"Voluptuary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was then, a rough voluptuary, a thoughtless, sentient beast who up to that time had lived a life of emptiness and of mockery, eating and drinking and sleeping and waking again day after day, year after year. And he saw himself as he was on that day, he one of thousands and thousands of lookers-on gazing on the ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... about that anon.—In the mean while, sir—notwithstanding your contempt of my advice, and your disobedience till my commands, I will convince you of my paternal attention till your welfare, by my management of this voluptuary—this Lord Lumbercourt,—whose daughter you are to marry. You ken, sir, that the fellow has been my patron above ...
— The Man Of The World (1792) • Charles Macklin
... sufficed to show that he wanted nothing but inclination to rival Danby and Sunderland, and turned away to pursuits which pleased him better. Like many other men who, with great natural abilities, are constitutionally and habitually indolent, he became an intellectual voluptuary, and a master of all those pleasing branches of knowledge which can be acquired without severe application. He was allowed to be the best judge of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, of acting, that the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was thoroughly wholesome. Even his occasionally free utterances on sexuality are only sins against decorum. They do not violate nature. He never spoke on this subject with the slobbery grin of the voluptuary, or the leer of prurience. He was at such moments simply unreticent. Meaning no harm, he suspected none. In this respect he belonged to a less self-conscious antiquity, when nothing pertaining to man was common or unclean, and even the worship ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... the next day's meal would never be a penny the better—and the next cook (when she came) would be worse, if anything, but just as pious. It was often wondered that Lord Hermiston bore it as he did; indeed, he was a stoical old voluptuary, contented with sound wine and plenty of it. But there were moments when he overflowed. Perhaps half a dozen times in the history of his married life—"Here! tak' it awa', and bring me a piece of bread and kebbuck!" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... psychical desires may be unlimited. A thirsty man thirsts not for an ocean, but for drink quantum sufficit: give him that and the appetite is gone. But the miser covets all the money that he can get: the voluptuary ranges land and sea in search of a new pleasure: the philosopher ever longs for a higher knowledge: the saint is indefatigable in doing good. Whatever a man takes to be an end in itself, not simply a means, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... the Gauley where the oak leaves carpeted the ford, and the little trout darted like a beam of light, and the old fish-hawk sat on the hanging limb of the dead beech-tree with his shoulders to his ears and his beak drooping, like some worn-out voluptuary brooding ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... you may think, Madam. 'Carpe diem' is my motto. 'Tis likewise the motto of that finished voluptuary, Horace, but I only take it because it suits me. The pleasure which follows desires is the best, for it is the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... too often drives from the mind of the possessor, the bare remembrance of the means of acquisition: luxury forgets the innumerable ingenuities that minister to its cravings, and wealth, once obtained, unfits the mind for future self-exertion or sympathy for others. Many an upstart voluptuary surveys the elegancies of his well-furnished mansion in comparative ignorance of the means employed for their perfection; and, as regards his stock of knowledge conducive to happiness, he is in a more "parlous state" than the poor shepherd who had not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... voluptuary, is painted against a background of church members and professing Christians scarcely less hypocritical than he. In this book Sinclair Lewis adds a violent stroke to his ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... regular advocate in the courts of civil and canon law, he did not love his profession, nor, indeed, any kind of business which interrupted his voluptuary dreams or forced him to rouse from that indulgence in which only he could find delight. His reputation as a civilian was yet maintained by his judgments in the Courts of Delegates, and raised very high by the address and ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... before stated, consider biche de mer a very great luxury, believing that it wonderfully strengthens and nourishes the system, and renews the exhausted system of the immoderate voluptuary. The first quality commands a high price in Canton, being worth ninety dollars a picul; the second quality, seventy-five dollars; the third, fifty dollars; the fourth, thirty dollars; the fifth, twenty dollars; the sixth, twelve dollars; ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... James, that Byron's tragedies are failures. Fools! Is Cain, the dark, dim, disturbed, insane, hell-haunted Cain, a failure? Is Sardanapalus, the passionate, princely, philosophical, joy-cheated, throne-wearied voluptuary, a failure? Is Heaven and Earth, that magnificent confusion of two worlds, in which mortal beings mingle in love and hate, joy and despair, with immortal—the children of the dust claiming alliance with the radiant progeny of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... upon choice, give up so much time to study, were it only to sharpen the value of what remained for pleasure. And thus the only difference between the scheme of the India House distributing his time for Lamb, and the scheme of a wise voluptuary distributing his time for himself, lay, not in the amount of time deducted from enjoyment, but in the particular mode of appropriating that deduction. An intellectual appropriation of the time, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... made him a voluptuary, and reclining there in an ease which the languor born of his long illness rendered the more delicious, inhaling the tepid summer air that came to him laden with a most sweet attar from the flowering rose-garden, he realized that with all its ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... of the extension in the meaning of this word is to be found in an inscription on the tomb of a lady of pleasure. This inscription was composed by a voluptuary ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... can be no doubt. But the circle he moved in, and his volatile, mischievous, beauty-idolising nature played havoc with his good intentions, though not to the extent implied by some critics who have pictured him as a reckless voluptuary. But just herein is the final proof of Constanze's devotion and her understanding of him, for, while there never was a breath of slander against herself, she found heart to forgive Mozart's ficklenesses. ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall. The awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of despair against English freedom, was no weak and indolent voluptuary but the ablest and most ruthless of ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... was the willing slave of the enchanting queen. The courage and stoical endurance of the soldier vanished, and were replaced by the soft indulgence of the voluptuary. The rigid discipline of the camp was exchanged for the idle and often childish amusements of the Oriental court. Cleopatra enchained him with an endless round of pleasures and profligacies. Now, while in a fishing-boat on the Nile, the queen amused him ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... German cheer, and handkerchiefs waved like a snow-storm. The King bowed right and left in acknowledgment of the plaudits, and the performance of the evening was kept long in waiting. The line of Bavarian kings has perhaps little title to our respect. The Ludwig of fifty years ago was a voluptuary, vacillating, like another Louis Quinze, between debauchery and a weak pietism. He probably merited the cuts of the relentless scourge of Heine than which no instrument of chastisement was ever more unsparing, and which in his case was put to ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... let me guess. When I had read for ten minutes, I offered a bet of seven to one (no takers) that the author's name began with H. Not out of any love for that amphibious letter; on the contrary, being myself what Professor Wilson calls a hedonist, or philosophical voluptuary, and murmuring, with good reason, if a rose leaf lies doubled below me, naturally I murmur at a letter that puts one to the expense of an aspiration, forcing into the lungs an extra charge of raw air on frosty mornings. But truth is truth, in spite ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... unimaginative. But the intent of the author never really gets into his picture. His Cowperwood in this first stage is hard, commonplace, unimaginative. In "The Titan" he flowers out as a blend of revolutionist and voluptuary, a highly civilized Lorenzo the Magnificent, an immoralist who would not hesitate two minutes about seducing a saint, but would turn sick at the thought of harming a child. But in "The Financier" ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... we find always the free-men: in soft and luxurious countries we find the slaves. It is not the free-born Touarick who is the slave-dealer, or the stimulator of the slave-traffic, but the Moorish merchant, and the voluptuary on the coast who sends him. All that the Saharan tribes do, is to escort the merchants over The Desert; and they would still escort them over The Desert did they not deal in slaves, carrying ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... and voluptuary may ridicule the idea of the Almighty Creator of the universe, being pleased, or displeased, with a man for having a full or an empty stomach; but whatever tends directly or remotely, to subdue rebellious passions, and subject a creature like man to the restraints ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... ladies of Europe did the like. Belinda ate with her knife; and Saccharissa had only that weapon, or a two-pronged fork, or a spoon, for her pease. Have you ever looked at Gilray's print of the Prince of Wales, a languid voluptuary, retiring after his meal, and noted the toothpick which he uses? . . . You are right, madam; I own that the subject is revolting and terrible. I will not pursue it. Only—allow that a gentleman, in a shaky ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... given me a different idea of this little feathered voluptuary, which I will venture to impart, for the benefit of my school-boy readers, who may regard him with the same unqualified envy and admiration which I once indulged. I have shown him only as I saw him at first, in what I may call the poetical part of his career, ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... The constant recurrence of similar combinations of colour and outline gradually forces upon us a sense of how the harmony has been built up, and we become familiar with something of nature's mannerism. This is the true pleasure of your "rural voluptuary,"—not to remain awe-stricken before a Mount Chimborazo; not to sit deafened over the big drum in the orchestra, but day by day to teach himself some new beauty—to experience some new vague and tranquil ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... viciously. Only, the cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must be for the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury to the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly "I beat you because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrive an excuse for it." But to represent this detestable lust to the child as Divine wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... had talked with him, or corresponded with him, could doubt. But the easy Epicurean life which he had led, his love of good cookery and good wine, of music, of conversation, of light literature, led many to regard him as a sensual and intellectual voluptuary. His habit of canting about moderation, peace, liberty, and the happiness which a good mind derives from the happiness of others, had imposed on some who should have known better. Those who thought best of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... She was the genius of motion, the divinity of the dance; she was Terpsichore in the grace of her movements, Euterpe in the ravishing sweetness of her voice. A thrill of admiration suffused with a deeper tint even the abhorred cheek of the voluptuary. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... incendiary mingled such awful regard, such melting compassion, as effectually screened him from the suspicion of treachery, while he widened the fatal breach between her and her lover by the most diabolical insinuations. He represented his friend as a voluptuary, who gratified his own appetite without the least regard to honour or conscience; and, with a show of infinite reluctance, imparted some anecdotes of his sensuality, which he had feigned for the purpose; then he would exclaim in ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... moral luxury, and that moral luxuries were a necessity to natures such as hers. But Anne had a secret, cherishing eye on martyrdom, and it was intolerable to her to be reminded in this way that, after all, she was only a spiritual voluptuary. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... collated these epithets; they are: "the beautiful," "the inflamer," "lustful," "desirous," "the happy," "the gay, or wanton," "deluder," "the lamp of honey, or of spring," "the bewilderer," "the crackling fire," "the stalk of passion," "the weapon of beauty," "the voluptuary," "remembrance," "fire," ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... to the feet at a proper distance, and ignited by means of the "fire-works" alluded to. In such an encampment as this, after a plentiful supper of half-cooked peas and Indian corn—the inland travelling fare of the Montreal department—and a day's hard walking, one enjoys a repose to which the voluptuary reclining on his bed of down is ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... democratic man may be, Prothero and he had decided that an aristocratic man is a public man. He is made and protected in what he is by laws and the state and his honour goes out to the state. The aristocrat has no right to be a voluptuary or a mere artist or a respectable nonentity, or any such purely personal things. Responsibility for the aim and ordering of the world is demanded from him as ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw nothing but profligate pessimism, the vanitas vanitatum of a disappointed voluptuary. According to this view Shakespeare was always saying, "Out, out, brief candle," because his was only a ballroom candle; while Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle as by God's grace should ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... we parted, but he retained all his other faculties in perfection; and as he gave vent to every whimsical idea as it rose, I was really astonished at the brilliancy of his thoughts, and the force of his expression. Quin is a real voluptuary in the articles of eating and drinking; and so confirmed an epicure, in the common acceptation of the term, that he cannot put up with ordinary fare. This is a point of such importance with him, that he always takes upon himself the charge of catering; and a man ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... prettiest women of Paris. It was rumoured, however that he was tortured by painful emotions which he was studious to conceal: his health and spirits failed; and he tried to find consolation in religious duties. Some people were much edified by the piety of the old voluptuary: but others attributed his death, which took place not long after his retreat from public life, to shame and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thy villain lesson! Thou shouldst have known that the very cat, thou thoughtest me, will turn and rend the huntsman if he dare rob her of her portion! I tell you, Lucius Catiline, you thought me a mere wanton! a mere sensual thing! a soulless animal voluptuary! Fool! I say, double fool! Look into thine own heart; remember what blood runs in these female veins! Man! Father! Vitiator! My spirit is not female! my blood, my passions, my contempt of peril, my will indomitable and immutable, are, like ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... can be said about him, was not a sensual man. We shall err widely if we consider this man as a common voluptuary, intent mainly on base enjoyments,—nay on enjoyments of any kind. His household was of the frugalest; his common diet barley-bread and water: sometimes for months there was not a fire once lighted on his hearth. They ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... In the male voluptuary of feeble intellect and unattractive individuality, who depends for the gratification of his sexual instincts, not on his power of winning and retaining the personal affection and admiration of woman, but on her purchaseable condition, either in the blatantly ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... permanency of social compared with personal impressions. Morality, if we take his explanation as complete and final, is reduced to tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; an etiquette which, perhaps, a sceptical voluptuary, wishing to remove the obstacles to a life of enjoyment, might think himself not unreasonable in treating as an illusion. This, so far as appears, is the explanation offered of moral life, with all its beauty, its tenderness, its heroism, its self- sacrifice; to say nothing ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... "I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest. Nay, I am in great doubt whether any man could be found, who would earn a life of the most perfect satisfaction at the price of ending it in the torments which justice inflicted in a few hours ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... blackbirds held a funeral feast around the fodder, some old-time bayside mansions stretched their long sides and speckled negro quarters along the inlets, half hidden by the nut-trees, and in the air soared the turkey-buzzard, like a voluptuary politician, taking beauty from nothing but ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... Ahasuerus for his fair bride seems to have soon declined. The fickle voluptuary sought new pleasures, and the bride so lately exalted to a throne was no longer an object of envy. Many bitter tears have been shed by the victims of family pride or state policy, when thus allied to greatness and ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... bookseller Mistress, 'cannot be a friend Mitchell, T., esq., his translation of Aristophanes 'Mobility' Modern gardening, Pope the chief inventor of Moira, Earl of (afterwards Marquis of Hastings) Moliere Moncada, Marquis 'Monk,' Lewis's, 'The philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary' Mont Blanc Montague, Edward Wortley ——, Lady Mary Wortley, proposed Italian translation of her letters and new life of three pretty notes by her Pope's lines on her Montbovon 'Monthly Literary Recreations,' Lord Byron's review of Wordsworth's poems in Monti, his Aristodemo ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... The Voluptuary. You will resemble a wolf in the mountains! a savage beast devoid of all human feeling! Regardless in every way of the obligations of days gone by, your sole pleasure will be in the indulgence of haughtiness, extravagance, licentiousness and dissolute habits! You will be inordinate ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the Fifth. Which yet, is the less to be condemned in him, because the disguise of VOLPONE (though, it suited not with his character as a crafty or covetous person) agreed well enough with that of a voluptuary: and, by it, the Poet gained the end he aimed at, the punishment of vice, and reward of virtue; which that disguise produced. So that, to judge equally of it, it was an excellent Fifth Act; but not so naturally proceeding from ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... was not more concerned in that great revolution than appears in the voluminous Lives we have of the great reformer. However, the reformers were as great sticklers for medals as the "papelins." Of Pope John VIII., an effeminate voluptuary, we have a medal with his portrait, inscribed Pope Joan! and another of Innocent X., dressed as a woman holding a spindle; the reverse, his famous mistress, Donna Olympia, dressed as a Pope, with the tiara on her head, and the keys of St. Peter in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... magnificent, full length mirrors, a bookcase, itself a rare work of art, containing the best works of the best authors, all in the richest of bindings—nothing here that the most refined and cultivated taste could disapprove, and yet everything bespoke the sybarite, the voluptuary. A place wherein to forget that the world held aught save beauty; a place for luxurious revelry, and ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... the misuse of man's higher powers on behalf of falsehood and impurity. These parents are the wine-god Bacchus and the sorceress Circe. The former, mated with Love, is the father of Mirth (see L'Allegro); but, mated with the cunning Circe, his offspring is a voluptuary whose gay exterior and flattering speech hide his dangerously seductive and magical powers. He bears no resemblance, therefore, to Comus as represented in Ben Jonson's Pleasure reconciled to Virtue, in which mask "Comus" and "The Belly" are ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... the terrible provocation of the animal pain was too slight to disturb the equal balance of his nature. But not on this account was the pain the Roman suffered less than it would have been in the case of the most effeminate voluptuary. True enough, the man who is accustomed to pass his days in a state of confused ideas will be less capable of manly action, in the critical moment of sensuous pain, than he who lives persistently among ideas distinct and clear; ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... bottom of such vice, to which his position, and the fashion of the day introduced him, a far better heart than any of his contemporaries, and in some respects a kind of simplicity which was endearing. He was neither knave nor fool. He was not a voluptuary, like his friend the duke; nor a continued drunkard, like many other 'fine gentlemen' with whom he mixed; nor a cheat, though a gambler; nor a sceptic, like his friend Walpole; nor a blasphemer, like the Medmenham set, though he had once parodied profanely a sacred rite; nor was he steeped ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... national concern with them, which, next to some new state-plot, that occurred oftener than a new epic, might engage the monarch and his privy council. These were not the men to be touched by the compressed reflections and the ideal virtues personified in this poem. In the court of the laughing voluptuary the manners as well as the morals of these satellites of pleasure were so little heroic, that those of the highest rank, both in birth and wit, never mentioned each other but with the vulgar familiarity of nicknames, or the coarse appellatives of Dick, Will, and Jack! Such was the era when ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... considered, and man being admittedly a creature of his environment, can we still pretend to horror at this Roderigo and at the fact that being the man he was—prelate though he might be—handsome, brilliant, courted, in the full vigour of youth, and a voluptuary by nature, he should have succumbed to the temptations by ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... drawing-rooms, brooding over the slights and offences of high life. The bitterness of trouble seems not so unfitting, when drunk out of a pewter mug, as when it pours from the chased lips of a golden chalice. In the sharp crack of the voluptuary's pistol, putting an end to his earthly misery, I hear the confirmation that in a hollow, fastidious life there is ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... of Hien-feng in 1850, a demand was raised for the reforms which had been hoped for under Tao-kwang, but Hien-feng possessed in an exaggerated form the selfish and tyrannical nature of his father, together with a voluptuary's craving for every kind of sensual pleasure. For some time Kwang-si had been in a very disturbed state, and when the people found that there was no hope of relief from the oppression they endured, they proclaimed a youth, who was said to ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Scandinavians in Paris who knew only Roman Catholic priests from Tartufe at the theatre, had very incorrect conceptions regarding them. Bressant was the cold, elegant hypocrite, Lafontaine the base, coarse, but powerful cleric, Leroux the full-blooded, red-faced, voluptuary with fat cheeks and shaking hands, whose expression was now angry, now sickly sweet. Northern Protestants were very apt to classify the black-coated men whom they saw in the streets and in the churches, as belonging to one of these three types. But my ecclesiastical acquaintances ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... dear Franz, was the best answer to my last, the two having crossed on the way. As to our final meeting I use all the arts of an experienced voluptuary in order to get the most out of it. As it has been delayed so long, I should almost like to finish the whole "Valkyrie" previously. The completion of this work, the most TRAGIC which I have ever conceived, will cost me much, and I must think of recovering what I have put into ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... giving him frequent and easy access to the emperor, created an intimacy between them, which was increased to friendship and esteem on the side of Nero, by the elegant entertainments often given him by Petronius. In a short time, this gay voluptuary became so much a favourite at court, that nothing was agreeable but what was approved by Petronius and the authority which he acquired, by being umpire in whatever related to the economy of gay dissipation, procured him the title of Arbiter elegantiarum. ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... satisfactorily divulged. At last this polished Sybarite, who boasted that he always drank the richest Montepulciano, who could not sit long in a room that was not garlanded with flowers, who said he felt lonely in an apartment without a fine cast of the Venus de' Medici in it,—this self-indulgent voluptuary at last committed several forgeries on the Bank of England, and the Old Bailey sessions of July, 1837, sentenced him to transportation for life. While he was lying in Newgate prior to his departure, with other convicts, to New South Wales, where he died, Dickens went with a former acquaintance ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... the miscreant was facing Sally as he bent over the table and fumbled with the lock of the jewel-case, and she made good use of this chance to memorise a countenance of mildly sardonic cast, not unhandsome—the face of a conventional modern voluptuary, self-conscious, self-satisfied, selfish—rather attractive withal in the eyes of an excited ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... be committed by the pilgrim, from the time of his assuming the pilgrim's habit to that of his putting it off; and this is construed by the stricter professors to take effect from the actual formation of the intent to make the pilgrimage. Haroun er Reshid, though a voluptuary, was (at all events, from time to time) a rigid observer ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... the most celebrated are the Saucepan and The Slaughter-House. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis, mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers, caravanseries of the caliphs, I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I eat at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to roll naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it is you, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Elise went into the adjoining room, used as a kitchen, while the voluptuary dabbed clouds of powder over her neck and shoulders. With a tired listlessness, Elise returned and sank into a chair, from the back of which an ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... many oxen. The attitude of the typical man toward beauty in its various forms is, in fact, an attitude of suspicion and hostility. He does not regard a work of art as merely inert and stupid; he regards it as, in some indefinable way, positively offensive. He sees the artist as a professional voluptuary and scoundrel, and would no more trust him in his household than he would trust a coloured clergyman in his hen-yard. It was men, and not women, who invented such sordid and literal faiths as those of the Mennonites, Dunkards, Wesleyans and Scotch Presbyterians, with their antipathy to beautiful ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... consume more food; consequently his frame will acquire a proportionate degree of strength, and, all other things being equal, it will be able to resist the influence of extraneous causes, to a much greater extent than that of the voluptuary. ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... was conversant with the world, and accustomed to the splendour of courts. Quite a contrast to the plain rigidity of Benedict, he was courteous and munificent, but withal a voluptuary; and his luxury and profusion gave rise to extortions, to rapine, and to boundless simony. His artful and arrogant mistress, the Countess of Turenne, ruled him so absolutely, that all places in his gift, which had escaped the grasp of ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... this cannot be considered as the healthy condition of a moral being. It is only when the desire itself is sound, that we can say the man is in moral health. "He who grieves at his abstinence," says Aristotle, "is a voluptuary;"—and this also is the great principle so often and so strikingly enforced in the sacred writings; "Keep thy heart with all diligence, because out of it are the issues of life." "Blessed are the pure in heart, for ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... political life until the resignation of Lord Liverpool in 1827, and though he consented with reluctance to Canning's tenure of the foreign office, he did not attempt to interfere with the change in foreign policy consequent upon it. He was, in fact, sinking more and more into an apathetic voluptuary; but he could rouse himself, and exhibit some proofs of ability, under the impulse of his brothers, the honest Duke of York and the arch-intriguer, the Duke ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... exclaimed Colline in a tone of stupefaction. "Ah! The voluptuary, that is why he will not ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger |
