"Dissoluteness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Puritanism and Republicanism, and many who, though attached to the Church and to hereditary monarchy, had been driven into opposition by dread of Popery, by dread of France, and by disgust at the extravagance, dissoluteness, and faithlessness of the court. The power of this band of politicians was constantly growing. Every year some of those members who had been returned to Parliament during the loyal excitement of 1661 had dropped off; and the vacant seats had generally been filled ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... bestowed sometimes by a profligate woman on her paramour, sometimes by a warlike baron on a kinsman still a stripling. We read of bishops of ten years old, of bishops of five years old, of many popes who were mere boys, and who rivalled the frantic dissoluteness of Caligula, nay, of a female pope. And though this last story, once believed throughout all Europe, has been disproved by the strict researches of modern criticism, the most discerning of those who ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sturgeon, but the common people who dwelt in the vicinity of the convent, and especially those poor persons to whom the river had been heretofore a source of support, were neither slow in seeing the cause nor in publishing the consequences to the world. Thus stood matters: dissoluteness of life on the one hand, distress on the other; profligacy and poverty, extravagance ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... of the gulf that gradually had opened up between them. The lad was righteous and God-fearing, truthful and sober, filled with stern ideals by which he sought to shape his life. He had taxed Crispin with his dissoluteness, and Crispin, despising him for a milksop, had returned to his disgust with mockery, and had found a fiendish pleasure in arousing that disgust ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... his errors, but the arguments of the Scottish proto-martyr, and above all the spectacle of his heroism at the stake, impressed Alesius so powerfully that he was entirely won over to the cause of the Reformers. A sermon which he preached before the Synod at St Andrews against the dissoluteness of the clergy gave great offence to the provost, who cast him into prison, and might have carried his resentment to the extremest limit had not Alesius contrived to escape to Germany in 1532. After travelling in various countries of northern ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Plutarch—[who, however, only gives one instance; and in this he tells us that the man visited his wife privately.]—has seen his courtiers repudiate theirs, whom they loved; and, which is yet more, uncleanliness and all manner of dissoluteness have so been in fashion; as also disloyalty, blasphemy, cruelty, heresy, superstition, irreligion, effeminacy, and worse, if worse there be; and by an example yet more dangerous than that of Mithridates' flatterers, who, as their master pretended to ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... was the stern answer. "To come here and prate to me of my dead father's dissoluteness and of an ancient quarrel between him and yours, to bleat of my trumped-up course of piracy and my own ways of life as a just cause why I may not wed your sister whilst the real consideration in your mind, the real spur to your hostility is not more than the matter of some few paltry ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... prettily one of the girls, in glossy silk, was leaning over the shoulder of the "lost" one! How much nicer to be lost than found!—anyway, that was the impression the feast made on Walter. The true purpose of the picture—to deter people from a life of dissoluteness—escaped Walter entirely. Perhaps he knew what it meant; but in his heart he felt that it meant something else. What attracted him most was not the food and drink, under which the table "groaned," nor the sinful sensuality painted on the faces of the ladies. It was the ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... satisfactory, daughter. But when you proceeded to point out to these plebeians how much of their misery arose from their own idleness, and ignorance, and dissoluteness, and abasement before those higher in station, and jealousy of the best among themselves—what said ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... IT, Act iv. Sc. 1./ Annotation of the Commentators./ That is, been at Venice, which was much visited by the young English/ gentlemen of those times, and was then what Paris is now—the seat of all dissoluteness. S.A./ Second Edition./ London:/ John Murray, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... tyrants and pleasure-seekers, their palaces the seats of scenes of cruelty and debauchery surpassing the deeds of Nero. Two emperors in particular, Kee and Chow, are held up as monsters of wickedness and examples of dissoluteness beyond comparison. The last, under the influence of a woman named Ta-Ke, became a frightful example of sensuality and cruelty. Among the inventions of Ta-Ke was a cylinder of polished brass, along which her victims were forced ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... to talk of the religion of a set of people, whose moral characters are so depraved, as to make it evident they believe in nothing capable of being a check to their passions. They are usually accounted pilferers, cheats, faithless, and abandoned to dissoluteness. ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... [3], the chief city of the Mang [4]; but his authority in the State greatly increased. 'He strengthened the ducal House and weakened the private Families. He exalted the sovereign, and depressed the ministers. A transforming government went abroad. Dishonesty and dissoluteness were ashamed and hid their heads. Loyalty and good faith became the characteristics of the men, and chastity and docility those of the women. Strangers came in crowds from other States [5].' Confucius became the idol of the people, and flew in songs through ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... passion and immorality, than even the obscene literature for the suppression of which such active measures have recently been taken. The more exquisitely painted the scenes of vice, the more dangerously enticing. Novel-reading has led thousands to lives of dissoluteness. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... separator seldom buzzed with soothing melody as the honey, whirled from the dripping frames of combs, pattered against its resonant sides. Bees seemed less and less numerous. An air of idleness, almost dissoluteness and despair, brooded over some of the hives. The strong robbed the weak; and the weak contented themselves with gathering in listless groups, murmuring plaintively. If the hives were inquiringly tapped, instead of a furious and instant alarm and angry outpouring of excited ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... tries to tell. Lutwyche had hated Jules for long. There were many reasons, but the chief was that reported judgment of the "crowd of us," as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Greatly, and above all else, had Jules despised their dissoluteness: how could they be other than the poor devils they were, with those debasing habits which they cherished? "He could never," had said Lutwyche to Gottlieb, "be supercilious enough on that matter. . . . He was not to ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... the question may be succinctly stated as follows: Without entering into details, it will be generally admitted that I am accurate in saying that many people condone in young men a course of conduct with regard to the other sex which is incompatible with strict morality, and that this dissoluteness is pardoned generally. Both parents and the government, in consequence of this view, may be said to wink at profligacy, and even in the last resource to encourage its practice. I am of opinion that this is ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... "that Pomponia and Lygia poison wells, murder children caught on the street, and give themselves up to dissoluteness! Folly! Thou, Vinicius, wert at their house for a time, I was there a little while; but I know Pomponia and Aulus enough, I know even Lygia enough, to say monstrous and foolish! If a fish is the ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... done too, by Poseidon! We men must share the blame of their ill conduct; it is we who teach them to love riot and dissoluteness and sow the seeds of wickedness in their hearts. You see a husband go into a shop: "Look you, jeweller," says he, "you remember the necklace you made for my wife. Well, t'other evening, when she was dancing, the catch came open. Now, I am bound to start for Salamis; will ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in frightful alarms, and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism; there is somewhat not holy in it; it seems not to know that other souls are of one texture with it; it has pride; it is the extreme of individual nature. Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it. There is ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... his own will, and, had he desired to do so, could have overcome his evil tendencies; instead, he openly countenanced and even encouraged dissoluteness and elegant debauchery, as long as he himself was not deprived of the lady upon whom his capricious fancy happened to fall. His advances were but seldom repulsed; but upon making his usual audacious proposals to the Marquise de Guercheville, ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... adequate idea of the range of Fielding's pictures of human nature, the reader must consult the novels themselves. Propriety forbids the insertion here of quotations which could convey an impression of the happy dissoluteness of Tom Jones, the brutal coarseness of Squire Western, or the scenes of unblushing license which pervade the novels of Henry Fielding. But a sample of the witty, jovial tone which has made these novels so popular may be of interest to readers who are not inclined ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... begin to pommel each other and to tear collars and periwigs. A speaker in the House of Commons gives offence to the Court. He is waylaid by a gang of bullies, and his nose is cut to the bone. This ignominious dissoluteness, or rather, if we may venture to designate it by the only proper word, blackguardism of feeling and manners, could not but spread from private to public life. The cynical sneers, and epicurean sophistry, which had driven honour and virtue from one part of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... worthy of a man of rank, or of a sensible person; and Cicero says: "No man who is sober dances, unless he is out of his mind, either when alone, or in any decent society; for dancing is the companion of wanton conviviality, dissoluteness, and luxury." ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... survivor of us endeavour, after the death of either of us, to maintain the reputation and dignity of the deceased, by avoiding levity of behaviour, dissoluteness of life and disgraceful marriage; not only so, but that such survivor persevere in good offices to the children of the deceased, as a discreet, faithful, and honourable ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... his mind that he might have spent them more wisely. "O that I could recall the last two years and a half,"[49] he wrote to Kaethchen Schoenkopf, and he warns a male correspondent in Leipzig to "beware of dissoluteness."[50] And the state of his health during the greater part of this time in Frankfort was such as to strengthen this mood. Immediately after his return from Leipzig he was threatened with pulmonary disease, and ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... unsuccessfully, nor was his successor Gaius Hostilius Mancinus more fortunate (617). But the catastrophe was brought about not so much by the arms of the Numantines, as by the lax and wretched military discipline of the Roman generals and by—what was its natural consequence—the annually- increasing dissoluteness, insubordination, and cowardice of the Roman soldiers. The mere rumour, which moreover was false, that the Cantabri and Vaccaei were advancing to the relief of Numantia, induced the Roman army to evacuate the camp by night without orders, and to seek shelter in the entrenchments ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... spread with plate and wines, and the daintiest preparations of Roman cookery. Caesar commented on the scene with mournful irony. "And these men," he said, "accused my patient, suffering army, which had not even common necessaries, of dissoluteness and profligacy!" ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... that their wounds and diseases might be hid. These artifices were not only fraudulent but fatal; but these, it was obvious, would of themselves fall with the trade. A third was, excessive labour joined with improper food; and a fourth was, the extreme dissoluteness of their manners. These, also, would both of them be counteracted by the impossibility of getting further supplies: for owners, now unable to replace those slaves whom they might lose, by speedy purchases in the ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... us to let our thoughts run upon whatsoever things are pure, if we would inherit the Kingdom of God; and the divine Plato tells us that we have within us a many-headed beast and a man, and that by dissoluteness we feed or strengthen the beast in us, and starve the man; and finally, following the divine Plato among the sages at a humble distance, comes the prosaic and unfashionable Paley, and says in his precise way: that 'this vice has a tendency, which other species of ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... compact the rainbow, and if they be placed with the same advantage towards Heaven as those are to the sun, they too have their splendour; and like that bow, while they unbend into seasonable showers, yet they promise, that there shall not be a second flood. But the dissoluteness of grief, the prodigality of sorrow, is neither to be indulged in a man's self, nor complyed with in others. If that were allowable in these cases, Eli's was the readyest way and highest compliment of mourning, who fell back ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... to notice that frequency of divorce always goes along with the dissoluteness of society. Rome for five hundred years had not one case of divorce. Those were her days of glory and virtue. Then the reign of vice began, and divorce became epidemic. If you want to know how rapidly the Empire went down, ask Gibbon. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... the miller's daughter. It must be admitted that for once the inexorable parent may have been in the right. Tales had reached him, unhappily too late to prevent the formation of an acquaintance between the young squires and his daughters, of the profligacies—dissoluteness with women and at the gaming-table—of both these young men. And it is little wonder that he resolutely opposed the union of Thornton and Maisie—she a girl of nineteen!—at least until there was some sign of reform in the youth, some turning ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... astonished that she had vices, but the wonder was that she had by nature so many good qualities." Jolly, kindly, generous, a rebel against etiquette, and an habitual breaker of promises, she was long popular in Spain, in spite of a career of dissoluteness only equalled by that ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... in such matters, quite as little, perhaps, had the two other counts in his London impeachment. One imputed savage cruelty to him; the other, with a Johnny-rawness that we find it difficult to comprehend, profligacy and dissoluteness of life. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... which he could point with pride. The floors were littered with papers; the walls were greasy and bedecked with malodorous notations, documents and pictures; the windows were smoky and useless; the clerk's desk bore every suggestion of dissoluteness. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... thus merely increasing the disorder and instability of life. Or it may serve to exaggerate the appeal of the present interest, until it becomes ungovernable and obscures ulterior interests. This tendency to promote dissoluteness is the most serious charge which Plato brings against the arts. After referring to the unseemly hilarity to which men are incited by ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... clever, kind, highly-bred Lord Carlisle was one of the English fine gentlemen who were wellnigh ruined by the awful debauchery and extravagance which prevailed in the great English society of those days. Its dissoluteness was awful: it had swarmed over Europe after the Peace; it had danced, and raced, and gambled in all the Courts. It had made its bow at Versailles; it had run its horses on the plain of Sablons, near Paris, and created the Anglomania ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... opposed to Utah and especially Egypt contrasted with Arabia. In these hot damp climates the venereal requirements and reproductive powers of the female greatly exceed those of the male; and hence the dissoluteness of morals would be phenomenal, were it not obviated by seclusion, the sabre and the revolver. In cold-dry or hot-dry mountainous lands the reverse is the case; hence polygamy there prevails whilst the low countries require polyandry in either form, legal or illegal (i,e. prostitution) ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... of the preceding. "She was a tame little woman of a servant-like meekness, whose dissoluteness had remained a matter of legend in Plassans." She was consulted by Madame Mouret regarding the Home for Girls proposed by Abbe Faujas, and agreed to act on the ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... For under an outward show of levity, profusion, improvidence, and eccentric impudence, he was in truth one of the most mercenary and crafty of mankind. He was now no longer young, and was expiating by severe sufferings the dissoluteness of his youth: but age and disease had made no essential change in his character and manners. He still, whenever he opened his mouth, ranted, cursed and swore with such frantic violence that superficial observers set him down for the wildest of libertines. The multitude ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cowardice "to side with neither faction, and be ready and willing to paint the faces of both." And then he commenced to talk disrespectfully of his rival's art. He claimed for his own portraits greater purity of look and style. 'The ladies of Lawrence,' he said, 'show a gaudy dissoluteness of taste, and sometimes trespass on moral as well as professional chastity.' This was purposed to be a terrible blow to Lawrence. Of course there was plenty of repetition of the remark, and people ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... of an Officer" [Footnote: Souvenirs d'un Officier du 2me de Zouaves. Paris, 1859.] sums up the character of the Zouaves in a few words which clear them from the other two charges, those of dissoluteness and drunkenness. He says,—"Beside the condition of success resulting from the first organization, it must be said, that, somewhat later, the happy idea came to be adopted, of giving to the Zouaves destined to fight in the light-armed troops the costume of Chasseurs—pied. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... in different centuries, who have written the history of the Valley of Rieti, assure us, that when dissoluteness recommenced in that country, the wolves returned and made great havoc. Wading, who wrote in Italy in the 17th century, says, that the inhabitants of the valley admitted this to be the case. It is certain by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures, that ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... and face he might have been considered one of the handsomest of men, if, at the same time, he had not had something of the sloven in his whole appearance. In like manner his splendid natural talents were marred by an incredible levity, and his excellent temper by an unbounded dissoluteness. He had an open, jovial face, rather more round than oval: the organs of the senses, the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, could be called rich; they showed a decided fulness, without being too large. His mouth was particularly charming, owing to his curling lips; and his whole physiognomy had ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
