"Prurient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... escapade was not forgotten by the malicious. No sooner had he become conspicuous in his profession and in politics, than the story of his intercourse with Miss Culling was told in coffee-rooms with all the exaggerations that prurient fancy could devise or enmity dictate. The old tale of a secret marriage—or, still worse, of a mock marriage—was caught from the lips of some Hertford scandal-monger, and conveyed to the taverns and drawing-rooms of London. In taking Sir Robert Booth's daughter to Church, he was said to ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... reader of these lines, first, get a correct mental attitude toward what is about to be said. Banish all prurient curiosity, put aside all thought of shame or shock, (these two will be hardest for young women to overcome, because of their training in false modesty and prudishness) and endeavor to approach the subject in a reverent, open-eyed, ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... and rags which they suspend to a tree entitled Shajarat al-Sitt—the Lady's tree—an Acacia Albida which, according to some travellers, is found only here and at Sayda (Sidon) where an avenue exists. The people of Kasrawan, a Christian province in the Libanus, inhabited by a peculiarly prurient race, also hold high festival under the far-famed Cedars, and their women sacrifice to Venus like the Kadashah of the Phoenicians. This survival of old superstition is unknown to missionary "Handbooks," but amply deserves the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... towards which the plan of redemption tends is the chief object of interest in prophetic representation. To nourish the faith and hope of the church, to invigorate her in her present struggles by the assurance of final victory—this, and not the gratification of a prurient curiosity respecting the exact dates of "times and seasons," is the main design of prophecy. That it has other subordinate ends need not be denied. It challenges for itself the attribute of omniscience, and its fulfilment is, to those who live after it, a proof ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... sure foundation. It is the way to the Unity of Government and People that the thoughts both of The Prince and the Discorsi lead, though the incidents be so nakedly presented as to shock the timorous and vex the prurient, the puritan, and the evil thinker. The people must obey the State and fight and die for its salvation, and for the Prince the hatred of the subjects is never good, but their love, and the best way to gain it is by 'not interrupting the ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... prose. The same train of thought latently underlies the feelings of most Protestants too, though it is true any one would now shrink from expressing it with such frankness and horrible gusto. But what else means the minute morbid anatomy of death beds, the prurient curiosity to know how the dying one bore himself in the solemn passage? How commonly, if one dies without physical anguish, and with the artificial exultations of a fanatic, rejoiceful auguries are drawn! if he dies in physical suffering, and with apparent ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the dance, or anything but an exhilarating and altogether delightful outward manifestation of an inner sense of harmony, joy and well being. Under the stress of morbid feeling, or the overstrain of religious excitement, coarsely organized natures see or create something gross and prurient in things intrinsically sweet and pure, and it happens that when the dance has fallen to their shaping and direction, as in religious rites, then it has received its most objectionable development and perversion. But the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... notice in passing, to be partially drawn from D'Holbach,—a man performing so long an experiment on these two souls, with the terrible curiosity of a surgeon engaged in vivisection.[54] It was, however, much less difficult for contemporaries than it is for us to accept so unwholesome and prurient a situation. They forgot all the evil that was in it, in the charm of the account of Wolmar's active, peaceful, frugal, sunny household. The influence of this was immense.[55] It may be that the overstrained scene where Saint Preux ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... our times, The gossip, with an eager ear for crimes, Lurks, half-admiring, all-recording there, Watching Narcissus with persistent stare, And ready note-book. Nothing but a Voice? No, but its babblings travel, and rejoice A myriad prurient ears with noisome news, Fit only for the shambles and the stews. These hear, admire, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... another man whose agony he looked upon. It was quite beyond his own enduring. Lucy's horrified shriek brought him more fully to his senses, and the screams of the children who scattered in every direction, crying as they ran on, only to creep back after a moment drawn by that prurient curiosity which is the one natural tie left between the buzzard ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... clothed, suggest only sensual thoughts—nay, the very modesty of the garments makes them the more insidious—the more dangerous. I would rather give my boy Jonson, Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher, whose very improper things 'are called by their proper names,' than let him dive in the prurient innuendo of ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... writing up the Flesh, glorifying it, praising it, and nothing more, or whether, on the contrary, he depicted it merely to buffet it—hating it. And, again, it would have done well to convince itself that there is a chaste as well as a prurient nude, and that it should not cry shame on every picture in which the nude is shown. Above all, it ought to have recognized that vices may well be depicted and studied with a view to exciting disgust of them and showing ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Kadijah died. All his 'ambition,' seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his 'fame,' the mere good opinion of neighbours that knew him, had been sufficient hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurient heat of his life all burnt out, and peace growing to be the chief thing this world could give him, did he start on the 'career of ambition;' and, belying all his past character and existence, set-up ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... stage presentation. Incest, when treated in the manner of Sophocles (Walpole justified himself by the example of "Oedipus"), or even of Ford, or of Shelley, may possibly claim a place among the themes which art is not quite forbidden to touch; but when handled in the prurient and crudely melodramatic fashion of this particular artist, it is merely offensive. "The Mysterious Mother," indeed, is even more absurd than horrible. Gothic machinery is present, but it is of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... it is preferred where an acrimonious state of the fluids prevails, indicated by prurient eruptions upon the skin, or in what has been called the ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... whose regret at the loss of that manuscript arises from some better motive than the mere disappointment of a prurient curiosity, I shall here add, that on the mysterious cause of the separation, it afforded no light whatever;—that, while some of its details could never have been published at all[1], and little, if any, of what it contained personal towards others could have appeared till long after the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... itself mysterious and holy. It appears that where marriage is solemnized by the church and blessed by the priest, it may at the same time be surrounded with customs and ideas of a frivolous, superficial, and even prurient character. We believed that two who love should be united in secret, before the public acknowledgment of their union, and should taste their apotheosis alone with nature. The betrothal might or might not be discussed and approved by the parents, but in either ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... What is more easily apprehended is the contempt of Henry Fielding—is the justice of that ridicule he was moved to visit it withal. To him, a scholar and a gentleman and a man of the world, Pamela was a new-fangled blend of sentimental priggishness and prurient unreality. To him the pretensions to virtue and consideration of the vulgar little hussy whom Richardson selected for his heroine were certainly not less preposterous than the titles to life and actuality of the wooden libertine whom Richardson put forth as his hero. He was artist ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... they wield for our warning and rebuke, for our encouragement and reward, an instrument which is like the dread thunderbolt of Jove, at once the most terrible and the most beneficent,—publicity. Some years ago, a number of ill-favored and prurient women and a number of licentious men formed themselves into a kind of society for the purpose of devising and promulgating a theory to justify the gratification of unbridled lust. They were called Free-Lovers. To have assailed their nightly ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... mixed than their sentiments. They had invented a composite jargon of expressions from all classes of society and every country under the sun—pedantic, slangy, classical, lyrical, precious, prurient, and low—a mixture of bawdy jests, affectations, coarseness, and wit, all of which seemed to have a foreign accent. Ironical, and gifted with a certain clownish humor, they had not much natural wit: ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... was wanted for the elevation of woman was to open to her new avenues of business. A very sad book was written a few months ago, "Dr. Sanger's work on Prostitution." It is a very dreadful book; not calculated, I think, to excite any prurient feeling in any one. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... 'see life,' or to know the secrets of wickedness, in order to be wise and good. 'Simple concerning evil' is a happier state than to have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Many a young man has been ruined, body and soul, by a prurient curiosity to know what sort of life dissipated men and women led, or what sort of books they were against which he was warned, or what kind of a place a theatre was, and so on. Eyes are greedy, and there ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... through; and I sought up others of a similar character, and in seeking for them I met books also of adventure, but by no means of a harmless description, lives of wicked and lawless men, Murray and Latroon—books of singular power, but of coarse and prurient imagination—books at one time highly in vogue; now deservedly forgotten, and most difficult ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... I have been taken seriously throughout my career. My lectures have been gravely discussed. My plays have been solemnly criticised by the amusing failures in literature who love to call themselves 'the gentlemen of the press.' My poems have been boycotted by prurient publishers; and my novel, 'The Soul of Bertie Brown,' has ruined the reputation of a magazine that had been successful in shocking the impious for centuries. Bishops have declared that I am a monster, and monsters have declared that I ought to be a bishop. And all this has befallen me because ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... place of Byron, the man who only struggles against it, and who shows his honesty and his greatness most by confessing that his struggles are ineffectual; that, Titan as he may look to the world, his strength is misdirected, a mere furious weakness, which proclaims him a slave in fetters, while prurient young gentlemen are fancying him heaping hills on hills, and scaling Olympus itself. They are tired of that notion, however, now. They have begun to suspect that Byron did not scale Olympus after all. How much more pleasant a leader, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... The conversation of the smoking-room is a little less apt to be risque; the possibility of masculine continence is more often taken for granted; solicitation on the streets is rare; few American publishers of repute dare to issue the semi-prurient style of novel at present so rife in England; the columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stage is distinctly healthier, and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means so popular, in spite of the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... of the last lecture,—while, on the other hand, we have absolutely ceased from the exercise of faithful imagination; and the only remnants of the desire of truth which remain in us have been corrupted into a prurient itch to discover the origin of life in the nature of the dust, and prove that the source of the order of the universe is the accidental ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... mere childish prejudice reinforced by outworn superstitions. The religious terror excited by certain formidable free-thinkers and anti-social philosophers in earlier days went much deeper than this, and was quite free from that mere prurient itch of perverted sensuality which inspires ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... may be said, lastly, with regard to prurient and polluted talk and unclean stories. Against these a Christian man will do well firmly and resolutely to set his face. Such things defile the mind. They are injurious both to him that hears and to him that speaks, in that they tend to engender a mental atmosphere in which the suggestions ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Despite prurient opposition it is making rapid headway. It is entering very largely into the instructive and the entertaining departments of the world's curriculum. Millions of dollars are annually expended in the production of films. Companies of trained and practiced actors are brought together to enact ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... do little harm to the rich. Those who consider Chartism as synonymous with devil-worship, should bless and encourage them, for the very reason for which we working men ought to dread them; for, quickened into prurient activity by the low, novel-mongering press, they help to enervate and besot all but the noblest minds among us. Here and there a Thomas Cooper, sitting in Stafford gaol, after a youth spent in cobbling shoes, vents his treasures of classic and historic learning in a "Purgatory of ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... keep to the open plain and trust to their speed, they are safe; but they have a prurient curiosity that sometimes betrays them to their ruin. When they have scud for some distance and left their pursuer behind, they will suddenly stop and turn to gaze at the object of their alarm. If the pursuit is not followed up they will, after a time, yield to their inquisitive hankering, and return ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... had few admirers. He delighted to revel in the details of the loves of the patriarchs, the unbridled passion of Potiphar's wife, the costume of Judith, her intercourse with Holophernes, and other subjects, the accounts of which his prurient fancy did not improve. His imaginative productions caused him many troubles. The Jesuits disavowed the work, and, as we have said, its author ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... encyclopaedic Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften. The eminence of the writers of these books and the mental calibre needed to read them suffice to show that we are not concerned, as a careless observer might suppose, with a matter of supply and demand in prurient literature, but with the serious and widespread appreciation of serious investigations. This same appreciation is shown not only by several bio-sociological periodicals of high scientific quality, but by the existence of a journal like Sexual-Probleme, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... reptile who is responsible for the slimy life of that prurient sheet, the Coyote, paid us a sneaking visit Saturday. If he had given us notice of his intentions, we would have prepared ourselves and torn his leprous hide from his dehauched and whiskey- poisoned frame, and polluted our fence with it, but he did not. True to his ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... all familiar through Thackeray's "History of the Georges" with the chronique scandaleuse of the Hanoverian dynasty. No doubt the Hohenzollern also have had their chronique scandaleuse and have also attracted the prurient curiosity of memoir writers. The Court of Berlin in the days of the polygamist King, Frederick William II., the successor of Old Fritz, was the most dissolute Court of Europe, as Berlin is to-day the most depraved city on the Continent. But somehow the scandals of the Hohenzollern seem to be irrelevant ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Her portrait had already been hawked about in the daily papers,—like those of the swell society set—and, like the latter, freely commented upon by bummers and bawds. She has the excuse of necessity for the sale of her picture, while her sisters in society are driven solely by a prurient itch for notoriety to exploit themselves in the public prints. It does not necessarily follow, as the sassiety sheets would have us believe, that every woman is unchaste whose portrait is found in a cigarette package—I have seen Queen Victoria's, Mrs. Cleveland's and the Princess of Wales' ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Rebellion remains gloriously distinct from the rubbish-heap of fiction by virtue of its intense sincerity and its frequent flashes of fine descriptive writing. The question of sex dominates it, and those of us who still think that such problems are merely sustenance for the prurient-minded may cast it impatiently aside. But others who like to watch a clever man feeling his way towards the light, and regard a novel as neither a bait nor a bauble, can be confidently advised to read it. They may be irritated, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 26, 1917 • Various
... Itch. A contagious prurient eruption. There are two kinds of itch, that which appears between the fingers, and under the joints of the knees and elbows; and that which seldom is seen in these places, but all over the other parts of the body. The latter is seldom thought to be the itch, as ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... thought for any one else.' On the contrary, he was a man full of keen interests, of which they were only one, and, as far as I saw, an entirely subordinate one. He was a broad-minded man, who hated petty misconception or a narrow view of anything, and he would have been horrified at the prurient indecency with which the most private affairs of the Carlyles have been exposed and distorted to please a public which really has a higher moral tone than is possessed by those who have ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... "calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion," and elsewhere of Keats' "prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady east of Temple Bar.... It is a better and a wiser thing," it commented, "to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... tragically the sinful service of Gallehault. Then it struck him that the great Gallehault of modern life—El Gran Galeoto—was the impalpable power of gossip, the suggestive force of whispered opinion, the prurient allurement of evil tongues. Set all society to glancing slyly at a man and a woman whose relation to each other is really innocent, start the wicked tongues a-babbling, and you will stir up a whirlwind which will blow them giddily into each other's arms. ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... the scale, and grows a trifle sharper. In fine, the effects observed in our autumn foliage may be traced in the people themselves, a heightening of colors; and while this accounts for much that is prurient and bizarre, it infolds also the best promise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... touch? quivering me to a new identity, Flames and ether making a rush for my veins, Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them, My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from myself, On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs, Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip, Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial, Depriving me of my best as for a purpose, Unbuttoning my clothes, holding ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Claudius, he was banished to Corsica at the instance of the Empress Messalina, on the charge of being the favoured lover of Julia Livilla, Caligula's youngest sister. Whether the scandal which connected his name with hers, or with that of her sister Agrippina, had any other foundation than the prurient gossip which raged round all the members of the imperial family, may well be doubted; but when Agrippina married Claudius, after the downfall and execution of Messalina seven years later, she recalled him from exile, obtained his nomination to ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... who was not wrong in heart somehow or other. Individuals so distinguished, are usually unhappy in their family relations—men not benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost hostile to them, yet lavishing money and labor and time on the race—the abstract notion." The prurient love of notoriety actuates some. There is much luxury in sentiment, especially if it can be indulged at the expense of others, and if there be added some share of envy or malignity, the temptation ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... critic, by some dark and prurient affinity of his imagination, saw nothing of the awful truths so clearly though briefly expressed, and finally came to the conclusion that the moral of the whole fiction was "that the Gospel has not set the relations of man and woman ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... In the third-floor-back of my skull I feel a light, airy, prurient, menacing tickling, Dainty as the pattering toes of nautch girls On a polished cabaret floor. Suddenly, With a crescendo like an approaching express train, The fury bursts upon me.... My brain explodes. Pinwheels of violet fire Whirl and spin before my bloodshot eyes— Violet, puce, ochre, ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... following them from block to block. He had no idea that the man could be following Mrs. Maroney, and supposed he must be following him. The idea flashed into his mind that it must be some inquisitive boor, who was following him merely out of prurient curiosity to see how he conducted himself with Mrs. Maroney. He did not mention the matter to her, but as he saw the man still following him his anger overflowed, and he determined that when he left Mrs. Maroney at Mitchell's, he ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... type of joke, but not unhealthy or prurient. Prototype probably Agesilaus and the younger Cyrus at the supper-table, with just ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... great posters with her name and Geoffrey's on them, the shameless pictures of her in his arms, the sickening details, the letters of the outraged matrons, the "Mothers of ten," and the moral-minded colonels—all, all! She heard the prurient scream of every male Elizabeth in England; the allusions in the House—the jeers, the bitter attacks of enemies and rivals. Then Lady Honoria would begin her suit, and it would all be dragged up afresh, and Geoffrey's fault would be on every lip, till he was ruined. ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... which promised nothing but delights of a spiritual order; a paradise which, whatever material or imaginative adjuncts it might have, certainly disclosed none; which presented no one thing to gratify the prurient curiosity of man's fancy, or the eager passions of his sensual nature; which must, in fact, have been about as inviting to the soul of a Heathen as the promise of an eternal Lent to an epicure! Surely these were resistless seductions. ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... masses, and which is absolutely pure. When I came out with Tit-Bits there was not a single popular paper containing fun or jokes or anything of the kind—except the illustrated ones—but what relied more or less upon prurient matter to tickle the fancies of prurient minds. Besides, my idea is that, just at present, the Board Schools tend to a certain hardness and narrowness of character, which is perhaps softened down by the development by these papers of the lighter ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... change. Sons and daughters revile their parents in gross language, and parents their children; men and women become almost like animals in the indulgence of their amorous propensities. They enact all that was ever portrayed by prurient artists in a bacchanalian festival or pandean orgy; and as the light of the sun they adore and the presence of numerous spectators seem to be no restraint on their indulgence, it cannot be expected that chastity is preserved when the shades ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... tin draperies in which ecclesiastical old women have swaddled the fair limbs of the marble. But in your prudery there is reason. So there is in the state censorship of the Press. The page may contain matter dangerous to bonos mores. Out with your scissors, censor, and clip off the prurient paragraph! We have nothing for it but to submit. Society, the despot, has given his imperial decree. We may think the statue had been seen to greater advantage without the tin drapery; we may plead that the moral were better might we recite the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... who sang and played lots, For Washington, Wesley and good Dr. Watts; His prurient plots pained Wesley and Watts, But Washington said he "enjoyed them ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various
... greatest of American poets, and he has equally warm admirers among the foreign literati. A Walt Whitman club is to be established in his honor at Philadelphia. Yet it is not long since Mr. Whitman was made the target of the "prurient prudes," who carry on the Comstockian movement of the Vice Society, and was ordered to expunge some of his writings. Mr. Whitman defied them, and his literary prestige has sustained him; but Mrs. Elmina Drake Slenker, of Western ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... and venomous opinion the undersigned begs to differ. The play is simply superb, in spite of the faults of the translation. It is shocking only to the most prurient of prudes; and in point of morality is infinitely better than Frou-Frou. And then it is played as it ought to be. Miss MORANT is magnificent, Mr. LEWIS is immensely funny, and Messrs. CLARKE and HASKINS are equal to whatever is required ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... Nouvelles is a book of great interest and value, despite serious defects due to its time generally and to its place in the history of fiction in particular. Its obscenity, on which even Sir Walter Scott, the least censorious or prudish-prurient of men, and with Southey, the great witness against false squeamishness, has been severe,[81] is unfortunately undeniable. But it is to be doubted whether Sir Walter knew much of the fabliaux; if he had he would have seen first, that this sort ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... witness,—in its present completed state! And Quack and Dupe, as we must ever keep in mind, are upper-side and under of the selfsame substance; convertible personages: turn up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he himself can become a quack; there is in him the due prurient insincerity, open voracity for profit, and closed sense for truth, whereof quacks too, in all their ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... world's greatest sham of a people ... the Judas among nations, who this time, for a change, betrays Germanism for thirty pieces of silver. Against us stands sensual France, the harlot (Dirne) among the peoples, to be bought for any prurient excitement, shameless, unblushing, impudent and cowardly [!] with her worthless myrmidons.—"War Devotions," by PASTOR J. RUMP, quoted in ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... as for his grandeur of form, any college youth who scrambles up him, peel him out of his shooting jacket and trousers, is a hundred times more beautiful, and more grand too, by all laws of art. But so it is. In our prurient prudery, we have got to despise the human, and therefore the truly divine, element in art, and look for inspiration, not to living men and women, but to leaves and straws, stocks and stones. It is an idolatry baser than that of the ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... loves as to be taken behind the scenes and shown how it is done—or not done; and then it will attend the next play and go on adoring with the blindest infatuation. Were it not for this astounding gift of resilience one might deplore the prurient curiosity that wants to peep into the hollow image of Isis and get at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... brigadier if he did not think an establishment had the beneficial effect of sustaining truth, by suppressing heresies, limiting and curtailing prurient theological fancies, and otherwise setting limits to innovations. My friend did not absolutely agree with me in all these particulars; though he very frankly allowed that it had the effect of keeping TWO truths from falling out, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... many and happy," one of the men stated baldly. Another fingered his spear with a prurient hand. ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... was the woman that people who knew her only from her books, called bold, prurient even! Simply because she was great-hearted—intellectual. He was overcome by the unspeakable pathos of ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... Narrow and prejudiced he sometimes was in his opinions; but he hated whatever was mean and low in character. It is with beautiful things and with noble things that he teaches us to sympathize. Here are no incitements to passion, no prurient suggestions of sensual delights. The air which breathes through all his fictions is as pure as that which sweeps the streets of his mountain home. It is as healthy as nature itself. To read one of his best works after many of the novels of the day, is like passing from ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... incomprehensible. The decanter flew across and across the table with wonderful rapidity, and the flow of assertion increased with the captain, and that of assentation with his lieutenant. At length, the little man with the epaulet commenced a very prurient tale. Mr Farmer cast a look full of meaning upon myself, when Captain Reud addressed me thus, in a sharp, shrill tone, that I thought impossible to a person who told such pleasant stories, and who could spin so prettily upon a quart bottle. "Do you hear, younker, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... had been fanaticised by the secret societies as well as by Garibaldi himself, that infuriated enthusiast, who could not write four lines nor utter four words without enshrining therein the treasons of the black race, that prurient sore of Italy; or the venom of the Vatican, that nest of vipers; or the lies of Pius IX., that pest, that monster, twice accursed, as priest and as king. So when these people were made prisoners, they expected nothing better than the hardest treatment and the most terrible ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... of national honor and domestic peace, wherever it sets the staggering hoof of it; incapable of reading, of hearing, of thinking, of looking,—capable only of greed for money, lust for food, pride of dress, and the prurient itch of momentary curiosity for the politics last announced by the newsmonger, and the religion last rolled by the chemist into electuary ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... Heard I aright? and was it HERE I heard This crew 'gainst England's CONSORT QUEEN preferred? Here did their sland'rous breath infest the air? Hence did malicious tongues the scandal bear? Gush'd 'neath this sacred dome the prurient flood Of filth and venom, from that viper brood, Which o'er the land hath spread its noisome stain, While shudd'ring virtue weeps, but weeps in vain? And (O shame's nauseous dregs!) did noble lips Here taste ...
— The Ghost of Chatham; A Vision - Dedicated to the House of Peers • Anonymous
... perfidious Art; cannot escape from it in the lowest hut, in the remotest island of the sea. Ruin and death must strike down the loved one; and, what is most significant of all, death even here not by necessity, but by etiquette. What a world of prurient corruption lies visible in that super-sublime of modesty! Yet, on the whole, our good Saint-Pierre is musical, poetical though most morbid: we will call his Book the swan-song of old ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... supine, Defying prurient modesty turned she, Displaying in her beauty candidly Wonder of curve and ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... shut tight, and all these said: "We decline to look at the pages fairly and as a whole, because to look might seem to imply a doubt of what the tumblebug has decreed. Besides, as long as the tumblebug has reasons which he declines to reveal, his reasons stay unanswerable, and you are plainly a prurient rascal who ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell |
