lover. And now she was told that he was ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... of England, married Edith, daughter of the great EARL GODWIN (q. v.); was a feeble monarch of ascetic proclivities; his appeal to the Duke of Normandy precipitated the Norman invasion, and in him perished the royal Saxon line; was canonised for ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... They make him THAT, hold him THERE. They lean heavily on what they find of the above influence in him. They won't follow the rivers in his thought and the play of his soul. And their cousin cataloguers put him in another pigeon-hole. They label him "ascetic." They translate his outward serenity into an impression of severity. But truth keeps one from being hysterical. Is a demagogue a friend of the people because he will lie to them to make them cry and raise false hopes? A search for perfect ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... gave way. Nothing could serve as a fulcrum for resisting decline, or producing recovery. In such a period despair wins control. The philosophy is pessimistic. The world is supposed to be coming to an end. Life is not valued. Ascetic practices fall in with the prevailing temper. Martyrdom has no great terrors; such as it has can be overcome by a little enthusiasm. Inroads of barbarians only add a little to the other woes, or hasten an end which is inevitable and is expected ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... celebrated, and justly so. At her receptions one always heard the best singers and players of the season, and Epicurus' soul could rest in peace, for her chef had an international reputation. Oh, remember, you music-fed ascetic, many, aye, very many, regard the transition from Tschaikowsky to terrapin, from Beethoven to burgundy with hearts aflame with anticipatory joy—and Mrs. Llewellyn's dining-room ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... requesting permission to return. They were all young, and several of them pretty; but as they had been among the most sincere of the sisterhood, so they had the most rigidly performed all the fasts, penances, vigils, imposed on them, and already the bloom of youth had departed, and the pallor or the ascetic had ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... passionate One, of our Age the Champion, King Sharrkan, by whom He shall conquer Constantinople town and destroy the sect of the Nazarene. And when ye shall have journeyed three days, you will find an hermitage known as the Hermitage of the ascetic Matruhina[FN415] and containing a cell; visit it with pure intent and contrive to arrive there by force of will, for therein is a Religious from the Holy City, Jerusalem, by name Abdullah, and he is one of the devoutest ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... picture of vice and profligacy was drawn by one whose love of truth rendered him incapable of deceit or of exaggeration. It was published at the time, and was unanswered, because unanswerable. It was not painted from imagination by an ascetic; but from life by an enlightened observer—not by the poor preaching mechanic when incarcerated in a jail for his godliness; but when his painful sufferings were past—when his Pilgrim, produced by the folly of persecutors, had rendered him famous through Europe—when ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... moderation with the reckless violence of Macedonius at Constantinople. His appointments were Arianizing, and he gave deep offence by the ordination of his old disciple, the detested Aetius. So great was the outcry that Leontius was forced to suspend him. The opposition was led by two ascetic laymen, Flavian and Diodorus, who both became distinguished bishops in later time. Orthodox feeling was nourished by a vigorous use of hymns and by all-night services at the tombs of the martyrs. As such practices often led to great abuses, Leontius may have had ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... will receive it; if you will believe a truth which is too often hidden from the wise and prudent, and yet revealed unto babes; which will never be understood by the proud Pharisee, the sour fanatic, the ascetic who dreads and distrusts his Father in heaven; but which is clear and simple enough to many a clear and simple heart, honest and single-eyed, sunny itself, and bringing sunshine wherever it comes, because it is inspired by the gracious spirit of God, and delights ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... lipped by the restless water was Spiridion. He lay on his back, thinner and more peaked than ever in life; his yellow hair made him an aureole. He looked like some martyred ascetic, with his tightened smile and the gash half-way through ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... inexplicable, however, in a girl of Spanish origin, Madame Claes was uneducated. She knew how to read and write, but up to the age of twenty, at which time her parents withdrew her from a convent, she had read none but ascetic books. On her first entrance into the world, she was eager for pleasure and learned only the flimsy art of dress; she was, moreover, so deeply conscious of her ignorance that she dared not join in conversation; for which reason she ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... Smoothbeard.) A village some three miles below Gulmarg; the ziarat is named after a rishi, or ascetic, of the sixteenth century. Baloo, (Kashmiri, Harpat) "Rara avis in terras, nigroque similima cignis." Anglice, a bear. Bandipur, An important village on the north shore of the Wular Lake, the starting-point for Gilgit, &c. Oddly enough, Bandipur is not marked on the Ordnance Map. Bandobast, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... besides—she is so fascinating. So she was shown in. She was veiled as much as only she could be, for mystery and to conceal the slight and ingenious coat of rouge, I guess. The usual feathers, rings and perfumes; and I had thought that I would see an ascetic face tired out by seclusion! She said that she had nothing serious to tell me, but had just run in to say good-bye and calm me; she was not going to call on Maroossia: ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... his seat under the banyan tree. He passed his hand unsteadily over his brow. Throughout the day the young ascetic had been plunged in profound meditation; and now, returning from heaven to earth, he was bewildered like one who awakens in darkness and knows not where he is. All day long before his inner eye burned the ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... not be supposed that their disregard of one another's bodily aspect grows out of any ascetic sentiment. It is merely a necessary consequence of their power of directly apprehending mind, that whenever mind is closely associated with matter the latter is comparatively neglected on account of the greater interest of the former, suffering as lesser things always do when placed ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... the Court yet still somewhat aloof, apartado. like Gil Terron. Vicente regards himself as a rustico peregrino (III. 390), an ignorante sabedor (I. 373) as opposed to the ignorant-malicious or ignorant-presumptuous of the Court. But Vicente was no ascetic, his was a genial, generous nature, he liked to have enough to spend and give and leave in his will. Kindly and chivalrous, he was a champion of the down-trodden but had first-hand knowledge of the malice and intrigues of the peasants and of the poor in the towns. Above all he was thoroughly ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... can see. But there are some strange tales going about. I wonder who that other woman is. Marvell—Gertrude Marvell?—I seem to have heard the name somewhere.—Hullo, Masham, how are you?" He greeted the leading local solicitor who had just entered the station, a man with a fine ascetic face, and singularly blue eyes. Masham looked like a starved poet or preacher, and was in reality one of the hardest and shrewdest men of ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... elevating influences of religion, and upon the worship of this deity they founded their hopes of an ultimate immortality of the soul. Unlike the popular worshipers of Bacchus, they did not indulge in unrestrained pleasure or frantic enthusiasm, but rather aimed at an ascetic purity of life and manners. It is difficult to tell when this association was formed in Greece, but we find in Hesiod something of the Orphic spirit, and the beginning of higher and more ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... they are, for what woman would not love to see the world's master at her feet? But things being as they are, why, Antony, what can be so sweet as thy sweet words? The harbour of his rest to the storm-tossed mariner—surely that is sweet! The dream of Heaven's bliss which cheers the poor ascetic priest on his path of sacrifice—surely that is sweet! The sight of Dawn, the rosy-fingered, coming in his promise to glad the watching Earth—surely that is sweet! But, ah! not one of these, nor all dear delightful things that are, can match the honey-sweetness of thy words to me, O Antony! ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... back to Clarke's Bottle Factory was a very different man from the one who had walked out of it five years before. He had gone out a stern, unforgiving, young ascetic, accepting no compromise, demanding perfection of himself and of his fellow-men. The very sublimity of his dream doomed it to failure. Out of the crumbling ideals of his boyhood he had struggled to a ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... of reasoning, and of the profound mathematical knowledge of the Chaldean astronomers, easily grasped the highest subjects, and showed from the first a capacity and lucidity that delighted his master. To attain by a life of rigid ascetic practice to the intuitive comprehension of knowledge, to the understanding of natural laws not discernible to the senses alone, and to the merging of the soul and higher intelligence in the one universal and ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... Paul regarded him with renewed interest. The black hair streaked with white, banging over the temples on the side away from the parting, the queerly streaked beard, the clear-cut ascetic features, the deep, mournful eyes in whose depths glowed a soul on fire, gave him the appearance of a mad but sanctified apostle. Barney Bill, who profoundly distrusted all professional drinkers of water, such as Mr. ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... a change, but the feelings and ideas created by early association, and fostered by habit, are far more lasting and enduring. The poet must have lamented the loss of the music, which, in the stern ascetic spirit of Puritanism prevailing at a later period of our history, he assisted to banish from our churches, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... frosty twilight of the spring morning, though Henry was now clad in his usual garb, sleeplessness, sorrow, and fasting made him as wan and haggard as any ascetic monk; his eyes were sunken, and his closed lips bore a stern fixed expression, which scarcely softened even when the sacrificial rite struck the notes of praise; and though a light came into his eye, it was rather the devotion of one who had offered himself, than ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... At last there was another small howl, and the screen lit up. Dr. O'Connor's face, as stern and ascetic as ever, stared through ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of the extreme seriousness of the situation. That Gallagher should be prepared to defy the clergy was bad enough. That he should adopt an ascetic's attitude towards drink was worse. But Doyle did not quite believe that Gallagher meant what he said. He opened a door at the far end of the office and whistled loudly. A small boy who had been cleaning type in the printing-room, appeared, rubbing his ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... The ascetic Jews of Palestine, the Essenes on the banks of the Dead Sea, by no means, according to Philo, thus quitted the active duties of life; and it would seem that the Therapeutas rather borrowed their customs from the country in which ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... only to those who live high above the ordinary tumults of life and the secularities of daily duty. You may be as true a saint in a factory—ay! and a far truer one—than in a hermitage. You do not need to cultivate a mediaeval or Roman Catholic type of ascetic piety in order to be called saints. You do not need to be amongst the select few to whom it is given here upon earth, but not given without their own effort, to rise to the highest summits of holy conformity with the divine will. But down amongst all the troubles and difficulties and engrossing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... imagination of the student, and which to the men of that day, with the Union crumbling around them, seemed one of the most mournful and dramatic of orations. Davis possessed a beautiful, melodious voice; he had a noble presence, tall, erect, spare, even ascetic, with a flashing blue eye. He was deeply moved by the occasion; his address was a requiem. That he withdrew in sorrow but with fixed determination, no one who listened to him could doubt. Early ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... for the large young glance, as if her elder frame got some needful warmth from it. The mother was getting fond of her tall, brown girl,—the only bit of furniture now on which she could bestow her anxiety and pride; and Maggie, in spite of her own ascetic wish to have no personal adornment, was obliged to give way to her mother about her hair, and submit to have the abundant black locks plaited into a coronet on the summit of her head, after the pitiable fashion of ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... only a dozen or so people in the church, but this made no difference. The priest would not feel slighted, as an Anglican curate might. He had a serious ascetic face, and seemed not to know that any was present beside his God ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... very favourite article of diet with both Mussulmans and Hindoos. Many of the latter take a vow to touch no flesh of any kind. They are called Kunthees or Boghuts, but a Boghut is more of an ascetic than a Kunthee. However, the Kunthee is glad of a fish dinner when he can get it. They are restricted to no particular sect or caste, but all who have taken the vow wear a peculiar necklace, made generally of sandal-wood beads or neem beads round their throats. ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... health and strength. Asceticism is the control of appetite merely for the sake of controlling it. Asceticism, in shunning the evils to which food and drink may lead, misses also the best blessings they are able to confer. The ascetic attempts to regulate by rule and measure everything he eats and drinks, and to get along with just as little as possible, and so he misses the good cheer and hearty enjoyment which should be the best part ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... standing on the hearthrug, his hands thrust into his trousers pockets, and smiling as he talked to a young clerical gentleman near him—the Rev. Octavius Brown. The Rev. Octavius was curate of a neighbouring ritualistic church, but in his life he was not ascetic; he loved whisky-and-water not wisely but too well, and he was passionately devoted to the noble game of Napoleon. Mr. Brown had just won seven shillings, and was in very high spirits; for being poor he had a great dread of losing, and played carefully ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... winding-sheets of human devising. Nevertheless, at certain points and in certain places, in spite of philosophy, in spite of progress, the spirit of the cloister persists in the midst of the nineteenth century, and a singular ascetic recrudescence is, at this moment, astonishing the civilized world. The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which should ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... is the chief supporter of the astronomical theory. One of his arguments is founded on the mistaken reading of the word "turaghun" (which he derives from tur, a tower, and aghan, or adhan, the kindling of flame), instead of "truaghan," an ascetic. The only other authority of his which we have not noticed is the passage in the Ulster Annals, at the year 995, in which it is said that certain Fidhnemead were burned by lightning at Armagh. He translates the word celestial indexes, and paraphrases it Round Towers, and all because fiadh ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... their sons. John became an Occultist and a Mystic. When the boy reached the age of puberty, he departed from the home of his parents, and went into the wilderness, "looking to the East, from whence cometh all Light." In other words, he became an Ascetic, living in the wilderness, just as in India even to-day youths of the Brahmin or priestly class sometimes forsake their homes, renouncing their luxurious life, and fly to the jungle, where they wander about for years as ascetics, wearing ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... Fantail in the morning, having taken in all sail: the chestnut curls have disappeared, and two limp bands of brown hair border her lean, sallow face; you see before you an ascetic, a nun, a woman worn by mortifications, of a sad yellow aspect, drinking salts at the well: a vision quite different from that rapturous one of the previous night's ball-room. No wonder Fantail ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you like to be a cat? In Timbuctoo each stern ascetic, Though blind to folly as a bat, Revels in love peripatetic Which makes him nimble as a cat But though I'm fond of such agility, I better like the busy bees, For they display so much ability They 'mind one of ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... Salvationist is not of the generally understood ascetic or monastic type, yet his spirit and deeds are of the very ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... huts, and its clear greensward; where the sun is even then shining so brightly, and the sky is so blue, and all is so calm and motherly and safe. She sighs for the peace of that sequestered home; then shudders to think that she shall never see it more. Accused of witchcraft, by her own ascetic melancholic father, she utters no word of denial to the charge; for her heart is dark, it is tarnished by earthly love, she dare not raise her thoughts to Heaven. Parted from her sisters; cast out ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... the things one has not done, the faces or places one has not seen, or seen but darkly, that have charm. It is only mystery—such mystery as besets the eyes of children—that makes things superb. I thought of the voluptuaries I had known—they seemed so sad, so ascetic almost, like poor pilgrims, raising their eyes never or ever gazing at the moon of tarnished endeavour. I thought of the round, insouciant faces of the monks at whose monastery I once broke bread, and how their eyes ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... admirable instance of the "point of view" forced throughout, and of too earnest reflection on imperfect facts. Upon me this pure, narrow, sunnily-ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm. I have scarce written ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer. Still it was as a writer that I had made his acquaintance; I took him on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... attention to, and even co-operate in the journalistic corruption of the people, how else than by the acknowledgment that their learning must fill a want of their own similar to that filled by novel-writing in the case of others: i.e. a flight from one's self, an ascetic extirpation of their cultural impulses, a desperate attempt to annihilate their own individuality. From our degenerate literary art, as also from that itch for scribbling of our learned men which has now reached such alarming proportions, wells forth the same sigh: Oh that ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... only still alive, but in capital spirits. To-day I took a fancy to ride a donkey, for such is the custom in Italy, so I thought that I too must give it a trial. We have the honor to associate with a certain Dominican who is considered a very pious ascetic. I somehow don't quite think so, for he constantly takes a cup of chocolate for breakfast, and immediately afterwards a large glass of strong Spanish wine; and I have myself had the privilege of dining with this holy man, when he drank a lot of wine ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... girl's hand and watched her helplessly as she worked over the limp figure on the bed. Mechanically he picked up the fallen picture to replace it. There looked out at him the face of a man of early middle age, a face of manifest intellectual power, high-boned, long-lined, and of the austere, almost ascetic beauty which the Florentine coins have preserved for us in clear fidelity. Across the bottom was written in a peculiarly rhythmic script, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... puritanism, sabbatarianism^; cynicism^, austerity; total abstinence; nephalism^. mortification, maceration, sackcloth and ashes, flagellation; penance &c 952; fasting &c 956; martyrdom. ascetic; anchoret^, anchorite; martyr; Heautontimorumenos^; hermit &c (recluse) 893; puritan, sabbatarian^, cynic, sanyasi^, yogi. Adj. ascetic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the hapless Jew to his heart with so fervent an outburst of love, that the edges of the monochal haircloth rubbed the Dominican's breast. And while Aser Abarbanel with protruding eyes gasped in agony in the ascetic's embrace, vaguely comprehending that all the phases of this fatal evening were only a prearranged torture, that of HOPE, the Grand Inquisitor, with an accent of touching reproach and a look of consternation, murmured ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... always afterwards a strong wish to meet the architect, Brother Michel; and one day, when I was talking with the Resident in Tai-o-hae (the chief port of the island), there were shown in to us an old, worn, purblind, ascetic-looking priest, and a lay brother, a type of all that is most sound in France, with a broad, clever, honest, humorous countenance, an eye very large and bright, and a strong and healthy body inclining to obesity. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... excessively burdensome, as well as many other rites of Islamism, and for this reason the greater part of the population of Soudan, who profess Mohammedanism, are still pagans in heart. It is vain to expect a nation to pass from loose to ascetic practices without some moral motive, such as that which sustained the Muslims at their first brilliant ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... either confused or deliberately disingenuous, since he shifts his ground several times. On occasion he argues merely in the role of a moderate man who is shocked by the extravagances of the playwrights, and on other occasions as an ascetic to whom all worldly diversion, however innocent of any obvious offence, is wicked. At one time, moreover, he accuses the playwrights of recommending the vices which they should satirize and at other times denies that even the most sincere satiric intention can justify the lively ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... gay, dissipated, reckless young man. The men whom he had to deal with were stern, sedate, and rigid religionists. They were scandalized at the looseness and irregularity of his character and manners. He was vexed and tormented by what he considered their ascetic bigotry, by the restraints which they were disposed to put upon his conduct, and the limits with which they insisted on bounding his authority. Long negotiations and debates ensued, each party becoming more and more irritated against the other. ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... part of Carey's poetical essays is entitled "I will sing unto the Lord," and contains a few "Triolets;" all of an ascetic savour, and strongly confirmatory of the belief that the author may ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... banner royal of Scotland fluttered was a man of different mould. His spare frame seemed buried in the suit of armour that he wore somewhat awkwardly. His pale ascetic countenance looked more in place in a monkish cloister than on a knightly tilting ground, and he glanced this way and that with the swift and furtive suspicion of one who, while setting one trap, fears ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... of Gordon as a gloomy ascetic, wrapped up in mystic thoughts, retiring from all communion with the world, and inspiring fear rather than affection. I can only describe him as he appeared to me. Far from being a gloomy ascetic, he always seemed to ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... portraits. You saw it—now, beneath the half-raised visor of Sir Malise, surnamed Poing-de-fer, who went up the breach at Ascalon shoulder to shoulder with strong King Richard—now, yet more grimly shadowed forth, under the cowl of Prior Bernard, the ambitious ascetic, whom, they say, the great Earl of Warwick trusted as his own right hand—now, softened a little, but still distinctly visible, under the long love-locks of Prince Rupert's aid-de-camp, who died at Naseby manfully ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... Giles' by an infuriated mob. More powerful, and far more numerous than his followers, the Peterbrusians, were the Cathari and the Waldenses (founded by Peter Valdez A.D. 1177) who soon spread to Northern Italy and amalgamated with the sect of the Lombards. The Cathari advocated a simple and ascetic life, in accordance with the teaching of primitive Christianity, refrained from all ecclesiastical ceremonies and despised the sacraments, particularly baptism. More radical than later reformers, they rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation, and ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... enjoyment and vision of the Deity. The opinions and practices of the monasteries of Mount Athos will be best represented in the words of an abbot who flourished in the eleventh century. 'When thou art alone in thy cell,' says the ascetic teacher, 'shut thy door and seat thyself in a corner: raise thy mind above all things vain and transitory; recline thy beard and chin on thy breast; turn thine eyes and thy thoughts towards the middle of thy belly, the region of the naval; ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... of literary composition. Samuel Johnson produced his principal works before the close of this period. Among the novelists, Richardson alone had anything in common with him. Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are equally distant from the dignified pomp of his manner and the ascetic elevation of his morality. In contrast to the looseness of the novels and the skepticism of Hume, the reasoning of Butler was employed in defense of sacred truth, and the stern dissent of Whitefield and Wesley was entered against religious deadness. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... passing through Harrington's mind, rendered more whimsical by the recollection that, during college life, his friend (though very far from vicious) had certainly never seemed to take any deficient interest in the affairs of this world, nor to exhibit any predilection for an ascetic life. Indeed, he acknowledged that, after all, he could not sympathize with Mr. Newman's extreme sensitiveness in relation to this matter. ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... is admirably drawn: all we dwellers in the East have known her well: she is so and so. Her dress and manners are the same amongst the Hindus (see the hypocritical-female ascetic in the Katha, p. 287) as amongst the Moslems; men of the world at once recognise her and the prudent keep out of her way. She is found in the cities of Southern Europe, ever pious, ever prayerful; and she seems to do her work not ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... Ecumenical Council to issue a bull of excommunication against "pusley." Of all the forms which "error" has taken in this world, I think that is about the worst. In the Middle Ages the monks in St. Bernard's ascetic community at Clairvaux excommunicated a vineyard which a less rigid monk had planted near, so that it bore nothing. In 1120 a bishop of Laon excommunicated the caterpillars in his diocese; and, the following year, St. Bernard excommunicated the flies ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... bungalow interested me. It was only the second Mofussil bungalow I had seen. The Takai drawing-room was delightful, a big, rather empty room, with one or two good reproductions of famous pictures on the walls, heaps of books, and an almost entire absence of ornaments—rather an ascetic room. It suited the simple, strenuous life there. Mrs. Edston's is quite different—bright and pretty, full of flowers and growing plants; tables laden with silver, and photographs of pretty women and children; comfortable chairs, with opulent cushions, ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... the cool boys, and one of the self- sufficing. Probably a bit of an ascetic at bottom, with good capacity for self-control and self-direction. Not at all an uninteresting type," he summed it up. "An ebullient Puritan?" ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... than to deceive him; but don't imagine I deceived him from the vainglory of a mere sinner. I lied to the dear man, simply because I couldn't bear the idea of him being deprived of the only gratification his big, ascetic, gaunt body ever knew on earth. As I mounted my mule to go away he murmured coldly: 'God guard you, Senora!' Senora! What sternness! We were off a little way already when his heart softened and he shouted after me ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... paper what he would of forgery and falsehood and going up to the Sultan's palace, said, "I have an advisement for the King." So he bade admit him and he delivered him the writ he had forged, saying, "I found this letter with the woman, the devotee, the ascetic, and indeed she is a spy, a secret informer against the sovran to his foe; and I deem the King's due more incumbent on me than any other claim and warning him to be the first duty, for that he uniteth in himself all the subjects, and but for the King's existence, the lieges would perish; ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... you mean to be a Christian, after all! Now just reflect how very absurdly you are choosing. Leave the Bible to that class of fanatics who may hope to be saved under its system, and, in the name of common sense, study the Koran, or some less ascetic tome. Don't be gulled by a plausible slave, who wants nothing more than to multiply professors of his theory. Why don't you read the Bible, you miserable, puling poltroon, before you hug it as a treasure? Why don't you read it, and learn out of the mouth of ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... wronged, might find a quiet refuge and hide their heads and be forgotten and fall asleep, with the prayers of other sufferers to console and support them in their passage through the valley of the shadow of death. The gentlest spirits here could taste the bliss of a holy tranquillity; the ascetic could indulge his most fantastic self-immolation; the morbid visionary could dream at his will and give his imagination full play, none hindering him; evil demons might chatter and gibe and twit him at his prayers; choirs of angels might calm his despair with celestial lullabies; awful ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... company besides ourselves. Who would have known from your appearance as you sat there gorging with the rest, that you were inwardly protesting, and greatly preferred the simple life? Don't flatter yourself that you had the aspect of an ascetic. There were moments during that meal when any unprejudiced observer who didn't know you would have sworn that you were deeply gratified that no other engagement had prevented you from dining ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... a semicircle are three inscriptions describing the Trinity as almighty, all-good, and all-bountiful. The figures of S. John and of the Virgin display equal majesty; both are reading holy books, as they turn towards the centre figure. The countenance of S. John expresses ascetic seriousness, but in that of the Virgin we find a serene grace and a purity of form which approach very nearly to the happier ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... opened from the great hall, were wainscotted, their chief embellishments being some old pictures in black frames, and a number of hunting, shooting, and racing prints, with red tape round them to serve the purpose of frames; while the library so-called was worthy of being the habitation of an ascetic monk, though two of the walls were covered with book-shelves which contained but few books, and they served chiefly to enable countless spiders to form their traps for unwary flies, while a table covered with green cloth and three wooden ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... died away into silence, he still knelt with bent head and clasped hands, so steeped in penitential thoughts that he did not hear the sea-door open, did not hear the entrance of a man, grizzled, bronzed, eagle-faced, ascetic, clad in the brown robe of his order. Father Hieronymus paused for a moment, seeing with gratification the kneeling figure before the altar. It would be the sweetest triumph of a life of ceaseless struggle with ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... one of the elder members of his form told him to go to "Bogus" for French. Now "Bogus" was short for the Bogus officer, and was the unkind appellation of one Rogers. Tall, ascetic and superior, with the air of a great philosopher, he had, like Richard Feverel's uncle, Adrian Harley, "attained that felicitous point of wisdom from which one sees all mankind to be fools." He was ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... hopes at this time are many;—and among them, I perceive, there is not wanting secretly, in spite of his experiences, some hope that he himself may be a good deal "happier" than formerly. Nor is there any ascetic humor, on his part, to forbid trial. He is much determined to try. Probably enough, as we guess and gather, his agreeablest anticipations, at this time, were of Reinsberg: How, in the intervals of work well done, he would live there wholly to the Muses; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... mathematician; yet he shrank from a consideration of the theory of Copernicus: it was more important, he declared, to think of the immortal soul. In the last years of his short life he sank into a torpor of superstition—ascetic, self-mortified, and rapt in a strange exaltation, like a medieval monk. Thus there is a tragic antithesis in his character—an unresolved discord which shows itself again and again in his Pensees. 'Condition de l'homme,' he notes, 'inconstance, ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... free Russia, but the idea was unmistakably imbedded in my mind that his Christianity was like Napoleon's description of a Russian. Scratch it and you would find Tartar fanaticism under it,—the fanaticism of the ascetic who would drive his own flesh and blood into the flames to save the soul of his domestics. This impression grew as I watched the attitude of the countess toward her husband. What must a wife think of such a husband's ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... opponents of Christianity. It is, in essence, the basis of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's whole distinction between Christianity and Paganism. I mean, of course, the virtue of humility. I admit, of course, most readily, that a great deal of false Eastern humility (that is, of strictly ascetic humility) mixed itself with the main stream of European Christianity. We must not forget that when we speak of Christianity we are speaking of a whole continent for about a thousand years. But of this virtue even more than of the other ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... which it is recognised and inculcated as virtue, while there are others in which it is no exaggeration to say that the whole tendency of religious teaching has been to discourage it. During many centuries the ascetic and purely ecclesiastical standard of virtue completely dominated. The domestic virtues, though clearly recognised, held altogether a subordinate place to what were deemed the higher virtues of the ascetic celibate. Charity, though nobly cultivated and practised, ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... probably during the Permian Ice Age that many of the insects divided their life-history into two main chapters—the feeding, growing, moulting, immature, larval stages, e.g. caterpillars, and the more ascetic, non-growing, non-moulting, winged phase, adapted for reproduction. Between these there intervened the quiescent, well-protected pupa stage or chrysalis, probably adapted to begin with as a means of surviving the severe winter. For ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... them better, and liking them better have become a better painter. We had the same kind of religious feeling, but I could give a crude philosophical expression to mine while he could only express his in action or with brush and pencil. He often told me of certain ascetic ambitions, very much like my own, for he had kept all the moral ambition of youth with a moral courage peculiar to himself, as for instance—'Yeats, the other night I was arrested by a policeman—was ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... fury. Three ecclesiastics, wearing black gowns, white bands, and square caps, were walking in the garden with a slow and measured step. The youngest seemed to be about thirty years of age; his countenance was pale, hollow, and impressed with a certain ascetic austerity. His two companions, aged between fifty or sixty, had, on the contrary, faces at once hypocritical and cunning; their round, rosy cheeks shone brightly in the sunshine, whilst their triple chins, buried in fat, descended in soft folds over the fine cambric of their bands. According to ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... regularly on Fridays and Tuesdays. We always recognized her jours maigres by the quantity of cakes and pastry we saw carried to her room just before dinner, to which dinner she came in nun-like gray silk, saintly coiffure, with ascetic pallor on cheeks wont to bloom with roses de Ninon, to dine, a la Sainte Catherine or Sainte Something else, on a few lentils or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... pessimist and master of cadenced lyric prose, urged young writers to lead ascetic lives that in their art they might be violent. Chopin's violence was psychic, a travailing and groaning of the spirit; the bright roughness of adventure was missing from his quotidian existence. The tragedy ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... are doing right, Mrs. Penn," said the minister, helplessly. His thin gray-bearded face was pathetic. He was a sickly man; his youthful confidence had cooled; he had to scourge himself up to some of his pastoral duties as relentlessly as a Catholic ascetic, and then he was prostrated by ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... represented as generally, or rather as almost always, inconsistent with any degree of happiness in this life; and heaven was to be earned only by penance and mortification, by the austerities and abasement of a monk, not by the liberal, generous, and spirited conduct of a man. Casuistry, and an ascetic morality, made up, in most cases, the greater part of the moral philosophy of the schools. By far the most important of all the different branches of philosophy became in this manner by far the ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... a carnival of love. My case is just the reverse. Before three soft speeches have escaped me I rebuke myself for folly and insincerity. Before a caress has had time to cool, a strenuous revulsion seizes me: I long to return to my old lonely ascetic hermit life; to my dry books; my Socialist propagandism; my voyage of discovery through the wilderness of thought. I married in an insane fit of belief that I had a share of the natural affection which carries other men through lifetimes of matrimony. Already I am undeceived. ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... Ned saw them very distinctly now. One was a boy but little older than himself, his face pale and worn. Near him was an old man, with a face very uncommon on the border. His features were those of a scholar and ascetic. His cheeks were thin, and thick white hair crowned a broad white brow. Ned felt instinctively that he ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... public in general know of what the singer often suffers in the way of nervousness or stage fright before appearing in front of the footlights, nor that his life, outwardly so feted and brilliant, is in private more or less of a retired, ascetic one and that his social pleasures must be ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... gravity which is the essence of Quixotic humour; it seemed to him a crime to bring Cervantes forward smirking and grinning at his own good things, and to this may be attributed in a great measure the ascetic abstinence from everything savouring of liveliness which is the characteristic of his translation. In most modern editions, it should be observed, his style has been smoothed and smartened, but without any reference to the original Spanish, so ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... in teaching his disciples, and in ascetic practices. Often did he meditate upon the Holy Scriptures in order to find allegories in them. Therefore he abounded in good works, though still young. The devils, who so rudely assailed the good hermits, did not dare to approach ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... friend who was left to her. He was a thin, gray-eyed, fair-haired young man, who practised largely among the poor, from choice rather than from necessity, since Dr. Morton had given him an excellent start in life. His pale, ascetic face had attracted Gabriella from their first meeting; there was the flamelike enthusiasm of the visionary in his eyes; and he had, she thought, the most beautiful and sympathetic hands she had ever seen. Even Fanny, who was usually impervious to sensitive impressions, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... type of Fertility, and the Goddess of Chastity, became, as the impersonation of motherhood, all beauty, bounty and graciousness; and at the same time, by virtue of her perpetual virginity, the patroness of single and ascetic life—the example and the excuse for many of the wildest of the early monkish theories. With Christianity, new ideas of the moral and religious responsibility of woman entered the world; and while these ideas were yet struggling with the ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... then," was the placid suggestion of a third officer, a man with keen eyes, thin, almost ascetic, face, but there twitched a quaint humor about the lines of his lips. "That visit's past the ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... of learning and knowledge of self, such a man wins esteem while here and attains to a high end hereafter. All acts that are regarded as good on earth, all those acts that are practised by the righteous, constitute the path of the ascetic possessed of knowledge. A person that is good never deviates from that path. Retiring from the world and betaking himself to a life in the woods, that learned person having a complete control over the senses who treads in that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... supposed that this earnest searcher after truth became ascetic or morose. Despite his mistakes, and the somewhat severe discipline which he was thereby led to impose on himself and the community, the effect on him and his large family of the Scriptures— pure, unadulterated, and without note or comment—was to create love to God, to intensify ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... controlling reason; and where, it will be noticed, the ultimate harmony is achieved, not by the complete eradication of desire, but by its due subordination to the higher principle. Even Plato, the most ascetic of the Greeks, is a Greek first ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... graces! fourfold wonder Of wit and beauty, love and wisdom! Canst thou Beatify the ascetic's savagery To heavenly prudence? Horror melts to pity, And pity kindles to adoring shower Of radiant tears! Thou tender cruelty! Gay smiling martyrdom! Shall I forbid thee? Limit thy depth by mine own shallowness? ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... M'sieur le Peintre, et bon voyage, and remember, 'Ask, and it shall be given, seek and you shall find,'" and with these cryptic words, he stood with uplifted hands, a smile irradiating his fine ascetic face glowing like that of a saint. Behind the faded black of his old soutane I could see his treasures of blue china and ancient cabinets, and a chance light illumined a mirror behind his head, and aureoled him ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... joints, and is as a general rule fairly thin. People with this type of hand are always studious. They are great readers and usually have a strong tendency towards literature. They love sedentary work, and have a somewhat lonely, ascetic disposition. Perhaps on account of this quality they are very often found in church-life, or largely associated with religious movements. The monks of old, I mean those who compiled those wonderful manuscripts on doctrine, science, art, alchemy, and occult matters, all had this class ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... solemnity of manner and he had the lean, ascetic face of the Puritan. Ned judged that he was from one of the Northern States of New England, but Obed, a Maine ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... proposed and attempted has not been the living of the temporal life in a particular spirit, it has been the transcending of it by a special experience. Indian saints have always believed that by meditation and ascetic discipline, by abstaining from active life and all its claims, and cultivating solitude and mortification, they could reach by a direct experience union with the Infinite. This is as true of the latest as of the earliest ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... inspired it. The sacred ecstasy, the voluntary mutilations and the eagerly sought sufferings manifested an ardent longing for {51} deliverance from subjection to carnal instincts, and a fervent desire to free the soul from the bonds of matter. The ascetic tendencies went so far as to create a kind of begging monachism—the metragyrtes. They also harmonized with some of the ideas of renunciation taught by Greek philosophy, and at an early period ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... into a state either of nervous instability or irritability by ascetic practices, or of nervous insensibility by the persistent withdrawal of all outer disturbance; and the mind is fixed upon a single object,—the one God, the God eternal, absolute, indivisible. Recalling our former scheme for the conditions of the sense of personality, we shall see that we ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... feet? But things being as they are, why, Antony, what can be so sweet as thy sweet words? The harbour of his rest to the storm-tossed mariner—surely that is sweet! The dream of Heaven's bliss which cheers the poor ascetic priest on his path of sacrifice—surely that is sweet! The sight of Dawn, the rosy-fingered, coming in his promise to glad the watching Earth—surely that is sweet! But, ah! not one of these, nor all dear delightful things that are, can match the honey-sweetness of thy words to me, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... of Saint Francis of Cheylas a tall, lean man with an ascetic face, prominent cheekbones, and a nose not unlike Garnache's own—the nose of a man of action rather than of prayer—bowed gravely to this stalwart stranger, and in courteous accents begged to be informed in ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... birthday, had been, as already mentioned, appointed as a general day of rejoicing for his restoration. This had from the first given offence as well to those members of the Presbyterian Church who saw in his Majesty's return no particular cause for joy, as to those more ascetic spirits who objected on principle to all holidays. May 29th was therefore hailed as the day divinely marked, as it were, for the purpose on hand, a crowning challenge to ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... proud purity, of faith in virtue.—They were not enough, they were not enough to stay his hunger: they were only the food of a moment. His life consisted of a succession of violent reactions—leaps from one extreme to the other. Sometimes he would bend his passion to rules inhumanly ascetic: not eating, drinking water, wearing himself out with walking, heavy tasks, and so not sleeping, denying himself every sort of pleasure. Sometimes he would persuade himself that strength is the true ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... and desire as truly as ever did medieval monk or oriental ascetic, and thus gave what was essential in their surroundings, a practical proof of their sincerity. The result was almost startling. Their Yankee audience first ridiculed them as dreamers; but when they found that what the transcendentalists actually recommended to them was ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... Malak, taught its devotees to hasten the advent of the Messiah by doing penance for the sins of Israel. They were so firmly convinced of the efficacy of fasts and prayers that they went to Jerusalem by hundreds to witness the impending redemption (ab. 1706). But the ascetic Hasidim and the epicurean Frankists were alike doomed to disappear or to be swallowed up by a new Hasidism, combining the teachings and aspirations of both, the sect founded by Israel Baal Shem, or Besht (ab. 1698-1759), and fully developed ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... white hair combed straight down on each side of his face, and an iron-grey hue of complexion; where the lines, or rather, as Quin said of Macklin, the cordage, of his countenance were so sternly adapted to a devotional and even ascetic expression, that they left no room for any indication of reckless daring or sly dissimulation. In short, Trumbull appeared a perfect specimen of the rigid old Covenanter, who said only what he thought right, acted on no other principle but that of duty, and, if he ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... at best, was provincial, local, distorted. His Christ is the Christ of morbid Seminarists and ascetic undergraduates; not the Christ that Leonardo da Vinci saw breaking bread with his disciples; not the Christ that Paolo Veronese saw moving among the crowds of the street like a ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... psalm-singer of the blockhouse. His name was Xerxes Alexander Anxley, and he was unceremoniously called by the community "X," and by Mivane "the unknown quantity," for he was something of an enigma, and his predilections provoked much speculation. He was a religionist of ascetic, extreme views,—a type rare in this region,—coming originally from the colony of the ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... than he was to the grave, thin, stooping ascetic in a long coat, that she had expected. He was a tall, well-made man, of the same youthful cast of figure as his nephew, and a far lighter and more springy step, with features and colouring recalling those of his niece, as did the bright sunny playful sweetness of his manner; his dark handsome ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... all these cases a physical sexual attraction is recognized as the basis of the relation, but as a matter of feeling, and partly also of theory, the ascetic ideal is adopted. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... taking on a new activity, by turning from questions of ceremony and church government to questions of morals. The Puritans always stood for greater earnestness and for the abolition of abuses in the church, but as time passed on they brought into greater prominence the ascetic ideal of life; the strict keeping of the Sabbath borrowed from the Jewish ritual became customary; [Footnote: Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, 123-132.] prevailing immoralities and extravagances were more bitterly reprobated in books, sermons, and parliamentary ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... of all graces! fourfold wonder Of wit and beauty, love and wisdom! Canst thou Beatify the ascetic's savagery To heavenly prudence? Horror melts to pity, And pity kindles to adoring shower Of radiant tears! Thou tender cruelty! Gay smiling martyrdom! Shall I forbid thee? Limit thy depth by mine own shallowness? ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... the White Lodge.[FN8: Terms while and black as used here have no relation to race or colour.] Of the disciples of the black and white magicians, the disciple of the black magician is often the more ascetic. His object is not the purification of life for the sake of humanity, but the purification of the vehicle, that he may be better able to acquire power. The difference between the white and the black ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... and to spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with the knowledge of the great fundamental truths of Nature and the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions have been trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; one who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to esteem others ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... monasteries unintentionally began to preserve and use the ancient Roman books, and from using them at first as models for style, an interest in their contents was later awakened. While many of the monasteries remained as farming, charitable, and ascetic institutions almost exclusively, and were never noted for their educational work, a small but increasing number gradually accumulated libraries and became celebrated for their literary activity and for the character of their instruction. The monasteries thus in time became the storehouses ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... dozen or so people in the church, but this made no difference. The priest would not feel slighted, as an Anglican curate might. He had a serious ascetic face, and seemed not to know that any was present ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... labor; a strange, grave, quaint, ascetic, rigorous life. It seems a mystery how the Reverend Joshua Moody could have survived to write four thousand sermons, but it is no mystery why the Reverend John Mitchell was called "a truly aged young man" at thirty,—especially ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his enlightenment, it is said that Gautama was seized by the temptation to enter at once into Nirvana, without proclaiming his doctrine to the world. But putting the temptation from him, he began his ministry by announcing the tidings of release to the companions of his ascetic life, who, after scoffing for awhile, were at length convinced. In the course of this, his first sermon, Buddha proceeded to enunciate the eight steps on the path which leads to Nirvana—(i) Right faith, (ii) right resolution, (iii) right speech, (iv) right action, (v) right living, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... deadening monotony of "plain" food. Chicken or mutton, beef or venison, finnan haddie or brook trout, eggs or oysters thus "sauced," taste all alike—sauce! To use such ready-made sauces with dishes cooked a l'anglaise is logical, excusable, almost advisable. Even the most ascetic of men cannot resist the insidiousness of spicy delights, nor can he for any length of time endure the insipidity of plain food sans sauce. Hence the popularity of such sauces amongst people who do not observe the correct culinary principle of seasoning food judiciously, befitting its character, ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... the few, very few, translators that have shown any apprehension of the unsmiling gravity which is the essence of Quixotic humour; it seemed to him a crime to bring Cervantes forward smirking and grinning at his own good things, and to this may be attributed in a great measure the ascetic abstinence from everything savouring of liveliness which is the characteristic of his translation. In most modern editions, it should be observed, his style has been smoothed and smartened, but without any reference to the original Spanish, so that if he has been ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... with youthful pain at the glance of your eyes, the ascetic lays the fruit of his austerities at your feet, the songs of poets hum and swarm round the perfume of your presence. Your feet, as in careless joy they flit on, wound even the heart of the hollow wind with the tinkle of ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... Galava. Janghabandhu, Raibhya, Kopavega, and Bhrigu: Harivabhru, Kaundinya, Vabhrumali, and Sanatana, Kakshivat, and Ashija, Nachiketa, and Aushija, Nachiketa, and Gautama; Painga, Varaha, Sunaka, and Sandilya of great ascetic merit: Kukkura, Venujangha, Kalapa and Katha;—these virtuous and learned Munis with senses and souls under complete control, and many others as numerous, all well-skilled in the Vedas and Vedangas and conversant with (rules of) morality and pure and spotless in behaviour, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... that Buddhism has owed nothing to State influence. It represents certain doctrines of the ancient Indian theosophy, incarnate, as one might say, in the figure of a spiritual Master, the Indian prince, Sakya Gautama, who was the type and example of ascetic quietism; it embodies the idea of salvation, or emancipation attainable by man's own efforts, without aid from priests or divinities. Buddhism is the earliest, by many centuries, of the faiths that claim descent ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Chandrapal had been engaged in the practice of the law, and had held a position of some honour under the Crown. But as the years wore on the ties which bound him to the world of sense were severed one by one, and he was now released. By the study of the Vedanta, by ascetic discipline, and by the daily practice of meditation undertaken at regular hours, he had attained the Great Peace; and those who knew the signs of such attainment reverenced him as a holy man. His influence was great, his fidelity was unquestioned, and his fame as a teacher ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... unjust the opinion he had formed of her; but still he could not help remembering the terrible child he had known once, at times wild as a hurricane, at others pensive and wrapped in gloomy reserve; he tried to imagine her such as she had been described to him since; tall, handsome, ascetic; then he fancied her suddenly casting her vail to the winds, like one of the fantastic nuns in "Robert le Diable," and returning swift-footed into the world; of all these various impressions he composed, ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... branched dead trees form a hedge around the house, and on one side, on a sort of shelf, hang hundreds of boars' jaws with curved tusks. Inside, there are a few fireplaces, simple holes in the ground, and a number of primitive stretchers of parallel bamboos, couches that the most ascetic of whites would disdain. Among the beams of the roof hang all kinds of curiosities: dancing-masks and sticks, rare fish, pigs' jaws, bones, old weapons, amulets and so on, everything covered with a thick layer of soot from the ever-smouldering fires. These ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... myself who had just left school, was quite inexperienced in all worldly matters, and particularly in the chapter of women, but in whom he detected good abilities and a very strained idealism, he affected ascetic habits. With other companions he showed himself the intensely reckless and dissipated rich man's son he was; indeed, he amused himself by introducing some of the most inoffensive and foolish of them into the wretched ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... the one in which he attains his highest flight: the composition is balanced and distributed with infinite art. The upper portion, which is arched, represents Paradise, Glory, as the Spanish say in their ascetic language: garlands of angels floating and submerged in a wave of light of uncalculable depth, stars scintillating in the flame, and brighter glints of the everlasting light form the aureole of the Father, who arrives from ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... troop of cooks; people bearing baskets of flowers for the altars; some bathing the gods, some ringing bells, chattering, pounding sandal-wood, cooking; men and women servants bearing water, cleaning floors, washing rice, quarrelling with the cooks. In the guest-house an ascetic, with ash-smeared, loose hair, is lying sleeping; one with upraised arm (stiffened thus through years) is distributing drugs and charms to the servants of the house; a white-bearded, red-robed Brahmachari, swinging his chaplet of beads, is reading from a manuscript copy of ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... along the side of the highway on a strip of waste land. There were no tents; but there were four or five miserable little caravans, roofed over with tattered and dirty canvas. They were tents on wheels. Some thin and ascetic-looking old mules and wizen donkeys had been taken out of the shafts, and were now nibbling the short wayside grass, the young burdocks and mulleins, which, but for the rain, would have filled their mouths with dust. Small portable ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... suppose there is practically only one Religion which would be in the least likely to appeal to a modern philosophical student of Religion as a possible alternative to Christianity—and that is Buddhism. But Buddhist Ethics are not the same as Christian Ethics. Buddhist Ethics are ascetic: the Christianity which Christ taught was anti-ascetic. In its view of the future, Buddhism is pessimistic; Christianity is optimistic. Much as {151} Buddhism has done to inculcate Humanity and Charity, the principle ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... "And how untrue! Naturally ascetic, but for the insistence of my physicians, I should long ago have let my hair grow and subsisted entirely on locusts and motionless lemonade. But a harsh Fate ruled otherwise. Excuse me, but I think that that there basket or ark in which the comfort is enshrined ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... houses, and amusements were subjects on which he expended a large amount of silent enthusiasm. But, for all this, he could still see much to admire—perhaps to envy—in Robert's more spiritual mind, and he dreaded—as men often do dread in such cases—the effect of a woman's companionship on so ascetic a character. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... acceptation of the term. He disdained all cant and clap-trap. He preached Church principles with commanding eloquence, and he practised them with unceasing devotion. His church was always open, yet his schools were never neglected; there was a perfect choir, a staff of disciplined curates, young and ascetic, while sacred sisters, some of patrician blood, fearless and prepared for martyrdom, were gliding about all the back slums of his ferocious neighbourhood. How came the Whigs to give such a church to such a person? There must have been some mistake. But how came ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... Exercise of Ethics is a fine defence of that training of the heart and mind which has no affinity with the morbid discipline of hair shirt and scourge. "The ascetic exercise of the monasteries," he says, "inspired by superstitious fear and the hypocritical disesteem of a man's own self, sets to work with self-reproaches, whimpering compunction and a torturing of the body. It is intended not to result in virtue but to make expiation ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... our Lord not as a severe ascetic but as a man of human sympathies and social instincts, mingling freely with his fellow men, worshiping with them in their synagogues and eating with them in their homes. No domestic scene in the life of our Lord is sketched with more detail than that of the Sabbath feast in the ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... disposed to do was to turn himself into a young modern ascetic, prick his legs well in going through the furze, and then take a little bark off his shins in climbing twenty feet up on to the great monolith, and there sit ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... were celebrated, and justly so. At her receptions one always heard the best singers and players of the season, and Epicurus' soul could rest in peace, for her chef had an international reputation. Oh, remember, you music-fed ascetic, many, aye, very many, regard the transition from Tschaikowsky to terrapin, from Beethoven to burgundy with hearts aflame with anticipatory joy—and Mrs. Llewellyn's dining-room ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... man's ascetic face relaxed a little. "You are a good fellow, Harrison, and I'm sure I wish you any strange sort of success ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... Does she command, or haply implore? Does this prodigious emotion issue from her, or is she its victim? Such knowledge as we possess of the general psychology of the bee warrants the belief that the swarming always takes place against the old sovereign's will. For indeed the ascetic workers, her daughters, regard the queen above all as the organ of love, indispensable, certainly, and sacred, but in herself somewhat unconscious, and often of feeble mind. They treat her like a mother in her dotage. Their respect for her, their tenderness, is heroic and boundless. The purest ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... "possibly there were a few other wise men in that company besides ourselves. Who would have known from your appearance as you sat there gorging with the rest, that you were inwardly protesting, and greatly preferred the simple life? Don't flatter yourself that you had the aspect of an ascetic. There were moments during that meal when any unprejudiced observer who didn't know you would have sworn that you were deeply gratified that no other engagement had prevented you from dining in your ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... the hedonism of the sophists and rhetoricians of antiquity, of the sensualists of the eighteenth and second half of the nineteenth centuries; the moralistic hedonism of Aristophanes and the Stoics, of the Roman eclectics, of the writers of the Middle Age and of the Renaissance; the ascetic and logical hedonism of Plato and the Fathers of the Church; the aesthetic mysticism of Plotinus, reborn to its greatest triumphs, during the classic period of ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... partialities, whims, or superstitions of His countrymen. He inculcated a theological system for which He could not expect the support of any of the existing classes of religionists. He differed from the Essenes, as He did not adopt their ascetic habits; He displeased the Sadducees, by asserting the doctrine of the resurrection; He provoked the Pharisees, by declaring that they worshipped God in vain, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men; and He incurred the hostility of the whole tribe of Jewish zealots, by maintaining His ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... a pace, like one pricked in conscience, and the paleness of his ascetic features took a deadly hue. His lips moved as if he would have spoken, but the sounds were smothered by an oppression that denied him utterance. The gentle Florinda saw his distress, and she endeavored to interpose between the impetuous ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... much is known, and that chiefly from its enemies. Catholic and Orthodox alike regarded the heresy with horror. But even its enemies allowed the Bogumils to have been an ascetic and temperate people. They abhorred the use of ikons and images, and unless the subterranean chapel at Jaitza be one, have left no church. Their doctrines spread into west Europe, and by the end of the twelfth century had developed in France into the sect of the Albigenses which was suppressed ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... therefore, from the contumely which vulgar minds are always ready to bestow upon saints and mystics who sit aloof from them, high enthroned amidst the truths and solemnities of God. The secluded and ascetic life of most scholars, highly favorable as it undoubtedly is to contemplation and internal development, has likewise its disadvantages, and puts them, as being undisciplined in the ways of life, at great odds, when they come to the actual and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... of this chronicle the ascetic sternness of the old Norman castles had been humanized and refined so that the new dwellings of the nobility, if less imposing in appearance, were much more comfortable as places of residence. A gentle race had built their houses rather for peace than for war. He who compares ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Bagrees issued from their tents having suddenly become canonised, metamorphosed from highwaymen to devout yogis, their bodies, looking curiously lean and ascetic, now clothed largely ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... Mohammed Ibn Sabih, surnamed Ibn es Semmak (son of the fishmonger), a well-known Cufan jurisconsult and ascetic of the time. He passed the latter part of his life at Baghdad and enjoyed high favour with Er Reshid, as the only theological authority whom the latter could induce to promise ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... The high saint cursed the hermitage. This was the grove—most lovely then— Of Gautam, O thou best of men, Like heaven itself, most honoured by The Gods who dwell above the sky. Here with Ahalya at his side His fervid task the ascetic plied. Years fled in thousands. On a day It chanced the saint had gone away, When Town-destroying Indra came, And saw the beauty of the dame. The sage's form the God endued, And thus the fair Ahalya wooed: "Love, sweet! should brook no dull delay ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... informed that the language-master had gone to his dinner at a neighbouring restaurant. Mr. Mool waited at the lodgings, and sent a note to Baccani. In ten minutes more he found himself in the presence of an elderly man, of ascetic appearance; whose looks and tones showed him to be apt to take offence on small provocation, and more than half ready to suspect an eminent solicitor of being ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... the historical account of this poet is a mythical one which, even within the early post-classical period, began to gain credence. The reasons of it are to be sought not so much in his poetical genius as in the almost ascetic purity of his life, which surrounded him with a halo of mysterious sanctity. Prodigies are said, in the lives that have come down to us, to have happened at his birth; his mother dreamt she gave birth to a laurel-branch, ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Baroness de Ruysch spent yesterday with us. They are an estimable couple, and very pleasant withal. His philosophy, which has nothing of the ascetic in it, harmonises very well with her vivacity, and her sprightliness never degenerates into levity. It is the gaiety of a mind at ease, pleased with others, and content with self. How unlike the exuberant ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... from so great a saint, it seems almost a profanity—certainly a bathos—to add any more secular touches. Yet, if the portrait is even to approach completeness, it must be remembered that we are not describing an ascetic or a recluse, but the most polished gentleman, the most fascinating companion, the most graceful and attractive figure, in the Vanity Fair of social life. He is full of ardour, zeal, and emotion, endowed with a physical activity which corresponds to his mental alertness, and young ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... held rigid Presbyterian views. From this time dates his friendship with Robert Leighton (1611-1684), who greatly influenced his religious opinions. Leighton had, during a stay in the Spanish Netherlands, assimilated something of the ascetic and pietistic spirit of Jansenism, and was devoted to the interests of peace in the church. Burnet wisely refused to accept a benefice in the disturbed state of church affairs, but he wrote an audacious letter to Archbishop Sharp asking him to take measures to restore peace. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... men of all sorts and conditions struggled toward that light and came to our shores with an eager desire to realize it, and a hunger for it such as some of us no longer felt, for we were as if satiated and satisfied and were indulging ourselves after a fashion that did not belong to the ascetic devotion of the early devotees of those great principles. Strangers came to remind us of what we had promised ourselves and through ourselves had promised mankind. All men came to us and said, "Where ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... different matter with you or Mr. Razumihin there, your friend. Your career is an intellectual one and you won't be deterred by failure. For you, one may say, all the attractions of life nihil est—you are an ascetic, a monk, a hermit!... A book, a pen behind your ear, a learned research—that's where your spirit soars! I am the same way myself.... ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... empire, that, when she became a devotee, he became a mystic: he followed her, as the satellite accompanies the planet, from the worldly gayeties of her youth, even to the foot of the altar, and the ascetic self-denial of Port-Royal. He survived her, as though he had survived himself, and lived to the extraordinary age of one hundred and four years, animated to unusual life by his gentle and amiable feelings. Such was Madame de Sevigne's principal friend. If his name ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... and rather unwelcome consciousness that I was not doing my share toward mitigating the general load of human misery and ignorance,—a consciousness which Allie's words had only quickened into more active life. "But, girls, I assure you that I am not at all moved by the ascetic notion of taking up the most disagreeable work I can find, as a penance for former shortcomings. I wish from my heart that Matty Blair was pretty and straight and sweet, a typical little story-book pauper, whom it would be a pleasure to befriend, and who would respond amicably to ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... return to their amusements. But neither wars nor amusements are the true satisfaction of men, which is to be found only in the society of the Gods, in sacrificing to them and propitiating them. Like a Christian ascetic, Plato seems to suppose that life should be passed wholly in the enjoyment of divine things. And after meditating in amazement on the sadness and unreality of the world, he adds, in a sort of parenthesis, ...
— Laws • Plato
... fled into the desert, that young Hindoo rajah, whom men call Buddha now, had fled into the forest, leaving wives and kingdom, to find rest for his soul. He denounced caste; he preached poverty, asceticism, self-annihilation. He founded a religion, like that of the old hermits, democratic and ascetic, with its convents, saint- worships, pilgrimages, miraculous relics, rosaries, and much more, which strangely anticipates the monastic religion; and his followers, to this day, are more numerous than those of ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... attempts to bring about the death of the Buddha (Vinaya Texts, iii. 241-250; J[a]taka, vi. 131), shortly afterwards, relying upon the feeling of the people in favour of asceticism, he brought forward four propositions for ascetic rules to be imposed on the order. These being refused, he appealed to the people, started an order of his own, and gained over 500 of the Buddha's community to join in the secession. We hear nothing further about the success or otherwise of the new order, but it may possibly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the director of M. Flaminio Corner, an old senator, and then a State Inquisitor. This statesman was a famous man of letters, a great politician, highly religious, and author of several pious and ascetic works written in Latin. His ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... that period, and to abolish the old law by substituting his own. But to his great mortification many of the monks undertook to demonstrate the contrary; and this disappointment, combined with his love of power and his impatience under the restraints of an ascetic life, quickly disabused him of his imaginary godhead, and drove him back to his palace and his harem. The king of Siam "is venerated equally with a divinity. His subjects ought not to look him in the face; they prostrate themselves before him when he passes, and ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... in detail his devious and criminal work, one brief tale will explain how his revolutionary activities were brought quickly to an end. There was in Moscow, so the story runs, a gentle, kindly, and influential member of Nechayeff's society. Of ascetic disposition, this Iwanof spent much of his time in freely educating the peasants and in assisting the poorer students. He starved himself to establish cheap eating houses, which became the centers of the revolutionary ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... down into a flagged room like a cellar—cold, ascetic and bare. There was a big open fire-place, with a chimney hooded by massive masonry and blackened by the fires of immemorial winters. This was where Joan's parents had lived. She had probably been born here. The picture ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... chief embellishments being some old pictures in black frames, and a number of hunting, shooting, and racing prints, with red tape round them to serve the purpose of frames; while the library so-called was worthy of being the habitation of an ascetic monk, though two of the walls were covered with book-shelves which contained but few books, and they served chiefly to enable countless spiders to form their traps for unwary flies, while a table covered with green cloth and three wooden ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... unrugged floor as the fitting circumstance of "plain living and high thinking." It is always open to character and intellect to perceive and to assert their essential superiority. Why should Socrates heed Sardanapalus? Why indeed? But the average young man at college is not an ascetic, nor a devotee, nor an absorbed student unmindful of cold and heat, and disdainful of elegance and ease and the nameless magic of social accomplishment and grace. He is a youth peculiarly susceptible to the very influence ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change. And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... without wings," said a woman of genius, "that exhales its calm melancholy plaint on the shores whence vessels depart, and where only shivered remnants return;" the melancholy of an Obermann, whose goodness and almost ascetic virtues are palsied for want of equilibrium, and whose discouragement and ennui were only calculated to exercise a baneful influence over the individual, and over humanity? No; the striking characteristics that exist in all these sorts of melancholy are utterly wanting to Lord Byron's. His was ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... had the darker malady. She fasted regularly on Fridays and Tuesdays. We always recognized her jours maigres by the quantity of cakes and pastry we saw carried to her room just before dinner, to which dinner she came in nun-like gray silk, saintly coiffure, with ascetic pallor on cheeks wont to bloom with roses de Ninon, to dine, a la Sainte Catherine or Sainte Something else, on a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... self-renunciation. Angelo's descendants were still living in Assisi in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Whether they shared their ancestor's contemptuous opinion of the Saint has not been recorded; but it seems probable that the homage of the world, rendered to the poor ascetic for several centuries, may have made some impression on their minds, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... upwards, lay an irresistible bait for such as have once tasted of their philosophy." The ideas which the sect cherished were popular in a certain part of Greco-Roman society, which, sated with the luxury of the age, turned to the ascetic life and to the pursuit of mysticism. Pliny the Elder, who was on the staff of Titus at Jerusalem, appears to have been especially interested in the Jewish communists, and briefly described their doctrines in his books; and the circle for whom Josephus wrote would have been glad ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... and give them a living message has not yet entered them; the refined grace, the sweet solemnity of these simple buildings, has no voice for the plain, sensible villager; it cannot be interpreted to him. If all the inhabitants of a village were humble, simple, spiritually minded people, ascetic in life, with a strong sense of beauty and quality, then a village church might have a tranquil and inspiring influence. But who that knows anything of village life can anticipate even in the remote future such a type of character ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Father Gray more than did the little old housekeeper of Hurricane Hall, and as her table and her accommodations were the best on the camp ground, she often invited and pressed good Father Gray to rest and refresh himself in her tent. And the old man, though a severe ascetic, yielded to her repeated solicitations, until at length he seemed ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... horse, cut off his beautiful hair with his sword, put on the yellow dress of an ascetic, and giving his ornaments and horse to Channa, ordered him to take them back to his father, ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... moment she lay in his arms. She felt the soft burning of his kisses, the call of the room with its intoxicating, yet strangely ascetic perfume, the room to which all the time he seemed to be gently leading her. And then a flood of strange, alien recollections and realisations seemed to bring her from a better place back to a worse,—the sound of a passing taxicab, the distant booming of ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... followed by a collection of short stories, Tristan (1903), from which we have selected Tonio Kroeger. A tragedy of the Renaissance, Fiorenza (1905), develops the dualism between real life and artistic existence, between the proud joy of living and ascetic hostility to life, in two brothers of the house of Medici, Lorenzo and Girolamo, who are suitors for the hand of one and the same woman. The following novel, His Royal Highness (1909), shows how a prince, educated in aloofness from life, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... gray-clad figure is beating a braided rug; a boy in homespun, with his hair slightly long in the back and cut in a straight line across the forehead, is carrying milk-cans from the dairy to one of the Sisters' Houses. Men in broad-brimmed hats, with clean-shaven, ascetic faces, are ploughing or harrowing here and there in the fields, while a group of Sisters is busy setting out plants and vines in some beds near a cluster of noble trees. That cluster of trees, did the eye of the stranger realize it, was the very starting-point of this Shaker ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... returned Rastignac without laughing. 'Possibly in your place I might plunge into the unspeakable delights of that ascetic course; it possesses the merits of novelty and originality, and it is not very expensive. Your Monna Lisa is sweet, but inane as music for the ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... is one thing among all these quasi-ascetic sects that has ever been in advance of the great mass of humanity from which they are detached parts: they have given woman her rights; whereas, the mass has always prated, and does yet, mentioning it ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... indifferent in the matter of eating and drinking, and when she was making as much as from 500 to 900 pounds by a new play, in order to save a trifle she would sit in the depth of winter without a fire. Only fancy any of our later lady-novelists thus ascetic and self-denying. The idea is absurd. She was to the last what Godwin described her, a mixture of lady and milkmaid. And yet the lady had ambition. She had an idea that she might be Lady Bunbury. However, she marred her chance, at the same time ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... more than any other writer of his time to establish certain latent tendencies as characteristics of the Catholic spirit. His pleading in favour of ascetic life and of virginity, that entirely Christian virtue, was very influential. He lauds the virgin above the wife, and, indeed, he goes so far as to tell parents that they can obtain pardon of their sins by offering their daughters to God. His teaching in this ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... elsewhere, approaches in the slightest degree to their power), the St. Barbara and St. Elizabeth.[27] I do not know among the pictures of the great sacred schools any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically expressive of the need of the heart that conceived them. Not ascetic, nor quaint, nor feverishly or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities of thought. Only entirely true—entirely pure. No depth of glowing heaven beyond them—but the clear sharp sweetness of the northern air: no splendor of rich color, striving to ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... that would not be quiet. There was just a little mocking smile on her lips, just a little gleam of laughing eyes under her drooping lashes, for she could not help watching my face for admiration. In such an attitude the tempting little witch might have made the tepid blood of an ascetic boil. ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... the peculiarities of Theodora. There was something about her which seemed to wither up all low or vicious things. It was not that she filled people with ascetic thoughts of saints and angels and their mother in heaven, only she seemed suddenly to enhance simple joys with beauty ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... example of a scene imposed by the logic of the theme. On the other hand, in Mr. Henry Arthur Jones's finely conceived, though unequal, play, Michael and his Lost Angel, we miss what was surely an obligatory scene. The play is in fact a contest between the paganism of Audrie Lesden and the ascetic, sacerdotal idealism of Michael Feversham. In the second act, paganism snatches a momentary victory; and we confidently expect, in the third act, a set and strenuous effort on Audrie's part to break down in theory the ascetic ideal which has collapsed in practice. It is probable enough that ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... had regained their former spirits. "Where shall I take you?" said the stranger quietly. There was a hurried whispering; and then Kate said boldly, "To the Institute." They drove silently up the hill, until the long, ascetic building loomed up before them. The stranger reined up suddenly. "You know the way better than I," he said. "Where do you go in?"—"Through the back-window," said Kate with sudden and appalling frankness. "I see!" responded their strange driver quietly, and, alighting quickly, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... fair-faced boy abode in the place, * Moon of breakfast-fte he lit by his face,[FN381] Lo! there came a Shaykh with leisurely pace * A reverend trusting to Allah's grace, And ascetic signals his gait display'd. He had studied Love both by day and night * And had special knowledge of Wrong and Right; Both for lad and lass had repined his sprite, * And his form like toothpick was lean and slight, And old bones with faded skin ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... startled at the face and appearance of the man who came upon their boat. They had never thought of encountering such a figure in the wilderness. He was of middle age, tall, well-built, and remarkably straight, but his shaven face was thin and ascetic, and the look in his eyes was one of extraordinary benevolence. Moreover, it had the peculiar quality of seeming to gaze far into the future, as it were, at something glorious and beautiful. His dress was a strange mixture. He wore deerskin leggins and moccasins, but his ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... desires, and tastes have their continued existence, and need vigilant and wise control, so that he has always work to do, a warfare to wage; and as conflict with the elements gives vigor to the body, so does conflict with the body add strength continually to the moral nature. The ascetic may have a hard struggle at the outset; but his aim is to extirpate his imagined enemies in the bodily affections, and when these are completely mortified, or put to death, there remains no more for him to do, and moral idleness and lethargy ensue. Simon Stylites, who spent thirty-seven ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who happened to call, saw us at table, and stayed to have some dessert with us. She has often told me afterwards how calm and serene the Duchess looked. One would never have thought she was about to quit a brilliant Court for the hair shirt of the ascetic, and all the death-in-life of a convent. I grieved for her, I wept for her, and I got her a grand gentleman ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... not the dervis, or the monk, but the lover, has in his heart the spirit which makes the ascetic and the saint; and certainly not their cowls and mummeries, but her glances, can impart to him the fire and virtue needful for such self-denial. Wrong shall not be wrong to Hafiz, for the name's sake. A law or statute is to him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... a Messiah of divine origin, but born on earth. He appeared long ago as a teacher and prophet, taught them picture-writing, healing, etc.; gave them the corn plant and pipe; he was an ascetic; told them of the Isles of the Blessed and promised to come again. In Mexico Quetzalcohuatl was a similar divine visitor, prophet ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... but all alike composed of pure, wholesome ingredients, guaranteed free from such deleterious substances or adulterants as yeast, chemicals, artificial colouring matter, mineral salt, &c. The variety of biscuits and cakes ranges from the plainest sorts, to suit the dyspeptic or ascetic, to the most delectable dainties for afternoon tea, not forgetting Oaten Shortcakes to specially delight the "Canny Scot." Nor need any one be at a loss to obtain supplies, for, besides the various Health Food Depots mentioned (see ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... care about ruin? I am ruined. They have got her, and her mind will be poisoned. She will get the abominable ascetic mind. The pleasure of the flesh transferred! What is legitimate and beautiful in the body put into the mind, the mind sullied by passions that do not belong to the mind. That is what papistry is! They will poison that pure, beautiful woman's ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... relishing this ascetic prospect] Hm! [He rises]. Ah, well: you must come and tell my wife and my young people all about it; and you will bring your daughter with you, of course. [He shakes hands with Savvy]. Goodbye. [He shakes hands with Franklyn]. Goodbye, ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... witnessed within the life of one individual. For instance, Leo Tolstoy, a great and good man, at one time a sensualist, has now turned ascetic; a common evolution in the lives of the saints. But excellent as this man is, there is yet a grave imperfection in his cosmos which to a degree vitiates the truth he desires to teach: he leaves the element of beauty out of ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... English. The coincidence of the two churches being dedicated to the same saint doubtless helped the growth of the unjust fable. But in an age of great women, in the times of Lucrezia Borgia, great and bad, of Catherine Sforza, great and warlike, Vittoria Colonna was great and good; and the ascetic Michelangelo, discovering in her the realization of an ideal, laid at her feet the homage of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Seneca without much difficulty to 'dine better', and the doctrines of Pythagoras were soon displaced by the more fashionable teaching of the Stoics. From the lips of Attalus[142] he learned all the principles of that ascetic school. 'I besieged his class-room,' he writes; 'I was the first to come, the last to go; I would waylay him when out walking and lead him to discuss serious problems.' Whether he denounced vice and luxury, or extolled ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... hair and lank fleshless limbs shook his body violently to and fro while he vociferated the sentences of the Mishnah in the traditional argumentative singsong. Near the central raised platform was a group of enthusiasts, among whom Froom Karlkammer, with his thin ascetic body and the mass of red hair that crowned his head like the light of a pharos, was a ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... time of Ethelbald, King of Mercians, a young noble named Guthlac, weary of life's rough way, sought peace in the ascetic life. He drifted in a boat to Crowland Isle, and there lived a hermit's life till his death in 817. On the spot where he died Ethelbald founded and endowed a monastery on the island, and it flourished exceedingly. The larger part of the conventual church is now destroyed, ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... island of the Bass, as stated by Boece, Leslie, Dempster,[117] etc., and, as we know with more certainty from a poem written—upwards now of one thousand years ago—by a native of this country, the celebrated Alcuin.[118] The followers of the order of St. Columba who desired to follow a more ascetic life than that which the society of his religious houses and monasteries afforded to its ordinary members, sometimes withdrew (observes Dr. Reeves[120]) to a solitary place in the neighbourhood of the monastery, where they enjoyed undisturbed meditation, without breaking the fraternal bond. Such, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... rheumatic, there were two funerals on wet and windy days, and when Mr. Audley, on Lady Price's entreating summons, wrenched himself from a murmuring home, and, starting by an early train, arrived half through the St. Michael's Day Service, it was to see Mr. Underwood looking indeed like some ethereal ascetic saint, with his bright eyes and wasted features, and to hear him preach in extempore—as was his custom—a sermon on the blessedness of angel helps, which in its intense fervour, almost rapture, was to many as if it came from a white-winged angel ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... throughout the long day, and he went early in the semi-light and sat before the holy man. The dusk darkened, and a new moon rose, but Gobind did not rise to mere physical consciousness that night, though Bedient sat very still before him for hours. The bony knees of the old ascetic, covered with dust, were moveless as the black roots of the camphor-tree; and a dog of the village sat afar off on his haunches and whined at intervals, waiting for the white man to go, that he might have the untouched supper, which a woman of Preshbend ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... main trend of the coast-line. It faces east, turning its back upon the little town—built on the site of a Roman colonial city, originally named in honour of the pagan Emperor rather than the Christian Confessor and ascetic. Mediaeval piety bestowed on it the saintly prefix, along with a round-arched cathedral church, of no great size, but massive ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... at this moment of defeat that Pius the Fifth mounted the Papal throne. His earlier life had been that of an Inquisitor; and he combined the ruthlessness of a persecutor with the ascetic devotion of a saint. Pius had but one end, that of reconquering Christendom, of restoring the rebel nations to the fold of the Church, and of stamping out heresy by fire and sword. To his fiery faith every means of warfare seemed hallowed by the sanctity of his cause. The ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... It reads thus: 'After a variety of vicissitudes, she had embraced the Romish faith: that religion which relieves from all personal responsibility in spiritual matters; and which teaches that earthly penance and ascetic observances will open the gates of heaven to the vilest of criminals.' We have studied Westminster, Episcopal, and Catholic catechisms, the teachings in all three of which are that faith in Christ and sorrow for and renunciation of sin alone can open the gates of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "And the young Greek brigand who stole my hat at the door is going to get a dollar! That, as our ascetic and honorable friend Goble would say, is the sort of little ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... real purpose of life; hence it condemns suicide as thwarting this end, while the ancients, from a lower point of view, approved of it, nay, honoured it. This argument against suicide is nevertheless ascetic, and only holds good from a much higher ethical standpoint than has ever been taken by moral philosophers in Europe. But if we come down from that very high standpoint, there is no longer a valid moral reason for condemning suicide. The extraordinarily active ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... reward and retribution, seemed fully to account for man's sufferings. These views together explain the avoidance as food by the Cathari of everything which was the result of animal propagation, and also the severity of the ascetic practices which were ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... compare our illustration with Titian's Christ of the Tribute Money[21] we shall see how closely the former imitates the latter. Yet, as no man of imagination can copy exactly another's work, Van Dyck's ideal of Christ is less ascetic than Titian's and somewhat more benign. In both pictures the pure countenance of the Saviour is sharply contrasted with the coarse ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... brilliant mathematician; yet he shrank from a consideration of the theory of Copernicus: it was more important, he declared, to think of the immortal soul. In the last years of his short life he sank into a torpor of superstition—ascetic, self-mortified, and rapt in a strange exaltation, like a medieval monk. Thus there is a tragic antithesis in his character—an unresolved discord which shows itself again and again in his Pensees. 'Condition de l'homme,' he notes, 'inconstance, ennui, inquietude.' It is the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... when suddenly round a bend in the path but a few paces from them came a body of soldiers and attendants, headed by a man clad in a white robe and walking with a staff. This man was grey-headed and keen-eyed, thin in face and ascetic in appearance, with a brow of power and a bearing of dignity. At the sight of the pair he halted, looking at them in question, ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... hearts, who unites the magic of talismans with loveliness transcending that of the peris! When she bent the soft arch of her eyebrows, she pierced the heart through and through with the arrows of her eyelashes; and when she smiled, the heart of the most rigid ascetic was intoxicated! She was gorgeously arrayed, and covered all over with jewels—and the tout-ensemble of her appearance was such as would have riveted the gaze of the inhabitants of the spheres—what, then, more can a mere ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... south-east of the city. They may be reached by taking the first turning to the right hand after crossing the bridge on the way from the city down Holywell Hill. This nunnery was founded by Geoffrey of Gorham, sixteenth Abbot, about the middle of the twelfth century. Two women, pious and ascetic, had taken up their abode on this spot in a hut which they built for themselves, and Geoffrey determined to build them a more permanent dwelling, and make them the nucleus of a religious house. They accepted the Benedictine Rule, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... Ozen[i] to the Greeks, and where Asoka had ruled in his youth as Viceroy of Western India. It owes its birth to the gods themselves. When Uma wedded Shiva her father slighted him, not knowing who he was, for the mighty god had wooed and won her under the disguise of a mere ascetic mendicant, and she made atonement by casting herself into the sacrificial fire, which consumed her—the prototype of all pious Hindu widows who perform Sati—in the presence of gods and Brahmans. Shiva, maddened with grief, gathered up the ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... duty, and a great destiny for man. In its strength, Margaret was enabled to do and bear, with patient fortitude, what would have crushed a soul not thus supported. Yet it is not the highest aim, for in all its forms, whether as personal improvement, the salvation of the soul, or ascetic religion, it has at its core a profound selfishness. Margaret's soul was too generous for any low form of selfishness. Too noble to become an Epicurean, too large-minded to become a modern ascetic, the defective nature of her rule of life, showed itself in her case, only in a certain supercilious ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the hand" of the author of Men and Women rather than of Tennyson. The grotesque vanity of the anchorite is so remote from us, that we can scarcely judge of the truth of the picture, though the East has still her parallels to St Simeon. From the almost, perhaps quite, incredible ascetic the poet lightly turns to "society verse" lifted up into the air of poetry, in the charm of The Talking Oak, and the happy flitting sketches of actual history; and thence to the strength and passion of Love ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... temple. Since I had joined Vanna I had begun with her help to study a little Hindustani, and with an aptitude for language could understand here and there. I caught a word or two as she spoke with him that startled me, when the high-bred ascetic face turned serenely upon her, and he addressed her as "My sister," adding a sentence beyond my learning, but which she willingly translated later.—"May He who sits above the Mysteries, ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... made the women more chaste made the knights more valorous and famous." We have here a new conception of love which has profoundly influenced life and thought ever since—love no longer a weakness as in the ancient world, or a sin as it seemed to the ascetic spirit of the Church, but a conscious source of strength, an avowed motive of heroism. And it was round Arthur and his court that the French poets of the next generation wove their romances inspired by this conception—the offspring of the union of Norman strength and ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... creeds will meet. Gentler and wiser than the theology of Buddha; more humanitarian than the laws of Brahma; more temperate than the Moslem's code of morality; with a wider grasp of power than the Romanist's authoritative Church; severely self-denying as Calvin's ascetic rule; simple and pious as Wesley's scheme of man's redemption; spiritual as Swedenborg's vast idea of heaven;—my faith will open its arms wide enough to embrace all. There need be no more dissent. The mighty circle of my free church will enclose ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... that the Cardinal was no ascetic. His hermitage contained other appliances save those for study and devotion. His retired life was, in fact, that of a voluptuary. His brother, Chantonnay, reproached him with the sumptuousness and disorder of his establishment. He lived in "good and joyous cheer." He professed to be thoroughly satisfied ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to the outward, that impassivity, has already a touch of the corpse in it; we see already Angelico and the Master of the Passion in the artistic future. The crushing of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon it, the ascetic interest, is already traceable. Those abstracted gods, "ready to melt out their essence fine into the winds," who can fold up their flesh as a garment, and still remain themselves, seem already to feel that bleak air, in which, like Helen of Troy, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Malthus? I can't tell; I wish she had: his book 's the eleventh commandment, Which says, 'Thou shalt not marry,' unless well: This he (as far as I can understand) meant. 'T is not my purpose on his views to dwell Nor canvass what so 'eminent a hand' meant; But certes it conducts to lives ascetic, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... thought turned to the fires of hell, and a night of wakefulness, common enough in his imperfect health, shook him with horrors unutterable. Being of such mind and temper, it was strange that he had not long ago joined the multitude of those who day by day fled from worldly life into ascetic seclusion; what withheld him was a spark of the ancestral spirit, some drops of the old Roman blood, prompting his human nature to assert and justify itself. Hence the sympathy between him and Basil, both being capable of patriotism, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... about some women, which overtops the best gymnosophist among men, that they suffice themselves, and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being. I declare, although the reverse of a professed ascetic, I am more obliged to women for this ideal than I should be to the majority of them, or indeed to any but one, for a spontaneous kiss. There is nothing so encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency. And when ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... increased in fuller measures of joy, heightened to fairer beauty, instinct with love in the heart of man. Wiser were the ascetics whom I used to scorn; they made themselves ascetics of the body, but I have been an ascetic of the soul." ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Joan had conducted her to her room, which she had spent infinite time and thought in arranging, the old woman remained there to rest until supper-time. Then she reappeared, and, by the signs of her worn, ascetic face, the cruel hollows about those adamant eyes, the drawn cheeks and furrowed brow, the girl realized that rest with her was not easy to achieve. She saw every sign in her now that in the old days she had learned to ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... preternatural age, of his hoarded treasures. Apart from such disputable titles to homage, there seemed no question, from all I heard, that his learning was considerable, his charities extensive, his manner of life irreproachably ascetic. He appears to have resembled those Arabian sages of the Gothic age to whom modern science is largely indebted,—a mystic enthusiast, but an earnest scholar. A wealthy and singular Englishman, long resident ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... anatomy, now that Huxley was taken from us, he had devoted his later days to the pursuit of medicine proper, to which he brought a mind stored with luminous analogies from the lower animals. His very appearance held one. Tall, thin, erect, with an ascetic profile not unlike Cardinal Manning's, he represented that abstract form of asceticism which consists in absolute self-sacrifice to a mental ideas, not that which consists in religious abnegation. Three years of travel in Africa had tanned his skin for life. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Italian scenery. Throughout, he could trace something of a humour into which Stoicism at all times tends to fall, the tendency to cry, Abase yourselves! There was here the almost inhuman impassibility of one who had thought too closely on the paradoxical aspect of the love of posthumous fame. With the ascetic pride which lurks under all Platonism, [201] resultant from its opposition of the seen to the unseen, as falsehood to truth—the imperial Stoic, like his true descendant, the hermit of the middle age, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... recalled the bygone scandals connected with his notorious and popular father and intimated with knowing nods that there were plenty of other descendants of the old Governor who were not entitled legally to bear the name; but the younger ones, who had known only the severely ascetic life and cold personality of the celebrated scholar, found it difficult to connect him with such a father. In their talk they brought to mind the man himself, his quiet shabby clothes, his big stooping frame, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
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