"Debauchery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shattering the industry, they undermine the economy and frugality and rend the integrity of mankind. We doubt whether any of the great forms of evil incident to our imperfect civilization—the slave-trade, debauchery, pauperism—cause more individual anguish or more public detriment than these incessant revolutions in the value and tenure of property. Those afflict limited classes alone, but these every class; they relax and pervert the whole moral ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... that Tamagno should in future be considered by all as the queen." Soon Waizero Tamagno had numerous rivals; but she was a woman of tact; and far from complaining, she rather encouraged Theodore in his debauchery, and always received him with a smile. One day she said to her fickle lord, who felt rather astonished at her forbearance, "Why should I be jealous? I know you love but me; what is it if you stoop now ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... [Letters, 1898, i. 150-160, and 153, note]). Moore (Life, p. 86) and other apologists are anxious to point out that the Newstead "wassailers" were, on the whole, a harmless crew of rollicking schoolboys "—were, indeed, of habits and tastes too intellectual for mere vulgar debauchery." And as to the "alleged 'harems,'" the "Paphian girls," there were only one or two, says Moore, "among the ordinary menials." But, even so, the "wassailers" were not impeccable, and it is best to leave the story, fact or ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... life. This Mr. Stewart, who was twelve years the Chevalier's senior, and, as I learned later, had been greatly attached to his person, deplored with affectionate regret. But Major Cross, who related incidents of debauchery and selfishness which, being in Europe, had come to his knowledge about the prince, did not ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... his religion in his life and conversation. He was a true Protestant of the Church of England, so born, so brought up, and so died; his conversation was so honest that I never heard him speak a word in my life that tended to God's dishonour, or encouragement of any kind of debauchery or sin. He was ever much esteemed by his two masters, Charles the First and Charles the Second, both for great parts and honesty, as for his conversation, in which they took great delight, he being so free from passion, that made him beloved ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... to the very free living in his household had pledged deeply the ample revenue of two hundred and thirty tawara, and would have upheld the samurai trait of not knowing the value of money—if Kwaiba had been of that kind. Between Kwaiba and Kibei, the wild debauchery of the last year had brought the House to the verge of ruin. Kibei was aghast. Long since he had become deeply involved with the Kashiku Tamagiku of the Yamadaya in Edomachi Itcho[u]me of the Yoshiwara. The ugly fellow was madly in love with the beauty. On her he had poured out the treasures ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... invite to rest—check the sigh of envy; there is a ring at the bell—hurrying footsteps on the stairs—a jarring sound against the polished door, and in bursts the rich man's son, his brow haggard, his eyes fierce and red. He is a notorious profligate; gambling is his food and drink, debauchery his glory and his ruin. Would you be that father? Go back to your honest sons and look in their faces; throw the bright locks from their brows, and bless God that there the angel triumphs over the brute; be even thankful that ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... life and glee sit down, All joyous and unthinking, 'Till, quite transmugrify'd, they're grown Debauchery and drinking; O would they stay to calculate Th' eternal consequences; Or your more dreaded hell ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... absorbing violence of his emotions: they swept over him, momentarily devastating his present and blotting out the horizon, but unlike the tempests of childhood their ravages did not disappear when the clouds dispersed and the torrents subsided. The life of debauchery which had preceded his journey to Italy was replaced, for some years, by a less excessive degree of dissipation, during which he lived with a fast set, who, however, were men of talent and accomplishments, the foremost among them being Prince Belgiojoso. The influence of the two fortunate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... broached to the world, there was prescription in favor of violence, debauchery, and selfishness; when Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and their disciples reconstructed philosophy and the sciences, there was prescription in favor of the Aristotelian philosophy; when our fathers of '89 demanded ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... marriage with Adelaida Ivanovna, not from malice, nor because of his matrimonial grievances, but simply because he forgot him. While he was wearying every one with his tears and complaints, and turning his house into a sink of debauchery, a faithful servant of the family, Grigory, took the three-year-old Mitya into his care. If he hadn't looked after him there would have been no one even to change the baby's ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... favoured method of enjoyment. Illegitimate births, formerly very rare, have multiplied, syphilis even has spread among the young. Food of a less substantial character has superseded the diet of former times, and, in short, alcoholism, precocious debauchery, and syphilis have come like so many plagues to arrest the development of the youth ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... Catiline but riot, and debauchery, and murder! Sin, for its own sake, even more than for the rewards its offers to its votaries! Paullus, men called me beautiful! But what cared I for beauty, that charmed all but him, whom alone I desired to fascinate? Men called me beautiful, I say! ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... night's spiritual debauchery," said she. She was pleased with her way of putting it; she was pleased, immeasurably ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... her love and truth was the one keystone that kept the fabric of my past life together—the one star that lit the thick black darkness of the future. I was hail-fellow-well-met with bad men; I was in the center of riot, drunkenness, and debauchery; but the purifying influence of my love kept me safe from all. Thin and gaunt, the half-starved shadow of what I once had been, I saw myself one day in a broken bit of looking-glass, and was frightened by ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... parts of the Empire; but the custom of the Roman generals, which Trajan would doubtless have followed, was to divide the most fertile districts amongst their veteran soldiers,[100] and therefore, if the charges of cowardice and debauchery made by Carra were true, they would apply to the bravest in the legions who had conquered the almost indomitable Decebalus. But Carra lived and wrote at a time (A.D. 1777) when cool judgment could ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... influence the character of the court changed entirely; retaining only a semblance of its former decency, it became utterly corrupt. It possessed external elegance and distingue manners, but below this veneer lay intrigue, debauchery, and gross immorality. In order to meet the vast expenditures of the king and the queen-mother, the taxes were enormously increased; the people, weighed down by the unjust assessment and by want, began to clamor and protest. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... insensible to the value of this element to a popular journal. He knew, he said, that people liked to be amused; and he supplied this want in a section of his paper entitled "Mercure Scandale; or, Advice from the Scandalous Club, being a weekly history of Nonsense, Impertinence, Vice, and Debauchery." Under this attractive heading, Defoe noticed current scandals, his club being represented as a tribunal before which offenders were brought, their cases heard, and sentence passed upon them. Slanderers of the True-Born Englishman frequently figure in its proceedings. ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... compelled to live miserable and unhappy lives. Young men and women, inheritors of vast fortunes, living lives of idleness, uselessness and vanity at one end of the social scale are driven to dissipation and debauchery and crime. At the other end of the social scale there are young men and women, poor, overburdened with toil, crushed by poverty and want, also driven to dissipation and debauchery ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... can supply it to the young man with the least danger. For if he once knows the state of your feelings, that you would sooner part with your life, and sooner with all your money, than allow your son to leave you; whew! what an inlet[58] will you be opening for his debauchery! aye, and so much so, that henceforth to live can not be desirable to you. For we all become worse through indulgence. Whatever comes into his head, he'll be wishing for; nor will he reflect whether that which he desires is right or wrong. You will not be able to endure your estate and him going ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... implanted is this ingenuous and amiable modesty in youth, which is frequently laid aside when engaged in the vortex of pleasure, that it is one of the highest charms of beauty; and wretches only, degraded by debauchery and systematic vice, are capable of insulting this sentiment. A scrupulous regard to modesty and truth will not permit me to pursue the description of these amusements farther than observing, that they ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... should excite: the black-hole of Calcutta would be as pleasing a subject. The character of the Hollanders is too grossly vicious and detestable to give the least pleasure. They are neither men, nor even devils; but a sort of lubber fiends, compounded of cruelty, avarice, and brutal debauchery, like Dutch swabbers possessed by demons. But of this play the author has himself admitted, that the subject is barren, the persons low, and the writing not heightened by any laboured scenes: and, without attempting to contradict this modest description, we may dismiss the tragedy ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... of straw or hay underneath his blouse. Then he is known as the "ragamuffin," on account of his covering of rags. Lastly he is termed the "infidel," and this is most significant of all, because by his cynicism and his debauchery he is supposed to typify the opposite of ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... were better provided with munitions of war; yet the pirates, fighting with the bravery of desperate men, were victorious, and the city fell into their hands. Then followed days of murder, plunder, and debauchery. Morgan saw his followers, maddened by liquor, scoff at the idea of discipline and obedience. Fearing that while his men were helplessly drunk the Spaniards would rally and cut them to pieces, he set fire to the city, that the stores ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... course, was that he was absolutely incapable of work next day; and then, giving way to the maddening desire, he and his comrade-in-debauchery went in, as they said, for a regular spree. It lasted for more than a week, and when it came to an end, the two men, with cracked lips, bloodshot eyes, and haggard faces, looked as if they had just escaped ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... observed that young men, corrupted in early youth and addicted to women and debauchery, are inhuman and cruel; their passionate temperament makes them impatient, vindictive, and angry; their imagination fixed on one object only, refuses all others; mercy and pity are alike unknown to them; they would have ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... bold enough to speak. "If you are indeed Ulysses, great are your wrongs, for your property has been, squandered, and riot and debauchery have filled your palace. But at your feet now lies Antinous, whose wild ambition meant to slay your son and divide your kingdom. Since he is dead, spare the rest of your people. Our gold and treasures shall defray ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... job if with some rounded periods in Italian he could cause the very numerous hostile business men to forget so blissfully that they were men of business. Under his dispensation the town is said to have been turned into a place of debauchery. Accusations were brought against his sexual code, and with regard to men of commerce: "those who are not partisans of d'Annunzio are expelled, and their establishments handed over to friends of the ruling power.... Woe to him who dares to condemn the transactions ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... flashes of hatred and of vengeance. The Catanese, who felt she was detected, lacked courage to fight this man in the open, and so conceived the hope of strengthening her tottering empire by the arts of corruption and debauchery. She instilled by degrees into her pupil's mind the poison of vice, inflamed her youthful imagination with precocious desires, sowed in her heart the seeds of an unconquerable aversion for her husband, surrounded the poor child with abandoned women, and especially attached ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... destructive. He is not constructive. The dim groping spirit of his mother and the curse of his environment press too heavily upon him, and he is crushed to debauchery and madness. He does not drink because liquor tastes good in his mouth. In the vile companions who purvey to his baser appetites he finds no charm. It is all utterly despicable and sordid, but thither his quest leads him and he follows the quest. He knows that everything ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... a totally undisciplined and disorderly manner; reeling in their saddles, drunken with debauchery, red-hot, reeking from some ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... had, meanwhile, returned to his own city, where he was excellently well received, because he brought much wealth with him. His old associates flocked around him rejoicing; and he fell into the same courses which had beggared him before. Gambling and debauchery soon blunted his passions, and emptied his purse. Again his boon companions, finding him without a broken cowrie, drove him from their doors, he stole and was flogged for theft; and lastly, half famished, he fled the ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... that life a blessing or a curse, as you inculcate good or evil; for if through your neglect, or through bad example, you let evil passions obtain an ascendency, that child may grow into a dissolute and immoral man; his career may be one of debauchery and profaneness; and then, when he comes to die, in the agonies of remorse, in the delirium of a conscience-stricken spirit, he may gasp out his last breath with a curse on your head, for having given him life, but not a disposition to use it aright, so that his has been a life ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... class of young fellows, I would recommend him to witness the ingenious comedy of LONDON ASSURANCE—the amiable heroes of which are represented, not only as drunkards and five-o'clock-in-the-morning men, but as showing a hundred other delightful traits of swindling, lying, and general debauchery, quite edifying to witness. ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... most doubtful, character. When Melchior Rink preached, his followers howled like dogs, bellowed like cattle, neighed like horses, and brayed like asses—some of them very {101} naturally, no doubt. In certain extreme cases the meetings ended in debauchery, while we know of men who committed murder in the belief that they were directed so to do by special revelation of God. Thus at St. Gall one brother cut another's throat, while one of the saints trampled his wife to death under the influence ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... design, at which he laughed heartily, but communicated it to the rest. The proposal was received with the greatest good-humour, as it promised to afford a new fund of entertainment to persons who had now no other resource for mirth, but what could be derived from ridicule or debauchery. ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... Christian religion. "One cannot expect to take absolutely no thought for the morrow, as is said in the Gospel, but only not to take too much thought for it; one cannot give away all to the poor, but one must give away a certain definite part; one need not aim at virginity, but one must avoid debauchery; one need not forsake wife and children, but one must not give too great a place to them in one's heart," and ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... gross debauchery: such were his means of action in his three enterprises at Strasburg, at Boulogne, at Paris. Two failures and a success. Magnan, who refused at Boulogne, sold himself at Paris. If Louis Bonaparte had been defeated on the ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... we have classed them, terminating with Philip the Arab, commences with Commodus. This unworthy prince, although the son of the excellent Marcus Antoninus, turned out a monster of debauchery. At the moment of his father's death, he was present in person at the head- quarters of the army on the Danube, and of necessity partook in many of their hardships. This it was which furnished his evil counsellors with their sole argument for urging his departure to the capital. A council ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... been selfish, griping, and avaricious on all occasions, and what he has saved or gained by oppression and fraud, he has spent on his profligacy: he has got drunk with the money which he has acquired by dishonesty, and he has paid for his debauchery at night by the sum which he has contrived in the morning to keep back from the poor. At the same time he has been turbulent, factious, and complaining—always talking of what is amiss in others, and very sudden ...
— Stories for the Young - Or, Cheap Repository Tracts: Entertaining, Moral, and Religious. Vol. VI. • Hannah More
... at all endangering his life. In this manner he had already sadly mutilated several brave officers and students, who had had the bad luck to stand up against him. He himself was anything but pleasant to look upon, his natural plainness having been rendered repellent by a life of low debauchery. He cherished a secret grudge against the bridegroom and bitter feelings toward the bride, because the latter had so plainly shown her aversion for him when he had ventured to pay suit ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... accompanied by another man, came upon me one morning by surprise. What a change did I discover in his person! Instead of his former gracefulness, he appeared sottish and vulgar, which made me extremely reserved with him. My eyes deceived me, or either debauchery had stupefied his mind, or all his first splendor was the effect of his youth, which was past. I saw him almost with indifference, and we parted rather coolly. But when he was gone, the remembrance of our former connection so strongly called to my recollection that of my younger days, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... colleges among the foremost in the world, men in reputation for their skill and beloved for their devotion to the people's welfare, have told here in medical terminology the intolerable consequences, to guilty and innocent, of the odious business of making commerce of girls and promoting the debauchery of young men. We are sure the time has come when millions will thank these lawyers and physicians for breaking the seal of secrecy and giving the people ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... enjoy similar privileges: and should their place of occupation be too remote from a theatre of indulgence, they get a week of holiday at Sydney, where they arrive in numbers, and, for the time they stay, wallow in every species of debauchery. In such a state of society the public standard of morality must necessarily fall to a very low degree. The leaven spreads from the corrupted part into the whole mass. Just as the slang of London thieves is become ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 547, May 19, 1832 • Various
... populous and wealthy country, blessed with free institutions and a constitutional government, are the great masses of the manual-labor class to be enabled to have steady work at fair wages, to be kept from starvation, and their children from vice and debauchery, and to be furnished with that degree, not of mere reading and writing, but of knowledge, that shall fit them intelligently to do the duties and exercise the privileges of freemen; even to be intrusted with ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... been reduced to receive it from those who believed neither Catholicism nor Protestantism, but who read the Bible in search of the picturesque. We thus refuse to regard the painters who passed their lives in prayer, but are perfectly ready to be taught by those who spent them in debauchery. There is perhaps no more popular Protestant picture than Salvator's "Witch of Endor," of which the subject was chosen by the painter simply because, under the names of Saul and the Sorceress, he could paint a captain of banditti, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... another Frenchman, a fat and very drunken banker, who sat down at his right and complained from time to time of the lack of elegance in this debauchery. He wished that these people had left him alone, and stared at the wall in front of him, where curtains of crimson brocade and gold galoon hung undrawn between the lustred tiles and the high windows, black with the outer night but ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... capable of pre-empting the plastic mind and imagination of childhood by intelligent explanations and true statements concerning the origin of life, and the vital purities and sanctities that can save every child from demoralization and debauchery. The boy who has been blest with a wise conscientious motherhood is not the boy to dwell in secret on lascivious thoughts and vile communications, nor will he be led ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... to have no alternative, but that of continuing in the practice which they once too fatally begun, in which the major part of them end a short life of debauchery and wretchedness. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Grand Vizier of that Prince, and ruled the state with some advantage: but, in a science still more difficult, he failed completely. He could not rule his own passions, but gave himself up to wine and women, and led a life of shameless debauchery. Amid the multifarious pursuits of business and pleasure, he nevertheless found time to write seven treatises upon the philosopher's stone, which were for many ages looked upon as of great value by pretenders to the art. It ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... challenge Bellmour. At the same time he reveals his love as though he told the tale of another, but he is met with scorn and only bidden to fight the husband who has repulsed her. Bellmour, meantime, in despair and rage at his misery plunges into reckless debauchery, and in company with Sir Timothy visits a bagnio, where they meet Betty Flauntit, the knight's kept mistress, and other cyprians. Hither they are tracked by Charles, Bellmour's younger brother, and Trusty, Lord Plotwell's old steward. Sharp words pass, the brothers fight ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... I can make it out, Whitman's argument seems to be, that, because a prairie is wide, therefore debauchery is admirable, and because the Mississippi is long, therefore ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... ever its victims to death and damnation. No wonder that Lord Chesterfield, in words as eloquent as they were burning, should say of rumsellers: "Let us crush out these artists in human slaughter who have reconciled their countrymen to sickness and ruin and spread over the pitfalls of debauchery such baits as men cannot resist." And his suggestions continue to be repeated, serving as a nucleus to which many cling and receive strength for present and future action. Yet there is room for more, as the battle is fierce ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... that no flame which she might kindle in them would thaw her own ice. [359] Among those who pursued her with an insane desire was a profligate captain in the army named Hill. With Hill was closely bound in a league of debauchery and violence Charles Lord Mohun, a young nobleman whose life was one long revel and brawl. Hill, finding that the beautiful brunette was invincible, took it into his head that he was rejected for a more favoured rival, and that this rival was the brilliant Mountford. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... itinerant beggars, of both sexes, and all ages, as well foreigners as natives, who strolled about the country in all directions. levying contributions from the industrious inhabitants, stealing and robbing, and leading a life of indolence, and the most shameless debauchery, was quite incredible; and so numerous were the swarms of beggars in all the great towns, and particularly in the capital, so great their impudence, and so persevering their importunity, that it was almost impossible to cross the streets without being attacked, and ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... each other. Oh! if, at our social table, we could see what passes in each bosom around, we would seek dens and caverns to shun human society! To see the projector trembling for his falling speculations; the voluptuary rueing the event of his debauchery; the miser wearing out his soul for the loss of a guinea—all—all bent upon vain hopes and vainer regrets—we should not need to go to the hall of the Caliph Vathek to see men's hearts broiling under ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... side of this proposition. For two hundred years there had been no pirates in the Mediterranean; yet in the declamation schools pirates abounded, and questions turned upon points of law which never existed or could exist in actual society. The favorite cases concerned the tyranny of fathers, the debauchery of sons, the adultery of wives, and the rape of daughters. In the procedure of the declamation schools the boys arose and delivered their speeches with frequent applause from the other students and from their ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... simple innocent delights of home, sick of the companionship of gentle sisters, the love of a fond mother, and wishing to be back again at the old uproarious wine-parties, the drunken orgies, the card-playing and prize-fighting, the extravagance and debauchery of the bad set in which he ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... crime, and who would a short time ago have expiated their crimes on a scaffold. They generally work or rob for a space, and when well stocked with gold, retire to Melbourne for a month or so, living in drunkenness and debauchery. If, however, their holiday is spent at the diggings, the sly grog-shop is the last scene of their boisterous career. Spirit selling is strictly prohibited; and although Government will license a respectable public-house on the ROAD, ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... on. She would cover all the territory where low debauchery fills its crop on Mondays and finds its loves, between a hospital, a slaughter-house, and a cemetery; Lariboisiere, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... exuberance of his inventions. So he was not long in getting commissions in considerable numbers. It only depended on himself to win riches and fame with all speed. But his chief idea was to amuse himself in company of Bruno di Giovanni and Nello, and squander along with them, in debauchery, all ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... met likewise with a gracious reception. Le Guast was now no more, having died under the operation of a particular regimen ordered for him by his physician. He had given himself up to every kind of debauchery; and his death seemed the judgment of the Almighty on one whose body had long been perishing, and whose soul had been made over to the prince of demons as the price of assistance through the means of diabolical magic, which he constantly practised. The King, though now without this instrument of ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... does the grim, consuming pestilence of gaming claim more victims than in the Ghetto. The ravages of drink and debauchery are slight indeed; but the tortuous streets can show too many a humble home haunted by the spectres of ruin and misery which stalked across the threshold when the first card ...
— A Ghetto Violet - From "Christian and Leah" • Leopold Kompert
... hair, splay-footed. To give him his right, he had the most piercing judgment naturally upon a figure of theft, and many other questions, that I ever met withal; yet for money he would willingly give contrary judgments; was much addicted to debauchery, and then very abusive and quarrelsome; seldom without a black eye or one mischief or other. This is the same Evans who made so many antimonial cups, upon the sale whereof he chiefly subsisted. He understood Latin very well, the Greek tongue not all; he had some arts above and beyond astrology, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... depravity merited the full severity of the law. The initiated, or the elect, as they were called, gave themselves up to unspeakable crimes. A number of them on being arrested at Carthage confessed immoral practices that would not bear repetition, and this debauchery was not peculiar to a few wicked followers, but was merely the carrying out of the Manichean ritual, which other heretics ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... take into calculation its probable bearing on the existing race of colonists, the greater part of whom are and will, perhaps, always be more or less addicted to the pernicious habits contracted in their early days of riot and debauchery, as on their posterity, who will necessarily soon form the majority of this colony, and whose amelioration or reformation all legislative measures should have principally in view. With those the immoderate use of spirituous liquors is a long contracted disease, which it is perhaps past the skill ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... expression and features were as monstrous and as hideous as was the mind behind them. This is by no means the case. On the contrary, he was a man who, in his younger days, must have been remarkable for his extreme beauty.(1) He was not, it is true, very old, as years go, when I saw him, but debauchery and low living had left their traces upon his countenance, without, however entirely destroying the regularity and the beauty of his features. He was dark, more like a Spaniard than an Englishman, with black eyes and olive complexion. His expression was lofty and noble, but his temper was so ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Sir Mulberry Hawk and his pupil brings out in strong relief the night scene of Kit Nubbles and his mother. The one in affluence and splendor, trying to find an easier position for his aching head, surrounded with means and trophies of debauchery, and thinking "there would be nothing so snug and comfortable as to die at once." The other in the poorest room, earning a precarious subsistence by her labors at the wash-tub—ugly, and ignorant, and vulgar, surrounded by poverty, with ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... and ludicrous ideas. These performances were first given in honor of the god of wine, Bacchus, which accounts, I suppose, for the fact that a theatre cannot live without a bar. On certain festive days, they acted these plays often in the most indecent manner, with drunkenness and debauchery abounding—scenes which are re-enacted in theatres at the present day. Now, they have a more splendid stage, within a costly, spacious building, but there is little or no improvement in the purity of the ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer
... practice goes on and on, from generation to generation, and this is why the morals, intelligence and progress of Cuba, Porto Rico and the Philippine Islands, are to-day on the same plane of depravity as they were centuries ago, and no one is to blame for this carnality and debauchery of the inhabitants of these islands but the Roman Catholic Church, and until the Government of the United States shall declare and back up her declaration by Protestant manhood, the inhabitants of these islands will never know of the beauties of chastity and morality ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... think him a devil. In some way he depended upon the excitement He could arouse in her hysterical nature. Perhaps he got the feeling of being a rake more from his wife's rage and amazement than from any experiences of his own. His zest in debauchery might wane, but never Mrs. Cutter's belief in it. The reckoning with his wife at the end of an escapade was something he counted on—like the last powerful liqueur after a long dinner. The one excitement he really couldn't do without was ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... intoxication of the moment? More wine was called for, glass after glass was drained, their parched and scalding mouths were cracked with thirst. Down poured the wine like oil on blazing fire. And still the riot went on. The debauchery gained its height; glasses were dashed upon the floor by hands that could not carry them to lips; oaths were shouted out by lips which could scarcely form the words to vent them in; drunken losers cursed and roared; some mounted on the tables, waving bottles above their ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... attended with temptations perilous to character. Abundant testimony is not wanting to show that their tendency has been toward rowdyism, gambling, debauchery, and other disgraceful conduct. Some of the games scarcely rise above the brutality of the prize fight. They have no elevating tendency, and no apology can be made for their ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... fondest designs! Speaking of this disappointment he afterwards wrote: "Had I remained and become a member of the university at that time, as I should have done in case of success, the profligate acquaintances I had there would have introduced me to scenes of debauchery, in which I must in all probability, from my extreme youth, ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea
... such as destroying their corn, killing their domestic animals, and whipping the women and children. They carried with them, as articles of traffic, whiskey and other intoxicating liquors, and by distributing them in the tribe, made drunkenness and scenes of debauchery common. Black Hawk and the other chiefs of the band, remonstrated against these encroachments, and especially in regard to the introduction of spirituous liquors among their people: and, upon one occasion, when a white man continued, openly, to sell whiskey to them, the old chief, ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... is the same in the science of health, arts, and in that of morals. If often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences. Take, for example, debauchery, idleness, prodigality. When, therefore, a man, absorbed in the effect which is seen, has not yet learned to discern those which are not seen, he gives way to fatal habits, not only by inclination, but ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... all theatres, music-halls, etc., had grown rapidly worse and worse, in character,—licentiousness, animalism, voluptuousness, debauchery, these were the main features of the newer type of performances. Salome dances, and even the wildest, obscenest type of the "can-can" of the French, in its most promiscuous lascivious forms, were common fare on the ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... very shame's sake! Art thou dead to the honor of thy calling, that thou dost wilfully consent to be the victim of wine-bibbing and debauchery? O thou frail soul! how hast thou quenched the heavenly essence within thee! ... why wilt thou be thus self-disgraced and all inglorious? Sah-luma! Sah- luma!"—and he shook him violently by the arm—"Up,—up, thou truant to the faith of Art! I will not let thee drowse the hours ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... after that of his parents, completed the consternation into which the court was thrown. The most sinister rumors circulated darkly; a base intrigue caused the Duke of Orleans to be accused; people called to mind his taste for chemistry and even magic, his flagrant impiety, his scandalous debauchery; beside himself with grief and anger, he demanded of the king to be sent to the Bastille; the king refused curtly, coldly, not unmoved in his secret heart by the perfidious insinuations which made their way even to him, but too just and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the age of twenty—"the very threshold of womanhood," as Fernando Lope so beautifully puts it—she was betrothed to Pedro y Bananas, a noble fresh from the vice and debauchery of the Court at Valladolid. Knowing naught of love or passion, she consented without hesitation, being but a tool in the hands of her parents, and a few months later the wedding took place with enormous pomp in the Cathedral ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... moustache of military cut. It was Brahim Bey, the most valiant colonel of the Regency of Tunis, aide-de-camp of the former Bey who had made the fortune of Jansoulet. The glorious exploits of this warrior showed themselves written in wrinkles, in blemishes wrought by debauchery upon the nerveless under-lip that hung as it were relaxed, and upon his eyes without lashes, inflamed and red. It was a head such as one may see in the dock at certain criminal trials that are held with closed doors. The other guests were seated pell-mell, just as they had ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... uncompromising poet, not pliant and easy like Horace, animadverted like an incorruptible censor on the vices which were undermining the moral health and preparing the way for violence; on the hypocrisy of philosophers and the cruelty of tyrants; on the frivolity of women and the debauchery of men. He discoursed on the vanity of human wishes with the moral wisdom of Dr. Johnson, and urged self-improvement like Socrates ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... be refrained, is obscene discourse, which is the language only of proficients in debauchery, who never repent, but in a gaol or hospital; and whose carcases relish no better than their discourse, till the body becomes too nasty for the soul to stay any longer ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... children, and of dying like men, often base courtiers, more than once true knights, displaying constantly, amidst all these contradictions of bearing, only the overflowing of nature. Thus prepared, they could take in everything, sanguinary ferocity and refined generosity, the brutality of shameless debauchery, and the most divine innocence of love, accept all the characters, wantons and virgins, princes and mountebanks, pass quickly from trivial buffoonery to lyrical sublimities, listen alternately to the quibbles ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... put up for sale like the estate of a bankrupt, it would not fetch as much as she owes; yet this thoughtless wretch must go to war, and with the avowed design, too, of making us beasts of burden, to support her in riot and debauchery, and to assist her afterwards in distressing those nations who are now our best friends. This ingratitude may suit a Tory, or the unchristian peevishness of a fallen Quaker, but ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Mary Wortley Montague. You have not been witness to the rhapsody of mystic nonsense which these two fair ones debate incessantly, and consequently cannot figure what must be the issue of this triple alliance: we have some idea of it. Only figure the coalition of prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and metaphysics; all, except the second, understood by halves, by quarters, or not at all. You shall have the journals of this notable academy. Adieu, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... come as a kind of refrain, contrasting the quiet, continuous growth and holy service of the child Samuel with the black narrative of Eli's riotous sons. While the hereditary priests were plunging into debauchery, and making men turn away from the Tabernacle services, Hannah's son was ministering unto the Lord, and, though no priest, was 'girt with an ephod.' This white flower blossomed on a dunghill. The continuous ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was, freely and openly, a life of shameless debauchery, wholesale blackmail and political intrigue, it is marvellous how his power became so unlimited. To those who disbelieved in his doctrine or in his divinity, he simply smiled evilly, and said: "If you fail to do my bidding you will ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... name of Fishbourne in the reign of Charles II. published a vile play, called Sodom, so detestably obscene, that the earl of Rochester, then in the full career of licentiousness and debauchery, finding it ascribed to him, thought it necessary publicly to disclaim the infamy of the authorship. This circumstance, coupled with the gross tendency of most of even the best plays of that time, must convey to the reader a tolerably correct idea how far the wretched author had outstripped his ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... Ronald, but every man and boy in the ship entered fully into the captain's eagerness. All longed for prize-money; the greater number, probably, that they might spend it as sailors in those days got rid of their hard-earned gains, in wild extravagance and debauchery; a few might have thought of their old fathers, mothers, and sisters, whose comforts they hoped to increase; or some one, more romantic than his shipmates, might have had in view some quiet woodbine-covered cottage, on the sunny slope of a ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... was always to be found unfailing good sense. His very vices could not repress the clearness, the sincerity of his understanding. At the foot of the tribune, he was a man devoid of shame or virtue: in the tribune, he was an honest man. Abandoned to private debauchery, bought over by foreign powers, sold to the court in order to satisfy his lavish expenditures, he preserved, amidst all this infamous traffic of his powers, the incorruptibility of his genius. Of all the qualities of being the great man of an age, Mirabeau was wanting ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... is a meeting avowedly for merriment; in Ireland it is a nocturnal meeting avowedly for the purpose of watching and bewailing the dead; but, in reality, for gossiping and debauchery. See ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... you see things couldn't go on any longer as they were. (Whispers.) Debauchery in the ranks! I won't say anything about the officers; but when the men ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... thousand families, are happy; the district becomes populated; villages spring up where there were only farms before; farms rise where there was nothing; wretchedness disappears, and with wretchedness debauchery, prostitution, theft, murder; all vices disappear, all crimes: and this poor mother rears her child; and behold a whole country rich and honest! Ah! I was a fool! I was absurd! what was that I was saying about denouncing myself? I really must pay attention ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... was the most attractive part of the colony, and the scene of infinite idleness and debauchery in the early days of the Spanish settlement. As Margarite and other mutineers had acted, so did Roldan and his soldiers now act, making sallies against several of the chain of forts that stretched across the island, and ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... contrast between New Orleans and St. Louis, another city with a considerable number of French inhabitants, says: "The inhabitants of the city of St. Louis, like those old time simple and united patriarchs, do not live at all in debauchery as do a part of those of New Orleans. Marriage is honored there, and the children resulting from it share the inheritance of their parents without any quarrelling."[228] But, says Berquin-Duvallon, among a large percentage of the colonists about New Orleans, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... that he meant to assert an independent dominion, and publickly avowed these absurd and criminal pretensions. On returning from Parto, he remained a long while at Quito, continually feasting and rejoicing; he and his adherents abandoning themselves to every degree of licence and debauchery, particularly in regard to the sex. It is even asserted that Gonzalo caused a citizen of Quito to be assassinated, whose wife he publickly lived with, and that he hired a Hungarian soldier, named Vincente Pablo to execute this infamous deed. This man was afterwards hanged at Valladolid, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... commenced. The cultivators of vineyards began to pay their Indian peons with aguardiente, a real 'firewater.' The consequence was that on receiving their wages on Saturday evening, the laborers habitually met in great gatherings and passed the night in gambling, drunkenness, and debauchery. On Sunday the streets were crowded from morning until night with Indians,—males and females of all ages, from the girl of ten or twelve to the old man and ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... perpetrated in thy name! How abused is the word! Because of a misconception of an idea it has suffered more than any other in the English language. It has done duty in describing almost every form of license and licentiousness. It has been the cloak of debauchery and the excuse for sex degradation. It has been so misused as to bring the ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords
... pantaloons, with hook-nose, fox-eyes, grizzled billow of frowsy moustache, and chin of a beast of prey. This fellow, habitually one of the dogs lining the green tables of the foreign Baths, snapping for gold all day and half the night, to spend their winnings in debauchery and howl threats of suicide, never fulfilled early enough, when they lost, claimed his princedom on the strength of his father's murder of a reigning prince and sitting in his place for six months, till a merited shot from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pangs and pin-pricks gave a certain piquancy, even a significance to my dissipation—in fact, completely answered the purpose of an appetising sauce. There was a certain depth of meaning in it. And I could hardly have resigned myself to the simple, vulgar, direct debauchery of a clerk and have endured all the filthiness of it. What could have allured me about it then and have drawn me at night into the street? No, I had a lofty way of getting ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... of its own accord, and, with his two fists on his hips, he surveyed the assembled guests with a melancholy and defiant air. The fatigue of bivouacs, absinthe, and fever, an entire existence of wretchedness and debauchery, stood revealed in his dull eyes. His white lips quivered, exposing the gums. The vast sky, empurpled, enveloped him in a blood-red light; and his obstinacy in remaining there ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... that he will cure one and not another thereby; that sickness is bad, but he sends it upon whom he pleases, because those upon whom he visits it are bad; but we did not have so much sickness and death before the Christians came into the country, who have taught the people debauchery and excess; they are therefore much more miserable than they were before. The devil, who is wicked, instigates and urges them on, to all kinds of evil, drunkenness and excess, to fighting and war, and to strife and violence amongst themselves, by which many men are wounded ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... "liberty and equality. The liberty of London is the liberty of the best people,[Footnote: Honnestes gens, which cannot be exactly translated. Montesq., vii. 185. Vian, 112.] in which it differs from the liberty of Venice, "which is the liberty of debauchery." The equality of London is also the equality of the best people, in which it differs from the liberty of Holland, which is the ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... yet it is very healthy, and uncommonly fine for vegetation. Most of the disorders which exist in the settlement are the fruits of intemperance and debauchery, the necessary result of that fatal addiction to drunkenness, which produces mental imbecility and bodily decay. Frost is known but little; at least, ice is very seldom seen; and, I believe, snow has never yet appeared ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... "We two are brethren, and we have a third brother, a lewd fellow and good for nothing. When our father died, he left us some money, which we shared amongst us, and he took his part of the inheritance and wasted it in frowardness and debauchery, till he was reduced to poverty, when he came upon us and cited us before the magistrates, avouching that we had taken his good and that of his father, and we disputed the matter before the judges and lost the money. Then he waited awhile and attacked us a second time, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... months or a year. Then he made a division of the skins and dried meat, and repaired to Tortuga or one of the French settlements on the coast of Hispaniola to recoup his stock of ammunition and spend the rest of his gains in a wild carouse of drunkenness and debauchery. His money gone, he returned again to the hunt. The cow-killers, as they had neither wife nor children, commonly associated in pairs with the right of inheriting from each other, a custom which was called "matelotage." These private associations, however, did not prevent ...
— The Buccaneers in the West Indies in the XVII Century • Clarence Henry Haring
... from their roofs; (Lacretelle, Histoire de France pendant le 18me Siecle (Paris, 1819) i. 271.) but contents himself with partridges and grouse. Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus. Nevertheless, one has still partly a feeling with the lady Marechale: "Depend upon it, Sir, God thinks twice before damning a man of that quality." (Dulaure, vii. 261.) ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... away, on this same road, Louis Quinze built a delicious summer villa for Mlle. de Romans, and the curious in such things will discover that the wayside casinos are adorned in a style that recalls traditions of the ingenious taste displayed in debauchery by our ancestors who, with all the license paid to their charge, sought to invest ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... is no doubt about it. And don't you think that is really just as disgraceful debauchery, in its town way, ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... with the remarks, that the absence of recognized public resorts and agents of vice may be dearly purchased when parents make a traffic in their own houses of their children's shame, and that perhaps as far as the state is concerned the debauchery of a few is a less evil than the dissoluteness of the whole population. More I cannot and need not say. With respect to other sins against the Decalogue, it is an easier task to speak. There is very little drunkenness in Rome I freely admit, but then ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... or so John had been kept shut up in a prison dungeon, evidence of his own faithfulness, and of the low moral tone, or absence of moral tone, of the time. Then one night there is a prolonged, debased debauchery in a magnificent palace; the cunning, cruel scheme of the woman whose wrong relation to Herod John had honestly condemned. The dancing young princess, the drunken oath, the terrible request, the glowing-coal eyes closed, ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... with a woman meant inevitably doing a woman harm—I won't undertake to decide; only in all his behaviour with the fair sex he was extremely delicate. Women felt this, and were the more ready to sympathise with him and help him, until at last he revolted them by his drunkenness and debauchery, by the desperateness of which I have spoken already.... I can think of no ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... journey from London to Oxford is so easily performed, it is amusing to read of Prideaux's miserable adventures, in the diligence, between a lady of easy manners, a "pitiful rogue," and two undergraduates who "sordidly affected debauchery." ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... land, affected nobles and people with its baleful influence. All law was at an end: the people, even while they murmured against the King, followed his evil example; and history shrinks from the scenes of debauchery and licentiousness, robbery and murder, which desecrated the land. But this state of things could not last long, while there still remained some noble hearts amongst the Castilians. Five years after their marriage, the Queen was said to have given birth to a daughter, ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... had loved exclusively, he endeavoured in vain to regain her affection; and then sought in new vices compensation for the happiness he had lost, and gave himself up to sensuality. Ardent in everything, he carried debauchery to a monstrous extent, and as if his palaces were not large enough for his desires, he assumed various disguises; sometimes in order to traverse the streets by night in search of the lowest pleasures; sometimes penetrating by day into churches ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... than the fact that he resists efforts to reclaim him. Ask these faithful and benevolent missionaries who go down into these dens of vice and pollution, to pour more light into the mind, and to induce these outcasts to leave their drunkenness and their debauchery,—ask them if they find that human nature is any different there from what it is elsewhere, so far as yielding to the claims of God and law is concerned. Do they tell you that they are uniformly successful in inducing these sinners to leave their sins? that they never find ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... and audacity. He was a man of gigantic size, and possessed a voice of thunder. His countenance was that of an Ogre on the shoulders of a Hercules. He was as fond of the pleasures of vice as of the practice of cruelty; and it was said there were times when he became humanized amidst his debauchery, laughed at the terror which his furious declamations excited, and might be approached with safety, like the Maelstrom at the turn of tide. His profusion was indulged to an extent hazardous to his popularity, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... faithful admonition, however well it appeared to be taken off the marquis's hand for the present, yet it appeared afterwards that this godly freedom was never forgot, until it was again repaid him with the highest resentment (such was the way to hearken to his counsel); for if debauchery and dissimulation had ever been accounted among the liberal sciences, then this prince was altogether a ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... graphic style, places him before us as if he were an acquaintance,—aloof from the world; immersed in the study of his high calling, with his brow never unbent from care and thought; severely abstemious in the midst of dissoluteness and debauchery; a water-drinker among Greeks; like that other Agonistes, elected and ordained to struggle, to suffer, and to perish for a people ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... references to poesia, as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars. This it is whose enemies he so vigorously combats—the frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... myriads of years ever a fighting animal when certain conditions exist in his environment. Though, through education, man be habituated in social and intelligent behavior or, through license, in sexual debauchery, still, at those times when his life or liberty is threatened, his instinct-emotional nature will inhibit either social thought or sex ideas, and present him as merely an irrational fighting animal. ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Varney, dismounting, rifled his pockets, turning out the lining, that it might appear he had fallen by robbers. He secured the Earl's packet, which was his chief object; but he also took Lambourne's purse, containing some gold pieces, the relics of what his debauchery had left him, and from a singular combination of feelings, carried it in his hand only the length of a small river, which crossed the road, into which he threw it as far as he could fling. Such are the strange remnants ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Terrorists were visible in the Paris of her youth. Some, of course, had gone to earth under aliases, but most of them were dead. The Terror which the Terrorists felt as much as inspired, the excitement, and probably also the debauchery of the time when everyone felt, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die," did not create an atmosphere in which people cultivated hygienic habits or studied rules of "how to ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... plenishing of your Sabine farm; if you deny my assertion I ask who dare wager 1,000 sesterces on its untruth? You have squandered more than a third of the property you inherited from your father and dissipated it in debauchery" (Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, vii, 11). It was about this time that the Oppian law came up for repeal. The stipulations of this law were as follows: No woman should have in her dress above half an ounce of gold, nor wear a garment of different colors, nor ride in a carriage in the city ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... themselves into the Management of their publick Affairs. They seem to endeavour all they can, (for what Policy I know not) to encourage the young Cacklogallinian Nobility and Gentry, in a Contempt of Religion, and in all Debauchery, perhaps to render them supine and thoughtless; and bringing them up without Principle, they may be fit Tools to work ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... feeble in their circumstances, easily over-reached, easily seduced. If they are many, the wages of corruption are the lower; and would to God it were not rather a contemptible and hypocritical adulation than a charitable sentiment, to say that there is already no debauchery, no corruption, no bribery, no perjury, no blind fury, and interested faction among the electors in many parts of this kingdom: nor is it surprising, or at all blamable, in that class of private men, when they see ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... if modesty, and decency, and chastity, and, in one word, temperance, is only upheld by the fear of punishment or infamy, and not out of regard to their own sanctity, then what lengths will adultery and debauchery and lust shrink from proceeding to, if there is a hope either of escaping detection, or of obtaining impunity ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... through all the lodging-houses in the Latin Quarter, in vain had she led a low, riotous life. Her nerves were ruined. Debauchery ceased to give her a sufficiently violent shock to render her oblivious of the past. She resembled one of those drunkards whose scorched palates remain insensible to the most violent spirits. She had done with lust, and the society of her paramours only worried and wearied her. ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... occasions to procure ardent spirits, and entice the Indians to drunkenness, and other acts of immorality; being apparently aware that with the introduction of virtue and knowledge among these people will be the departure of gain which arises from abuse, fraud, and debauchery. 2. That these agents are not always men who respect the Sabbath. 3. That the Missionary's "absurd advice" was in effect that the Indians should apply to their Great Father to remove such agents from among them. 4. That their "craft being endangered," ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... existed, and even triumphed in the mere smother and froth of life—the brilliant froth. There thoughts, sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions too, are nothing but agitation in empty space—to amuse life—a sort of superior debauchery, exciting and fatiguing, meaning nothing, leading nowhere. She is the creature of that circle. And I ask myself if she is obeying the uneasiness of an instinct seeking its satisfaction, or is it a revulsion of feeling, or is she merely deceiving her own heart ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... of them shouted a name, generally Peden's name, or the name of some dealer or bouncer in his hall. Nobody answered, nobody raised hand or voice to interfere or protest. During their short reign of pillage and debauchery under the protection of the city marshal, the members of the gang had not made a friend who cared to risk his skin to ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... eating appears! Miserably hot with gluttonous debauchery. He has feasted upon a thousand deaths! Belshazzar's court fed on fish of every type, birds of every flight, brutes of every clime, and added thereto each finer luxury known in the catalogue ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... performed some good actions amid a multitude of bad ones. He robbed with a furious rapacity, and granted favors with great generosity; he was intrepid in action; affable in company; a debauchee at table, but gay in debauchery; and particularly remarkable for his frank and open behavior. He was highly pleased with Zadig, whose lively ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... Hopkins had boasted to the other that they need not fear conviction, because his father would certainly get them clear; and they had planned what they would do after the trial was over, wallowing in anticipations of a course of crime and debauchery. ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... side and sucked blood from the wounds—a modern "Succubus." Pare mentions the perverted appetites of pregnant women, and says that they have been known to eat plaster, ashes, dirt, charcoal, flour, salt, spices, to drink pure vinegar, and to indulge in all forms of debauchery. Plot gives the case of a woman who would gnaw and eat all the linen off her bed. Hufeland's Journal records the history of a case of a woman of thirty-two, who had been married ten years, who acquired a strong taste for charcoal, and was ravenous for it. It ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... wealth and dignities, he has sent robbers to invade my patrimony. Avaricious and sparing of his own possessions, he is lavish of those of others, and thus enriches libertines and profligates who have consumed the patrimony of their fathers in debauchery." ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... refined simplicity of nature worship there gradually evolved a phase of worship, which in the beginning had for its basic principle an exalted ideal of the purpose and the powers of the female sex-function; but this ideal sunk to the level of debauchery and sex-degradation, in which the symbol of the female sex-organ of generation was worshipped, literally, although not reverently; and yet from the fact that it is only upon the temples and in the groves dedicated to worship that are found the carvings of the generative organs of either ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... wages; it damages the small investor, discourages thrift, and encourages gambling and speculation; while perhaps worst of all is the trickiness and dishonesty which it implies—for harm to morals is worse than any possible harm to material interests, and the debauchery of politics and business by great dishonest corporations is far worse than any actual material evil they do the public. Until the National Government obtains, in some manner which the wisdom of the Congress may suggest, proper control ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... penitents. One of his biographers says that "the most remarkable change that was apparent in the manners of the people, in their recreations and amusements, was the abandonment of demoralizing practices, of debauchery of all kinds, of profane songs of a licentious character which the lower grades of the people especially were greatly addicted to; and the growth of a new taste and passion for spiritual hymns and sacred poetry that ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... or Jonson's throughout the year, and he added, that they "understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better, whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done." Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a gentleman in Shakspere, nor was it altogether so in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their gentlemen are gallant and passionate lovers, gay cavaliers, generous, courageous, courteous—according to the fashion of their times—and sensitive on the ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the daring of Armigell, the adventurer, with the evil disposition of Esme, the Lieutenant of the Tower. No sooner had he become master of his fortune than he took to dice, drink, and debauchery with all the extravagance of the last century. He was foremost in every riot, most notorious of all the notorious ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... playful and sprightly yet already somewhat decadent side of a strong race. It smacks rather of the Parc-aux-Cerfs than of the Hotel de Rambouillet. It is a race of the strong rather than of the sweet; I incline to lay a little debauchery to its charge, and more than I should wish in brilliant and generous natures; it is gallantry after the fashion of the Marechal de Richelieu, high spirits and frolic carried rather too far; perhaps we may see in it the outrances of another age, the Eighteenth Century pushed to extremes; ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... subject. By freedom do we mean the absence of all restraint in private life, the non-interference by the state in the details of ordinary intercourse? According to such a view, the old government of Venice and the present government of Austria, where debauchery is more than tolerated, would be freer than the Puritan commonwealths in North America, where dramatic representations were prohibited as impious, and death was the legal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... thought these recreations better than gaming for money, or going forth to places of debauchery." ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... the roadhouse was but the beginning. All at once Vandover rushed into a career of dissipation, consumed with the desire of vice, the perverse, blind, and reckless desire of the male. Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, debauchery, he knew them all. He rubbed elbows with street walkers, with bookmakers, with saloonkeepers, with the exploiters of lost women. The bartenders of the city called him by his first name, the policemen, the night detail, were familiar with his face, the drivers ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... it may be remembered, the hostess of the Dark House at Queenhithe,—whence wine, ale, and brandy of inferior quality were dispensed, in false measures, and at high prices, throughout the prison, which in noise and debauchery rivalled, if it did not surpass, ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... flippant, yet feeble. In truth he had no great ability of any kind, but dauntless courage and high animal spirits. Nor should we deny him another much rarer praise,—a vein of good humor and kindliness, which did not forsake him through all his long career, amidst the riot of debauchery or the rancor of faction. So agreeable and insinuating was his conversation, that more than one fair dame as she listened found herself forget his sinister squint and his ill-favored countenance. He used to say of himself ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... show that on the 19th the German soldiers gave themselves up to debauchery in the streets of Liege, and on the night of the 20th (Thursday) a massacre took place in the streets, beginning near the Cafe Carpentier, at which there is said to have been a dinner attended by Russian and other students. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... was the probable destiny of the Pandora. Her voyage was to be a success; five hundred more unfortunate beings were to swell the ranks of slavery—her captain would be enriched—her crew would receive bounty and live for a time in riotous debauchery—and all this at the expense of every right of humanity—every principle ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... was Cecil's; the four others were Arabs, armed to the teeth and mad with drink, who had spent the whole day in drunken debauchery; pouring in raki down their throats until they were wild with its poisonous fire, and had darted headlong, all abreast, down out of the town; overriding all that came in their way, and lashing their poor beasts with their sabers till the horses' flanks ran blood. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... their fleets, no material irregularities; no tumultuous drinking assemblies: whereas in our continental towns, the thoughtless seaman indulges himself in the coarsest pleasures; and vainly thinking that a week of debauchery can compensate for months of abstinence, foolishly lavishes in a few days of intoxication, the fruits of half a year's labour. On the contrary all was peace here, and a general decency prevailed throughout; the reason I believe is, that almost everybody here is married, for they get ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... shrines become the dens of a prostitution which forms part of the homage rendered to the gods; the religious rites of ancient Asia, and those of Greece which fell under their influence, are notorious for their lewdness. The temples of false deities, too often defiled by debauchery, are too often also dishonored by frightful sacrifices. The ancient civilization of Mexico was elegant and even refined in some respects; but the altars were stained, every year, with the blood of thousands of human beings; and the votaries of this sanguinary ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... college young Scatcherd did shine as long as such lustre was permitted him. Here, indeed, his father, who had striven only to encourage him at Eton, did strive somewhat to control him. But that was not now easy. If he limited his son's allowance, he only drove him to do his debauchery on credit. There were plenty to lend money to the son of the great millionaire; and so, after eighteen months' trial of a university education, Sir Roger had no alternative but to withdraw his son from his ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope |
