"Cult" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The patriotic member of Parliament, who refused in his poverty the Lord-Treasurer Danby's proffered bribe, became a character in history before the exquisite quality of his garden-poetry was recognised. There was a cult for Liberty in the middle of the eighteenth century, and Marvell's name was on the list of its professors. Wordsworth's sonnet has preserved ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... various phases which Greenwich had known. The studio-and-poverty Bohemian epoch, the labour and anarchy era, the futurist fad, the "free love" cult, the Bohemian-and-masquerade-ball period, the psychoanalysis craze; the tea-shop epidemic, the arts-and-crafts obsession, the play-acting mania; and other violent and more or less transient enthusiasms which had possessed the Village during the years he had lived there. Not wholly transient, he admitted. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... and an affectionate mother! The mixture of old and new in her—the fresh habits of growth imposed on the original plant—startle me at every turn. Her Catholicism, which resolves itself, perhaps, into the cult of a particular church and of two or three admirable and sagacious priests, seems to me one long intrigue of a comparatively harmless kind. It provides her with enemies, allies, plots, battles, and surprises. It ministers, too, to her love of colour and magnificence—a ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... machinery of the poem. He has profoundly impressed upon it the human likeness often called anthropomorphic, and which supplied the basis of Greek art. He has repelled on all sides from his classical and central system the cult of nature and of animals, but it is probable that they kept their place in the local worships of the country. His Zeus is to a considerable extent a monarch, while Poseidon and several other deities bear evident marks of having had no superior at earlier epochs or ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and members of a few other denominations outside the direct Apostolic Succession. Yet I confess I was shocked at the conversion (or perversion) of my old neighbour, McPherson, to a cult which, for want of a better word, I ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... street, bright with the lamps of the small houses, from which projected wooden balconies painted in gay colours, and with the glowing radiance of the moon, was mysterious despite its gaiety, its obvious dedication to the cult of pleasure. Alive with the shrieking sounds of music, the movement and the murmur of desert humanity made it almost solemn. This crowd of boys and men, robed in white from head to heel, preserved a serious grace in its vivacity, suggested besides a dignified ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... incessant; but the cure was a man of firm mind; their efforts to recapture his attention were futile. For the music of Charm's foreign voice was in his ear. Worship of the cloth is not a national, it is a more or less universal cult, I take it. It is in the blood of certain women. Opposite the two fussy, jealous bourgeoises, were others as importunate and aggressive. They were of fair, lean, lank English build, with the shifting ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the Elizabethans had been forced to drive in closed cars through the Nevada desert in the summertime, they might have started a cult of nudity, Malone felt. It was bad enough now, in what was supposed to ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... designed to control the social evil, we have no knowledge of them, but there is nevertheless no lack of evidence to prove that it was only too well known among them long before that happy age (Livy i, 4; ii, 18); and the peculiar story of the Bacchanalian cult which was brought to Rome by foreigners about the second century B.C. (Livy xxxix, 9-17), and the comedies of Plautus and Terence, in which the pandar and the harlot are familiar characters. Cicero, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... study of dragons impressed upon me the importance of the part played by the Great Mother, especially in her Babylonian avatar as Tiamat, in the evolution of the famous wonder-beast. Under the stimulus of Dr. Rendel Harris's Rylands Lecture on "The Cult of Aphrodite," I therefore devoted my next address (14 November, 1917) to the "Birth of Aphrodite" and a general discussion of the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... in some late texts he is said to have evolved the world from himself, his characteristic function is not to create but, like Vishnu, to save and like Vishnu he holds a lotus. But also he has the title of Isvara, which is specially applied to Siva. Thus he does not issue from any local cult and has no single mythological pedigree but is the idea of divine compassion represented with such materials as the art and mythology of ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... religion been so powerless or religions so many. Of one abandoned woman it is told as the climax of her other wickednesses that she blasphemously proclaimed her belief in one god only. Apuleius seems to have been initiated into every cult of religious mystery, and in his story he exultingly shows us the dog-faced gods of Egypt triumphing on the soil that Apollo and Athene had blessed. Here was Anubis, their messenger, and unconquered Osiris, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the sake of brevity and as roughly indicating his origin, he was called 'The Native.' He might have been the original Old Man of the Mountains, who is said to be the only authorised head of the Tea-cup Creed. Some people said that he was; but Dana Da used to smile and deny any connection with the cult; explaining that he was an ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... named, we are likely either to take this man's attitude or something approaching it, or to go to the other extreme, renounce the accuracy and precision of the scientific method, and give ourselves up to the cult of emotionalism. ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... himself face to face with a man, it might be of thirty years of age, whose complexion was dark but not unpleasant, whose eyes were frank and open, the possessor, too, of fair brown hair and of a manner not altogether free from a suspicion of that which scoffers call the "wash-hand" basin cult. ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... word-civilization than the English. Our architectural, painting, and sculptural history is concerned with men now living, or their immediate predecessors. And even such work as we have is pretty largely a cult by the wealthy. This is the more a cause for misgiving because, in a democracy, the arts, like the political parties, are not founded till they have touched the county chairman, the ward leader, the individual voter. The museums in a democracy should go as far as the public libraries. Every ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... not less difficult where the conception of God is, as it was with Jesus, entirely spiritual. The whole experience of mankind was against the idea that there could be a religion at all without priest, sacrifice, altar, temple, and the like. There is a very minimum of symbol and cult in the teaching of Jesus—so little that the ancient world thought the Christians were atheists, because they had no image, no temple, no sacrifice, no ritual, nothing that suggested religion in the ordinary sense of the word. We shall realize the difficulty of what Jesus was doing ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... having his own property stolen. The child's face became, under the forced humiliation of the apology, revolutionary, anarchistic, rebellious. He might have been the representative, the walking delegate, of some small cult of rebels against the established order of regard for the property-rights of others. The sinner, the covetous one of another's sweets, became the accuser. Just as he was going out of the door, following the pink flutter of his sister's ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... invented, and is so insufficiently advertised, that it is only to be found in a very few houses indeed, and is not a commodity in general request. The Patentees then call themselves a Church, and devote their energies to advertising the new "Cult," as they generally style it. For example, you have Esoteric Buddhism, so named because it is not Buddhism, nor Esoteric. It is imported by an American company with a manufactory in Thibet, and has had ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... in the laborious sarcophagus? Nothing; absolutely nothing! Before the fierce heat of the human furnace, the papyri smoulder away as paper smoulders under a lens in the sun. Remember Nineveh and the cult of the fir-cone, the turbaned and bearded bulls of stone, the lion hunt, the painted chambers loaded with tile books, the lore of the arrow-headed writing. What is in Assyria? There are sand, and failing rivers, and in Assyria's ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... Schalk was one of the founders of the Wagner-Verein at Vienna, and devoted his life to propagating the cult of Bruckner (who called him his "Herr Generalissimus "), and ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... one indistinguishable body of work. The pupils were competent but not gifted, yet they could turn out wood engravings not inferior to Bewick's own. And so we find that such capable technicians as Nesbit, Clennell, Robinson, Hole, the Johnsons, Harvey, and others all contributed to the Bewick cult. ...
— Why Bewick Succeeded - A Note in the History of Wood Engraving • Jacob Kainen
... envy in the heart of Lucullus; for Warrington was a man of the world, thoroughly polished; there was nothing Stoic about him (though, in the early days he had been a disciple of this cult perforce); he was ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... cult; anxious meeting, camp meeting; ebenezer, virginal. thanksgiving; giving thanks, returning thanks; grace, praise, glorification, benediction, doxology, hosanna; hallelujah, allelujah[obs3]; Te Deum[Lat], non nobis Domine[Lat], nunc dimittis[Lat]; paean; benschen[Ger]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... name is Stephen Heller, to try several times before one succeeded in meeting him. These trials ["essais"] being no more to my taste than to Heller's, I could not belong to that little congregation of faithful ones whose cult verged on fanaticism. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Christian conception of international relations. I'm afraid that for a long time to come there will be those who will want to wage war and will have to be crushed with their own weapons. But I think this insane and devilish cult of war will be a thing of the past. War will only remain as an unpleasant means to an end. The next stage will be, one hopes, the gradual realisation that the ends for which one wages war are generally ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... and her relatives to be set at liberty, while the priests and shark kahunas were requested to make offerings and invocations to Kamohoalii that his spirit might take possession of one of his hakas (mediums devoted to his cult), and so express to humanity his desires in regard to his bad son, who had presumed to eat human beings, a practice well known to ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... apply to the aforenamed Catholics whenever they enter into betrothal or matrimony with non-Catholics, baptized or not, even when they have obtained a dispensation from the obstacle of a mixed religion or of a disparity of cult; except the Holy See decrees otherwise for a certain ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... their fates are the same. One, in sacrificing herself wholly to a cult, to an unparalleled passion for honor, has by breaking the first blow of barbarous invasion probably saved Europe, just as the other, the older sister, in grief and heroism several centuries ago ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... His appointment to keep With the doe, at her call. With her following, the roe From the danger of ken Couches inly, and low, In the haunts of the glen; Ever watchful to hear, Ever active to peer, Ever deft to career,— All ear, vision, and limb. And though Cult[121] and Cuchullin, With their horses and following, Should rush to her dwelling, And our prince[122] in his trim, They might vainly aspire Without rifle and fire To ruffle or nigh her, Her mantle to dim. Stark-footed, lively, Ever capering naively With motion alive, aye, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... had believed it possible to merge themselves. The significant truths that lay behind the higher Mysteries, degraded since because forgotten and misinterpreted, trooped powerfully down into his mind. For the supreme act of this profound cult, denied by a grosser age that seeks to telephone to heaven, deeming itself thereby "advanced," lay in the union of the disciple with his god, the god he worshipped all his life, and into whose Person he slipped finally at death by a kind ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... fully satisfied that, thanks to it, man will regain his natural powers of expression, and at the same time his full motor faculties, and that art has everything to hope from new generations brought up in the cult of harmony, of physical and mental health, ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... awakened to a dazed realization of the head-way which the new idea had made. It had become a cult of the ruling-class, the esoteric religion of the state; everywhere its defenders sprang up—it seemed as if all the intellectual as well as the material power of the community was under its spell. To oppose it was not merely ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... indicates to me that a discussion and exchange of basic concept would be fruitless. I'm rather hurt that you question my integrity with the statement about the "slick, calculating, career-minded cult of Ph. Deism." Moreover, I would appreciate, if possible, the return of my ...
— On Handling the Data • M. I. Mayfield
... and long journeys, in company with his father, and could thus complete his extraordinary aesthetic education under paternal direction, without the restrictions and constraints imposed by tutors. And it was to his father that he owed his taste for everything pertaining to art, his passionate cult of the Beautiful, his paradoxical disdain of prejudice, and his ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... up a kind of cubist effect in sculpture; but you will see his things for yourself. I'd like to give him a good shaking and stand him in the corner. The poor fool can draw; made quite a name for himself at Carlo Rossi's and has a sense of color that even this crazy cult can't down. Goodness, how I am rattling on! I must fly back to my model who has rested long enough. You will come to-morrow, then? Please bring three tea cups with you," and the strange ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... to be nationalism, and to others the negation, or rather the supersession of nationalism, we mean the rather complex outcome of several distinct things. This complexity was confessed, unwittingly perhaps, in the first humanist creed: 'I believe in one Blood, one Speech, one Cult, one congruous Way of Living.'[2] Modern ethnology, indeed, tends to subsume cult under way-of-living, as a peculiarly delicate test of conformity—and to regard language, alongside of both cult and way-of-living, as another manifestation of the same ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... callings—from drapers' shops and furniture vans, from stools in the city and looms in Lancashire, from Durham pits and bishops' palaces. Whatever else the war has done, it has knocked on the head the idea that the cult of militarism is necessary to preserve the soul of courage and chivalry in a people. We, with a wholly civic tradition, have shown that in the hour of need we can draw upon an infinite reservoir of heroism, as splendid as anything in the annals ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... at the hotel, as we heard from Grady a few minutes later, and, as there was some time before the cult met, we returned to ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... cult comprised some of the most dangerous Chinese criminals, thugs, and assassins, besides a number of dangerous characters who belonged to various Chinese secret societies. At the head of this formidable organization was Long Sin, the high priest ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... himself, instead of the regularly appointed priest, offered the sacrifices upon the new altar, as he had seen Tiglath-Pileser do. To cap the climax, Ahaz introduced certain pagan religious ideas, copied from the Assyrian worship, into the cult of the Temple, simply to please ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... I. Public instruction and its three effects. II. Napoleon's Educational Instruments. III. Napoleon's machinery. VI. Objects and sentiments. V. Military preparation and the cult of the Emperor. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Complete - Linked Table of Contents to the Six Volumes • Hippolyte A. Taine
... happiness which go to the making of a saint. This influence was no doubt ethical in its character rather than religious; but it can be traced, for example, in a humane scruple which links it with Dilke's affectionate cult ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... his countrymen some noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the dark concerning him when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, and the young men whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult. No doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He was often at Pfaff's with them, and the night of my visit he was ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... undiscerning make remarks, slightly tinged with muriatic acid, concerning the ancient and honorable cult known as the Mutual Admiration Society. My firm belief is, that no man ever did or can do a great work alone—he must be backed up by the Mutual Admiration Society. It may be a very small Society—in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... corpse of a past not altogether buried, and most cultivated Englishmen who tarry there long feel their influence as did John Maltravers. Like so many decepti deceptores of the Neo-Platonic school, he did not practise the abnegation enjoined by the very cult he professed to follow. Though his nature was far too refined, I believe, ever to sink into the sensualism revealed in Temple's diaries, yet it was through the gratification of corporeal tastes that he endeavoured to achieve the divine extasis; and there were ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... every one of them, he must apply to the eighth with perfect confidence, because there he is certain of receiving alms. As he had already performed the pilgrimage to Rome, he knew every person in Ancona devoted to the cult of Saint-Francis, and was acquainted with the superiors of all the rich convents. I had to write to every person he named, and to set down all the lies he dictated to me. He likewise made me sign the letters for him, saying, that, if he signed himself, his correspondents ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... craft of printing was scanty, on the other hand, he was supposed to be past master of an art which workmen pleasantly call "tipple-ography," an art held in high esteem by the divine author of Pantagruel; though of late, by reason of the persecution of societies yclept of Temperance, the cult has fallen, day ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... a citizen of the world," Selingman admitted. "I enjoy myself as I go, but I have my eyes always fixed upon the future. I make many friends, and I do not lose them. I set my face towards the pleasant places, and I keep it in that direction. It is the cult of some to be miserable; it is mine to be happy. The person who does most good in the world is the person who reflects the greatest amount of happiness. Therefore, I am a philanthropist. You shall learn from me, my young friend, how to banish some of that ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... period also must be referred the rise of that system of necromancy which, originating in America, has had great vogue in other countries, and here in its native land has taken such form as really to constitute a new cult. Making no mention of sporadic instances of what in earlier generations would have been called (and properly enough) by the name of witchcraft, we find the beginning of so-called "spiritualism" in the "Rochester ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... hysterical and supersensitive persons, like Carlyle and Nietzsche, it mattered little to the world of politics. An excitable man, of vivid imagination and invalid constitution, like Carlyle, feels a natural predilection for the cult of the healthy brute. Carlyle's English style is itself a kind of epilepsy. Nietzsche was so nervously sensitive that everyday life was an anguish to him, and broke his strength. Both were poets, as Marlowe ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... which I was soon to feel for so much affectation and levity, for such an abuse of the most hallowed words and the most sacred convictions. For my own part, I was perfectly sincere; and I founded my philosophic fervour (that recently discovered sentiment of liberty which was then called the cult of reason) on the broad base of an inflexible logic. I was young and of a good constitution, the first condition perhaps of a healthy mind; my reading, though not extensive, was solid, for I had been fed on food easy of digestion. The little I knew served to show ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... type of state and culture which we call mediaeval, for want of a better word, which we see in the Gothic or the great Schoolmen. This thing in itself was above all things logical. Its very cult of authority was a thing of reason, as all men who can reason themselves instantly recognize, even if, like Huxley, they deny its premises or dislike its fruits. Being logical, it was very exact about who had the authority. Now Feudalism ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... will proceed to Italy to join the coterie of ascetics known as the Assisi Set. His conspicuous ability in telling the tale to the London Pressmen encourages expectations that he will be no less successful as a preacher to the birds, after the manner of St. FRANCIS, the founder of the cult. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various
... leagued together in the name of a god, as were the Asclepiadae, might escape, and did escape, the baser theurgic elements of temple medicine. Of these they were as devoid as a modern Catholic physician might be expected to be free from the absurdities of Lourdes. But the extreme cult of prognosis among the Coans may not improbably be traced back to the medical lore of the temple soothsayers whose divine omens were replaced by indications of a physical nature in the patient himself.[62] We are tempted ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... be a great crash, believing himself to be doing his part by undermining the structure, and working on undoubtingly. Abenali was not aggressive. In fact, though he was reckoned among Lucas's party, because of his abstinence from all cult of saints or images, and the persecution he had suffered, he did not join in their general opinions, and held aloof from their meetings. And Tibble Steelman, as has been before said, lived two lives, and that as foreman at the Dragon court, being habitual to him, and requiring much ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... satisfactory and important, because they have tended to express in a concrete and indisputable form the present state of the Chinese mind and its immense underlying commonsense. Remarkable discussions and fierce enmities, for instance, marked the final decision not to make the Confucian cult the State Religion; but there is not the slightest doubt that in formally registering this veritable revolution in the secret stronghold of Chinese political thought, a Bastille has been overthrown and the ground left clear for the development of individualism ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... of their Master, many of the priests of his cult refrained from sexual relations, and as a mortification of the flesh they practiced a painful rite by transfixing the tongue and male member with the sharp thorns of the maguey plant, an austerity which, according to their traditions, he was ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... training consists of a personnel of about 610,000, and that our annual appropriations are about $680,000,000 a year, expended under the direction of an exceedingly competent staff, it can not be said that our country is neglecting its national defense. It is true that a cult of disparagement exists, but that candid examination made by the Congress through its various committees has always reassured the country and demonstrated that it is maintaining the most adequate defensive forces in ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the root of "Nab!" in the Assyrian Nabu and Heb. Noob (occurring in Exod. vii. 1. "Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet." i.e. orator, speaker before the people), and holds it to be a Canaanite term which supplanted "Roeh" (the Seer) e.g. 1 Samuel ix. 9. The learned Hebraist traces the cult of Nebo, a secondary deity in Assyria to Palestine and Phnicia, Palmyra, Edessa (in the Nebok of Abgar) and Hierapolis in Syria or ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... chest. He fell and with a foot on the body for leverage a red, dipping blade was withdrawn. On again, crack! crack!! Lunge, until the ribs snapped like dry sticks beneath each thrust. Stoic British, unmoved, unexcited ... well might you Germans call the 29th the Iron Division. Aye, the Cult of the Bayonet! ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... Ferte seem puny and old. Her deep sensual voice had a coarse richness. Her face, dark and young, annihilated easily the ancient and greyish walls. Her wonderful hair was shockingly black. Her perfect teeth, when she smiled, reminded you of an animal. The cult of Isis never worshipped a more deep luxurious smile. This face, framed in the night of its hair, seemed (as it moved at the window overlooking the cour des femmes) inexorably and colossally young. The body was absolutely and fearlessly alive. In the impeccable ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... Shintoism has no fixed tradition of prayers or prescribed dogma, but is characterized by individual ritual. Respect for the kamis in nature is a key Shinto value. Prior to the end of World War II, Shinto was the state religion of Japan, and bolstered the cult of ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... exhausted my ammunition! You wish to imitate the sparrow? But the sparrow does not, slyly and meanly mischievous, make a cult of sprightliness is not funny with authority, is not the pedant of flippancy! You percher among low bushes, who never care to fly, you wish to imitate—[Turning to one of the exotic COCKS cackling behind him.] Silence, Cock of Japan! or ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... men. He felt that the idol of Noblesse, before which they burned incense at home, was hollow; he had come to be one of the commonest as well as one of the worst types from a social point of view—a consistent egoist. The aristocratic cult of the /ego/ simply taught him to follow his own fancies; he had been idolized by those who had the care of him in childhood, and adored by the companions who shared in his boyish escapades, and so he had formed a habit ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... affections and take them as they come, or as we are suffered to indulge them. A mother is followed by a boyish friend, a friend by a girl, a girl by a wife, a wife by a child, a child by an idea. A divinity passes through these various temples; they may all remain standing, and we may continue our cult in them without outward change, long after the god has fled from the last into his native heaven. We may try to convince ourselves that we have lost nothing when we have lost all. We may take comfort in praising the mixed and perfunctory attachments which ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... was willing that people should like Alice for any reason they chose, if they did not go too far. With her little flutter of futile deceits, her irreverence for every form of human worth and her trust in a providence which had seldom failed her, she smiled at the cult of Alice's friends, as she did at the girl's seriousness, which also she felt herself able to keep ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... would be very interesting to trace the influence of the chivalric idea on religious Mysticism. Chivalry, the worship of idealised womanhood, is itself a mystical cult, and its relation to religious Mysticism appears throughout the "Divine Comedy" and "Vita Nuova" (see especially the incomparable paragraph which concludes this latter), and in the sonnet of M. Angelo translated by Wordsworth, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Hiro, where the priest said he would cause the prized tools to reproduce their kind, like fruit. He planted them in a field near by and watched for results. The lack of any result except rust was an able argument for the Christian missionaries, when they came, to destroy his cult by laughing at the foolishness of his ideas and ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... respects the same. In the popular faith older superstitions and beliefs still lingered which had disappeared from the religion of the state or appeared in it in another form. The place of the priest was in large measure taken by the sorcerer and the magician, the ceremonies of the public cult were superseded by charms and incantations, and the deities of the official creed were overshadowed by a crowd of subordinate spirits whose very existence was hardly recognized among the more cultured classes. The Babylonian was inordinately superstitious, and superstition naturally flourished ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... its workings must often be accepted rather than understood. But those who wish to understand somewhat the psychological process which led in antiquity to the deification of kings during their life-time could not do better than study the cult of Constantine among the ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... to century, and which, in Russia, often deceive the careless observer regarding the age of a building. It is a peculiar sensation to find yourself in these mysterious sanctuaries, where personages familiar to the Roman Catholic cult, mingle with the saints peculiar to the Greek Calendar, and seem in their archaic Byzantine and constrained appearance to have been translated awkwardly into gold by the childish devotion of a primitive race. These ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... mixed devil, nature, and phallic worshipers; the last mentioned cult being evolved, beyond question, from nature-worship. It may be set down as an established fact that, where nature-worship does not exist in some form or other among primitive peoples, phallic worship is likewise ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... Gate. He used to declare that this situation combined all the advantages of London and the country, also that the Park that was good enough for the Regent was good enough for him. He had a decided cult for George IV; and there was even more than a hint of Beau Brummel in his dress. The only ugly thing in the house was a large coloured print of ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... viands from the kitchen where he had prepared them; for, like a true conventual, he was something of a master in the confection—and a very glutton in the consumption—of delectable comestibles. The kitchen was to him as the shrine of some minor cult, and if his breviary and beads commanded from him the half of the ecstatic fervour of his devotions to pot and pan, to cauldron and to spit, then ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... the Guild of All Souls which has for its avowed object the restoration of the Romish doctrine of Purgatory with all its attendant horrors, and finally I need scarcely add he is a member of the Confraternity of the "Blessed Sacrament" which seeks openly to popularize the idolatrous and blasphemous cult of ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... of innovating forces in human affairs there has actually grown up a cult of receptivity, a readiness for new ideas, a faith in the probable truth of novelties. Liberalism—I do not, of course, refer in any way to the political party which makes this profession—is essentially anti-traditionalism; its tendency is to commit ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... for manners, for the essence of social culture which places art at the service of life. Always they had sought to preserve the finer lessons of the past; always they had struggled against the tyranny of mediocrity, the increasing cult of the second best. From this source, from the inherited instinct for selection, for elimination, from the inbred tendency toward order and suavity of living, Corinna had derived her clear-eyed acceptance of ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... purchaser of Mr. William Morris's wall papers. It existed ten or twelve years before the public "caught on," as they say, to these delights. But, except one or two of the masters, the school were only playing at aesthetics, and laughing at their own performances. There was more fun than fashion in the cult, which was later revived, developed, and gossiped ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... thing, and a continued turning to Nature, not as to a cult like a latter-day nature-student, but as a child to its mother, or a hart to the water brook. As even in a border, stayed between two lines of solid-coloured galloon, flowers and fruit do not stand forever ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... primitive Chaldaeans, that it will be unnecessary, after the full treatment which that subject received in an earlier portion of this work, to do much more than notice in the present place certain peculiarities by which it would appear that the cult of Assyria was distinguished from that of the neighboring and closely connected country. With the exception that the first god in the Babylonian Pantheon was replaced by a distinct and thoroughly national deity ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... river deities are female, the Manu fish and flood legend resembles closely the Babylonian, and seems to throw light upon it. Indeed, the Manu myth appears to have been derived from the lost flood story in which Ea figured prominently in fish form as the Preserver. The Babylonian Ea cult and the Indian Varuna cult had apparently much ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... by habit, and a grave man receives the most chaff most good-humoredly. But he had a nervous dread of being found out. He had made a sort of religion of suppressing the fact that he was a prince; the holy of holies of this cult was the fact that he was a prince who sought to do good to his neighbor—a prince in whom ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... shores of South Europe he sat down to write his autobiography—the great literary success of its year. This book was followed by other books written with the declared purpose of elevating humanity. In these works he preached generally the cult of the woman. For his own part he practised it under the rites of special devotion to the transcendental merits of a certain Madame de S—, a lady of advanced views, no longer very young, once upon a time the intriguing wife of a now dead and forgotten diplomat. Her loud pretensions to be one of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... bridge the chasm 'Twixt man to-day and protoplasm, Who theorize and probe and gape, And finally evolve an ape— Yours is a harmless sort of cult, If you are pleased with the result. Some folks admit, with cynic grace, That you have rather proved your case. These dogmatists are so severe! Enough for me that Fanny's here, Enough that, having long survived Pre-Eveic forms, she HAS arrived— An illustration the completest Of ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... knows it, only he who steals to their pillow and listens to the unconscious utterance of a dream, hears it. He alone knows it who makes a woman of himself, and initiates himself into the secrets of her cult of inconstancy! But man, who asks for it openly, he who opens a loyal hand to receive that frightful alms, he will never obtain it! They are on guard with him; for reply he receives a shrug of the shoulders, and, if he rouses ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... this last item, you must know that a Trojan picnic is no ordinary function. To begin with, it is essentially patriotic—devoted, in fact, to the cult of the Troy river, in honour of which it forms a kind of solemn procession. Undeviating tradition has fixed its goal at a sacred rock, haunted of heron and kingfisher, and wrapped around with woodland, beside a creek so tortuous as to simulate a series of enchanted lakes. Here the ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... With the Conrad cult, so discreetly nurtured out of a Barabbasian silo, there arises a considerable Conrad literature, most of it quite valueless. Huneker's essay, in "Ivory, Apes and Peacocks,"[9] gets little beyond the obvious; William Lyon Phelps, in "The Advance of the English Novel," achieves ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... which men climb Those glittering steps, those milestones upon time, Those tombstones of dead selves, those hours of birth, Those moments of the soul in years of earth. They mark the height achieved, the main result, The power of freedom in the perished cult, The power of boredom in the dead man's deeds Not the bright ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... violence is done to the throat, which in time results in some of the many ailments peculiar to singers who use faulty methods. The middle range of the voice becomes proportionately weaker and thinner as the cult of the extra "top notes" becomes greater, until the anomalous position is reached of a voice with two ends and no middle; while these superadded, artificial, high notes are wanting in timbre, in purity, in strength, and in ease. It is easily demonstrable ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... and yet, alas! how few, specimens of this old petit point work have been preserved. It is only during recent years that the "cult of the antique" has been fashionable, and is also becoming a source of income and profit to the many who indulge in its quest. Only members of learned antiquarian societies or born reliquaries troubled themselves to acquire ancient articles of historic interest because ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... of Faddists has been gradually growing up, not in our midst, but in the parts about Literature and the Drama. The object of their cult is, one HENRIK IBSEN, a Norwegian Dramatist, (perhaps it would be more correct to say, the Norwegian Dramatist,) of whose plays a pretty sprinkling of scribes, amateur and professional, but all of the very highest culture, profess themselves the uncompromisingly ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... jealousy; it was the sadness of realizing that she was sickly. She was certain of her husband; she knew his declarations of faithfulness to her. But when the painter spoke of his artistic interests in her presence, he did not hide his worship of beauty, his religious cult of form. Even if he was silent, she penetrated his thoughts; she read in him that fervor which dated from his youth and had grown greater as the years went by. When she looked at the statues of sovereign nakedness that decorated the ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of existing material on this subject is so great that I have not attempted to make a survey of the whole of European 'Witchcraft', but have confined myself to an intensive study of the cult in Great Britain. In order, however, to obtain a clearer understanding of the ritual and beliefs I have had recourse to French and Flemish sources, as the cult appears to have been the same throughout Western Europe. The New England records ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... All the more reason why I must see her. Sweetwater, someone drew that weapon out. Effects still have their causes, notwithstanding the new cult. The question is who? We must leave no stone unturned ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... of a priest, and a lantern slide of a stomach by way of altar-piece; and alcohol they make their Devil, and their god is Hygiene—a curious and instructive case of mental inertia. I understand, too, there are several other temples of this Cult in London—South Place Chapel and Essex Hall, for instance, where they worship the Spirit of the Innermost. But the thing that struck me so oddly was the number of bald heads glimmering faintly ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... in general there was much earnestness and truth. When Priscilla rose in her turn and spoke, with downcast eyes, he felt the beauty and simplicity of her religious life. And he rightly judged that from the soil of a cult so severe there must grow some noble and heroic lives. Last of all the class leader reached the marquis, ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... ideals of the Motherland. Its civilization, spite of superficial resemblances, is not English; let him who will think it superior; all one cares to say is that it has already shown in a broad picture the natural tendencies of English blood when emancipated from the old cult. Easy to understand that some there are who see nothing but evil in the influence of that vast commonwealth. If it has done us good, assuredly the fact is not yet demonstrable. In old England, democracy is a thing so alien to our traditions and rooted sentiment that the line ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... pink-and-white bust simpered out of the Beauty Parlor's display-case, a bust elaborately coiffured with pounds of yellow hair in which glittered rhinestone buckles. Hair of every sort and shade and length was clustered about her, as if she were the presiding genius of some barbarian scalping-cult. Seen at that hour, in the pale luster of the flashlight, this sorry plunder of lost teeth and dead hair made upon one a melancholy impression, disparaging to humanity. I had scant time to moralize on hair and teeth, however, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... mental connection between the construction of the future and the destruction of the past, that she could honestly admire Cyrus Treadwell for possessing the qualities her soul abhorred. The simple awe of financial success, which occupies in the American mind the vacant space of the monarchical cult, had begun already to generate the myth of greatness around Cyrus, and, like all other myths, this owed its origin less to the wilful conspiracy of the few than it did to the confiding ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... an iterated example of German state policy. It proclaimed glaringly to the eyes of all men what the Teutonic thing is, what it means to the world. The Latin has been cruel and bloody in his deeds, like all men, but he has never made a cult of inhumanity, never justified it as a principle of statecraft. Italians, prone to hate as to love, prone especially to hate the Teuton, those aliens who have lusted after their richness and beauty all these centuries, felt the Lusitania ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... state were over, so they told you. The cult of the personality was a thing of the past. The long series of five-year plans and seven-year plans were over and all the goals had been achieved. The new constitution guaranteed personal liberties. No longer were you ...
— Expediter • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... The cult of Mr. Ransome reached its height at four o'clock on this Sunday afternoon, when Ranny's Uncle John Randall (Junior) and Aunt Randall dropped in to tea. Both Mr. and Mrs. Randall believed in Mr. Ransome with the fervent, immovable faith of innocence that has once ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... that Socialists as a class are upon a higher ethical plane than individualists may be dismissed. Personally, I fear that at present the average ethical plane of Socialists is below that of opponents for the allurements of Socialistic theory have attracted to that cult a great number of the economically impotent, but nevertheless greedy, who know nothing and care less about Socialistic theory but lust for that which they have never earned. It is they who promote class ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... the two choir transepts, the huge windows of which present in picture the life stories of St. Cuthbert and St. William respectively. The Lady Chapel, the part of the choir to the east of the reredos, was very important in pre-Reformation days when the cult of the Virgin was very popular. To the north and south of the Central Tower are the Transepts. From the North Transept the Vestibule leads to the Chapter House. The church is, therefore, of the shape of a cross (the centre of which is marked by the Central Tower) with an octagonal building ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... Bells now, and her relation to them has become almost daughterly. The three are swayed, to the extent of their several capacities, by what one might call a cult of Elfrida—her death has long ago been explained by the fact that a grandaunt of Mrs. ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... Often they hang from the branches of trees, like bats, but they are also pictured as having fine houses and great riches. They are sometimes hostile or mischievous, but more frequently are friendly. They play a very important part in the mythology, but not in the cult. [121] ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... so. There were more queer costumes than she had seen at the Lakewood party, more weird effects of hairdressing and more eccentric posing and posturing. The New York branch of these Bohemians were evidently farther advanced in their cult than the others ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... by no means unanimous. They owned that there was much to be said even for compulsory Greek, if only Greek had been intelligently taught. And with that, of course, I agree: for to learn Greek is, after all, a baptism into a noble cult. The Romans knew that. I believe that, even yet, if the schools would rebuild their instruction in Greek so as to make it interesting, as it ought to be, from the first, we should oust those birds who croak and chatter upon the walls of our old Universities. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... and who played and worked hard for the honour of the game, and without thought of personal advantage or reward, was the god of his idolatry. Fond as he was of sport, and highly as he appreciated it as a discipline for character, he held that the cult of athletics could be overdone, and that to make a business of what should only be a pastime was a grave blunder. In an essay which he wrote on "Sport," he characterises the professional athlete as a man who is engaged "in the vilest of trades." "Life," ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... intellectual forces of contemporary Brazil, has written of Machado de Assis: "By his extraordinary talent as writer, by his profound literary dignity, by the unity of a life that was entirely devoted to the cult of intellectual beauty, and by the prestige exerted about him by his work and by his personality, Machado de Assis succeeded, despite a nature that was averse to acclaim and little inclined to public appearance, in being considered and respected as ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... Spanish people. They are the friends and favourites of the aristocracy, the demi-gods of the populace. You never see one of them in the streets without an admiring circle of worshippers, who hang on every word and gesture of the great man; and this is no cult of the hour, it is unceasing. They are always known for their generosity, not only to injured comrades, but to any of the poor in need. Is there a disaster by which many are injured—flood, tempest, ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... continued to look at her with the air of a naturalist examining an interesting specimen of his cult. He said nothing till, driven by his scrutiny, ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... cried Gianapolis enthusiastically, "no important city has been neglected! A high priest of the cult has arisen, and from a parent lodge in Pekin he has extended his offices to kindred lodges in most of the capitals of Europe and Asia; he has not neglected the Near East, and America owes him a national debt ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer |
