"Beatific" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the exorcists and the echoes of Lourdes through the darkness. Human religions tunnelled—Hinduism with its idea of a Divine Incarnation, Buddhism with its coarse apprehension of the Eternal Peace of a Beatific Vision, North American Religion with its guesses at Sacramentalism, Savage Religion with its caricature of a Bloody Sacrifice; all from various points; and presently heard through the tumult the historical dogma of the Incarnation ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... Jainism considers the world of transmigration as a bondage or journey which the wise long to terminate. But joyless as is its immediate outlook, its ultimate ideas are not pessimistic. Even in the body the soul can attain a beatific state of perfect knowledge[256] and above the highest heaven (where the greatest gods live in bliss for immense periods though ultimately subject to transmigration) is the paradise of blessed souls, freed from transmigration. They have no visible ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... while he hurried toward her, and in passionate emotion, not knowing what he was doing, knelt down near the chair into which she had sunk, and laid his head on her hand. That was Anton. Not a word was spoken. Sabine gazed on the kneeling form as at some beatific vision, and gently laid her ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... likewise, with most dying saints; They see e'en here the beatific sight; The spirit then breaks thro' this world's restraints, And enters into ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... this impossible, since from the very heart of the Beatific Vision, the Angels keep watch over us. No, there can be no rest for me until the end of the world. But when the Angel shall have said: 'Time is no more!' then I shall rest, then I shall be able to rejoice, because the number of the elect will ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... most rusticated Audacity," answered Sir Piercie; "truly I become oblivious of every thing beside, when the recollections of the divine court of Felicia press upon my wakened memory, even as a saint is dazzled when he bethinks him of the beatific vision. Ah, felicitous Feliciana! delicate nurse of the fair, chosen abode of the wise, the birth-place and cradle of nobility, the temple of courtesy, the fane of sprightly chivalry—Ah, heavenly court, or rather ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... follow Jesus' sayings and his demonstra- tions, which dominate the flesh. Perfect and infinite Mind enthroned is heaven. The evil beliefs 266:27 which originate in mortals are hell. Man is the idea of Spirit; he reflects the beatific presence, illuming the universe with light. Man is deathless, spiritual. He 266:30 is above sin or frailty. He does not cross the barriers of time into the vast forever of Life, but he coexists with ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... hour, we talked gaily of our coasting voyage, of our arrival at Athens. We would make our home of one of the Cyclades, and there in myrtle-groves, amidst perpetual spring, fanned by the wholesome sea-breezes—we would live long years in beatific union—Was there such a thing as ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... contented and happy, that I feel afraid as I think of it, lest it should escape me; and, even to my dearest Hal, am shy of speaking of my happiness. What is ambition to me, with this certainty? What do I care for wars, with this beatific peace smiling near? ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sprung from that stock whose courage was not shaken by the flames of funeral pyres, nor by all the tortures the human mind could devise; men who at the block betrayed no signs of fear, but faced death, as brave men ofttimes do, with a beatific smile, to the utter amazement of such as had to enact the cruel tragedy. These pioneers have in their veins the best blood of European nations, and their traditions are such as any ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... indicate how the Ideas of Plato, the "sub specie aeternitatis" of Spinoza, the "Liberation" from "the Will" of Schopenhauer, the "Beatific Vision" of the Catholic saints are all analogues and parallels, expressed under different symbols, of the same universal feeling. The difference between these philosophic statements of the situation and mine, is that, whereas ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... torment me so vilely with these poets? May the gods give that client of thine ills enow, who sent thee so much trash! Yet if, as I suspect, this new and care-picked gift, Sulla, the litterateur, gives thee, it is not ill to me, but well and beatific, that thy labours [in his cause] are not made light of. Great gods, what a horrible and accurst book which, forsooth, thou hast sent to thy Catullus that he might die of boredom the livelong day in the Saturnalia, choicest of days! No, no, my ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... seemed. A cavern next Entering, with mole-like hands he scooped his way, And reached at last the gates of morn. Ah me! A stone's cast from him rose the Tree of Life: He heard its sighs ecstatic: Full in view The Beatific River rolled; beyond All-glorious shone the City of the Saints Clothed with God's light! And yet from him that realm Was severed by a gulf! Not wide that strait; It seemed a strong man's leap twice told—no more; But, as insuperably soared that cliff, Unfathomably thus its sheer descent Walled ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... paused and looked, lost in enjoyment of that beatific vision, Sir Anthony himself emerged from the porch. Dolly took a good stare at him. He was handsome, austere, close-shaven, implacable. His profile was clear-cut, like Trajan's on an aureus. Dolly thought that was just how so grand a gentleman ought to look; ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... do you know, he has made a beatific confusion between last Saturday and next Saturday, and said to me he had told Miss Thomson to mind to come on Friday if she wished to see me ... 'remembering' (he added) 'that Mr. Browning took ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... the gate at Girard College wearing his usual little white necktie, his spectacles and his beatific, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... Above, the birds were swirling in sweeping circles, raining down the ecstasy of their night-song; still above, far beyond them, across a zenith pure, transparent, ineffably pink, illumined wisps of clouds were trailing their scarf-like shapes. It was a scene of beatific peace. Across the fields came the sound of a distant bell. It was the Angelus. The ploughmen stopped to doff their hats, the women to bend their ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was half-maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels, or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or awoke, screaming, from dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the scepter of the millennial year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hidden His face from him. But when he ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... At sixteen the doctrine of divine illumination fascinated him. He struggled to find the path of true devotion; abandoned himself to extremely ritualistic forms of worship; dabbled a little in alchemy and astrology to help develop the divine nature within him and to attain the beatific vision. Soon he was introduced to the "Protestant nunnery," as it was called, where the venerable Mr. Ferran, a friend of George Herbert's, was greatly taken by Inglesant's accomplishments and grace of manner. Various forms of extremely High Church yet Protestant worship were ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... us return to the dinner. The fare is excellent, the company delightful, and I am just revelling in that beatific state of mind born of a sufficiency of the good things of this earth, when nothing seems to me more pleasant than a City dinner, when I am tapped upon the shoulder by the Toastmaster, who bears a warrant to consign me to ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... depressed as the days passed. Then he closed his eyes and tried an antidote. He abandoned this study of his fellow-creatures and plunged once more into the museums, sated himself with the eternal beauties, and came out to resume his place amid the tumultuous throng with rested nerves and a beatific smile upon his lips. It mattered so little, his welfare of to-day or to-morrow—whether he went hungry or satisfied to bed! The other things were in his heart. He ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... undergoing swift changes during this short speech, but now it cleared and a beatific expression ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... in beatific tones, and the three four-legged creatures stood on their hind legs and, joining paws and wings with the chicken, went through a solemn Alice-in-Wonderland-like dance. This was always terminated abruptly by some animal ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... not pay in this country, Lorimer," he said, with a beatific air. "Diligence is the one road to success. There is a truss of hay waiting to go through the cutter. Harry, I notice more oats than need be mixed with ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was half maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face from him. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... some one, "in the future state evil surroundings will be withdrawn and elevated influences substituted, and hence expurgation, and sublimation, and glorification." But the righteous, all their sins forgiven, have passed on into a beatific state, and consequently the unsaved will be left alone. It can not be expected that Doctor Duff, who exhausted himself in teaching Hindoos the way to heaven, and Doctor Abeel, who gave his life in the evangelization of China, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... dissemble the simple devotion of their brethren; and Gregory Palamas introduced a scholastic distinction between the essence and operation of God. His inaccessible essence dwells in the midst of an uncreated and eternal light; and this beatific vision of the saints had been manifested to the disciples on Mount Thabor, in the transfiguration of Christ. Yet this distinction could not escape the reproach of polytheism; the eternity of the light of Thabor was fiercely denied; and Barlaam still ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the rest, had never before felt so gay, and, imagining himself really and truly to be a landowner of Kherson, spoke of various improvements in agriculture, of the three-field system of tillage [33], and of the beatific felicity of a union between two kindred souls. Also, he started to recite poetry to Sobakevitch, who blinked as he listened, for he greatly desired to go to sleep. At length the guest of the evening realised that matters had gone ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the mediocrity of the figure in his portrayal of the features of the Christ? The rector started, and stared again. There was no weakness in the face, no meekness, no suggestion of the conception of the sacrificed Lamb, no hint of a beatific vision of opening heavens—and yet no accusation, no despair. A knowing—that were nearer—a knowing of all things through the experiencing of all things, the suffering of all things. For suffering without revelation were vain, indeed! A perfected wisdom ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I turn at the request, and caught a half glance of his features. May no eye destined to reflect the beauties of the New Jerusalem inward upon the beatific soul behold such a sight as mine then beheld! My immortal spirit, blood and bones, were all withered at the blasting sight; and I arose and withdrew, with groanings which the pangs of death ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... A look of beatific relief overspread the other's face. He immediately began to swell. "That is most gratifying! most gratifying!" he said pompously. "I am really under obligations to you, Weir. We both are, aren't ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... craning her soft white neck, she saw Cousin Emelene, with her gray kitten under one arm and a large suitcase in her other hand, coming up the steps. There was a beatific expression in her gentle, faded eyes, and her lips were quivering uncertainly. When she caught sight of Genevieve's sweet face back of the bored expressmen, she gave a little cry, ran forward, set down her suitcase and clasped her young cousin in ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... disciples whose eyes were holden. And to-night, John, as I have been rocking baby to sleep I have been reading Tennyson's Holy Grail, and thinking how often, in our modern life, Calabad and Percivale kneel at the same shrine, and how often what is but a memorial service to the one affords a beatific vision of a living and life-giving ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... home safe," she said gaily. "I hope you feasted your eyes on your beloved Governor, boys. I can tell that Cecilia forgathered with Nan by the beatific look on ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... ready; and crying out, O pray, pray! Praise, praise, praise,—he was turned over, and died almost without any struggle, with his hands lifted up unto heaven, whither his soul ascended, to enjoy the beatific presence of his Lord ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... good, and harmony results. When he is unduly influenced by the outward world his actions are evil, and discord intervenes. The holy man is one who has an instinctive, inward sight of the ultimate principle in its twofold operation (or what we should call the sight of God, the beatific vision), and who therefore spontaneously and easily obeys his nature. Hence all his thoughts are perfectly wise, his actions perfectly good, and his words perfectly true. Confucius was the last of these holy men. The infallible authority of the ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... title of Aesthetic of pure beauty. But if (as is often the case) something mystical and transcendental be meant by this, something that is unknown to our poor human world, or something spiritual and beatific, but not expressive, we must reply that while applauding the conception of a beauty, free of all that is not the spiritual form of expression, we are yet unable to conceive a beauty altogether purified of expression, that is ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... able to conceive the glory of that dwelling place which shall be ours. If to-day we were permitted to peer but for a moment into that heavenly abode, then should we see how impossible, to the soul which has once entered upon that beatific state, would be a thought of return to this grovelling earth. There their aspirations are ever upward and onward toward the Great White Throne, with no thought for the things left behind, even were there not a 'great gulf ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... eve! The morn was racked with storm: 'Tis past; the skylark sings; the tide at flood Sighs a soft joy: alone those lines of weed Report the wrath foregone. Yon watery plain Far shines, a mingled sea of glass and fire, Even as that Beatific Sea outspread Before the Throne of God. 'Tis Paschal Tide; - O sorrowful, O blissful Paschal Tide! Fain would I die on Holy Saturday; For then, as now, the storm is past—the woe; And, somewhere 'mid the shades of Olivet Lies sealed the sacred cave of that Repose Watched by the Holy Women. Earth, ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... of her musicians ushered by Eugenio, but personally and separately welcomed, and the supreme opportunity offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the spell of a general, a beatific mildness. There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for some than for others; what he in particular knew of it was that he seemed to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it and it made no plash; he floated, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... to which she took her two youngest boys, since Jock was the godson of the house, and had moreover been shaken off by his two elder brothers. Happily he was too good-tempered to grumble at being thrown over, and his mind was in a beatific state of contemplation of his newly-purchased treasures, a small pistol, a fifteen-bladed knife, and a box of miscellaneous sweets, although his mother had so far succumbed to the weakness of her sex as to prevent the weapon from being ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rapidly, and oh, how earnestly! He was evidently full of his subject; he was well aware how short might be the time allowed him to impart to his friends those sacred, precious, all-important truths he had himself learned. As he went on speaking, his countenance seemed to assume an almost beatific expression; the tones of his voice were full of melody. His friends listened with rapt attention, tears streaming down from their eyes, their breasts heaved; but not one moved his position, not a gesture ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the Assumption, more than twice seven times is it reiterated in a very brief space, and with slight variations of expression, that Mary was taken up into heaven; and that, not on any general and indefinite idea of her beatific and glorified state, but with reference to one specific single act of divine favour, performed at a fixed time, effecting her assumption, as it is called, "to-day." [AEs. 595.] "To-day Mary the Virgin ascended ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... in ecclesiastical writers, as if it were our duty to understand them; which I am sure it is not. And I defy the greatest divine to produce any law either of God or man, which obliges me to comprehend the meaning of omniscience, omnipresence, ubiquity, attribute, beatific vision, with a thousand others so frequent in pulpits, any more than that of eccentric, idiosyncracy, entity, and the like. I believe I may venture to insist farther, that many terms used in Holy Writ, particularly by St Paul, might ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... the Roman Catholic Church for the commemoration of the faithful departed. The celebration is based on the doctrine that the souls of the faithful which at death have not been cleansed from venial sins, or have not atoned for past transgressions, cannot attain the Beatific Vision, and that they may be helped to do so by prayer and by the sacrifice of the mass. The feast falls on the 2nd of November; or on the 3rd if the 2nd is a Sunday or a festival of the first class. The ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... walked ahead with his unyielding wife. Apparently he was expostulating with her. She looked neither to right nor left, but walked on with her face set and her eyes narrowed as if in pain. Colonel Grand, the picture of insolent assurance, sauntered behind them, a beatific smile on ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... really listen, for Miss Letitia would be far too intent on counting stitches, and Miss Asenath would dream, and to Arethusa, Miss Eliza's choice of reading matter was anything but interesting; but Miss Eliza herself would be made beatific. She considered herself somewhat gifted as an elocutionist; during her course at the old Freeport Seminary, now so long ago, she had had the most lady-like of instruction. She prided herself on her ability to put "expression" ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... fixed her eyes on the ceiling with an expression of beatific joy such as is worn by S. Caterina da Siena when the ring is being put on her finger in the pictures. Nina's hair had now to be done up and it is magnificent hair, lustrous, black, wavy thick ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... converted a shameful conspiracy into an act of the highest virtue. And her smile changed, too—became a good smile, a smile on which a man might depend. His heart went out to her, and he contemplated the smile in a pleased, beatific silence. ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... ecclesiastical style, the Plagal, a mode that obtained centuries before Palestrina. Harsh and strident, inharmonious, are the tones, which in the opening Adagio typify the dread, the foreboding and dismay, that can be supposed to have been felt by the Son of God when the time came to give up a beatific state and enter on the actualities of earthly existence. The sin of the world is already being borne in anticipation. Suddenly we are in the midst of celestial harmonies, delicate gradations and mergings of tones, subtleties of expression, ethereal, evanescent, that come faintly ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... which is common in fable is all but unknown in life: a man, capable of loving ardently, who for the sake of one woman, beyond his hope, sacrifices love altogether. Piers Otway, who read much verse, had not neglected his Browning. He knew the transcendent mood of Browning's ideal lover—the beatific dream of love eternal, world after world, hoping for ever, and finding such hope preferable to every less noble satisfaction. For him, a mood only, passing with a smile and a sigh. To that he was not equal; these heights heroic were not for his treading. Too insistent were the ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... held that by long and assiduous contemplation any man might be united to the deity in an ineffable manner and become one with the source and parent of all things, and that he who had thus ascended to God and been absorbed in his beatific essence, actually formed part of the Godhead, was the Son of God in the same sense and manner with Christ himself, and enjoyed thereby a glorious immunity from the trammels of all laws human and divine. Inwardly transported by this blissful persuasion, though outwardly presenting in their aspect ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the hitching post in front of the post office listening with a beatific smile to the sound of the saw and the hammer that came from the Opera House going up at the corner of Prouty Avenue and Wildwood Street. The Major's eyes held the brooding tenderness of a patron saint, ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... thinking on Olivia, recollecting every incident of my past life in which she had had the least part, placing all her divine perfections full in view, and unable to detach my mind one moment from the beatific vision. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... had looked woman-y, girl-y, even remotely, affectedly feminine, Barton would doubtless have floundered heroically through some protesting lie. But to the frank, blunt, little-boyishness of her he succumbed suddenly with a beatific grin of relief. "Yes, we certainly ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... (20:6), when the bodies of the saints will "be fashioned like unto his glorious body" (Phil. 3:21), and thus become the first fruits with their risen Head. Those who come up at the second resurrection will not attain to that beatific state. ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... gasped Ruth, under her breath, and suddenly the other girls looked at her to observe an almost beatific expression spread over the features of the girl of the ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... such wine, the journey would be worth while," Rolf murmured to the shield-maiden, beside whom he sat, when at last the business of eating was over and the pleasure of drinking had begun. As he spoke he tilted his head back, with closed eyes and a beatific smile, and let the contents of his horn ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... and Dutch; Only art like yours can show How the pine-logs gleam and glow, Till the fire-light laughs and passes 'Twixt the tankards and the glasses, Touching with responsive graces All those grave Batavian faces,— Making bland and beatific All that session soporific. ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... so dignified—and Dutch; Only art like yours can show How the pine logs gleam and glow, Till the firelight laughs and passes 'Twixt the tankards and the glasses, Touching with responsive graces All those grave Batavian faces, Making bland and beatific ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... past, which had but lately been so full of dangers, was ignored; and the future, the dangers of which were much more real, was not for the moment considered. Jefferson was sworn in with his head encircled by a halo of beautiful phrases; and he and his followers were so well satisfied with this beatific vision that they entirely overlooked the desirability of redeeming their own past or of providing for their country's future. Sufficient unto the day was the popularity thereof. The Federalists themselves must be conciliated, and the national organization achieved ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... suggested the want of a cigarette, John nodded one up for him. He didn't ask a question. Evidently, between Jimmy and Violet, the story was being elicited to his satisfaction. But it was amazing how quickly that last words of his wife's snatched him out of that beatific abstraction. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of the great idol and a glittering army among the marble ruins of the Serapeum. Apostles and martyrs soared around, the Saviour sat enthroned in glory and triumph, while angels, cradled on the clouds that were his footstool, were singing beatific hymns which sounded clearly in her ear above the many-voiced tumult of the quays. The vision did not vanish till she was desired to get ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... give those Reichs fellows two good months [scarcely took so long] to be in a condition to show face again. As for ourselves, I can send you nothing but contemptibilities. We have never yet had the beatific vision of Him with the Hat and Consecrated Sword [Papal Daun, that is]; they amuse us with the Sieur Loudon instead;—who, three days ago [7th July, two days] did us the honor of a visit, at the Gallows of Liebau. He was conducted out again, with all the politeness imaginable, on to ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was an amiable man a man of good abilities, a man who had seen much of the world. But he seems to have thought that going to Court was like going to heaven ; that to see princes and princesses was a kind of beatific vision ; that the exquisite felicity enjoyed by royal persons Was not confined to themselves, but was communicated by some mysterious efflux or reflection to all who were suffered to stand at their toilettes or to bear their trains. He overruled all his daughter's ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... and purgatory before he may enjoy the "beatific vision?" Are temptation, sin, sorrow, and even death, angels of God sent forth to minister to the perfection of man? or are they fiends which, in some foul way, have invaded the otherwise fair ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... narrow space, uttering, as it did so, those curious little guttural sounds of pleasure that only an animal of the feline species knows how to make expressive of supreme happiness. Its stiffened legs and arched back made it appear larger than usual, and the black visage wore a smile of beatific joy. Its eyes blazed magnificently; it was in ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Eden," said the scientist, with such a beatific smile that his face was less hideous. "We start immediately. I have arranged with Professor Michael for you ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... Fernando, and my friend had promised to take me with him. Now, this was a great favour. St. Fernando is one of the patrons of Seville; he has been dead a long time, but his corpse refuses to putrefy, like those of ordinary mortals; it is a sacred corpse, and in a beatific state of preservation. Three times a year the remains of the holy man are uncovered, and the faithful are admitted to gaze on his incorruptible features. This was not one of the regular occasions; the Cardinal Archbishop had made an exception in compliment to my friend, who ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... forms of heresy which characterized the thirteenth century—naturalism with its tendency to magic, astrology, alchemy, etc., etc., and mysticism with its dreams of beatific visions, its self-torture and its lawlessness (see Goerres, 'Die Christliche Mystik')—were due largely to Averroes. In spite of this, his commentaries on Aristotle maintained their credit, their influence being ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... a new idea upon the subject. On such a point I speak with great diffidence; but I am inclined to think that my author was right; that the real end which Americans set before themselves is Acceleration. To be always moving, and always moving faster, that they think is the beatific life; and with their happy detachment from philosophy and speculation, they are not troubled by the question, Whither? If they are asked by Europeans, as they sometimes are, what is the point of going so fast? ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... fog or grey weather the spot can be dreary, weird, desolate; but in times of fair sunrise or sundown it is glorified with a marvellous beauty, with restful nooks where a dreamer may enter upon a heritage of beatific vision. St. Piran, the dominant personality of the district, is the patron of the tin-miners, but neither they nor others know much about him; he is a ghost of the far past, but a ghost with a dim halo around his head. He belongs to the sixth century, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... beatific speak; Yet have they ears, and eyes as well; And if not with a paler cheek, They feel the shivers in them dwell, That something of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... correspondingly rare morsel of an earlier pate tendre. He could take the small clutching child from his nurse's arms with an iteration grimly discountenanced, in respect to their contents, by the glass doors of high cabinets. Something clearly beatific in this new relation had, moreover, without doubt, confirmed for him the sense that none of his silent answers to public detraction, to local vulgarity, had ever been so legitimately straight as the mere element of attitude—reduce ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... knowledge of the true, monistic ethic as training for the good, monistic aesthetic as pursuit of the beautiful—these are the three great departments of our monism: by the harmonious and consistent cultivation of these we effect at last the truly beatific union of religion and science, so painfully longed after by so many to-day. The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, these are the three august Divine Ones before which we bow the knee in adoration; in the unforced combination and mutual supplementing of these we gain ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... say my priest had his notion of the general shape and purport, the gross material body of the thing, but he did not trouble me with it, while we sat tranced together in the presence of its soul. He seemed, at times, so lost in the beatific vision, that he forgot my stumblings in the philological darkness, till I appealed to him for help. Then he would read aloud with that magnificent rhythm the Italians have in reading their verse, and the obscured meaning would seem to shine out of the mere music of the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wholly wrong impression of what Bishop Berkeley calls 'the philosophy of fire' if we set before our minds in this connection, the raging element whose strength is in destruction. Let us rather picture to ourselves as the type of fire the benign and beatific solar heat, the quickener and fosterer of all terrestrial life. For according to Zeno, there were two kinds of fire, the one destructive, the other what we may call 'constructive,' and which he called 'artistic'. This latter kind of fire, which was known as aether, was ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... the supper arrived. Her nervousness vanished, and he got far away from the neighborhood of the subjects that, even in remotest hint, could not but agitate her. And as the food and the wine asserted their pacific and beatific sway, she and he steadily moved into better and better humor with each other. Her beauty grew until it had him thinking that never, not in the most spiritual feminine conceptions of the classic painters, ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... us, the valley of the Oreto, Palermo, Sta. Catarina, Monreale,—all were but parts of a dreamy vision, like the heavenly city of Sir Percivale, to attain which he passed across the golden bridge that burned after him as he vanished in the intolerable light of the Beatific Vision. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... covered by gleaming locks of black hair; and as he stood there, sure and secure, a sublime divinity, and played the violin, it seemed as if the whole creation obeyed his melodies. He was the man-planet about which the universe moved with measured solemnity and ringing out beatific rhythms. Those great lights, which so quietly gleaming swept around, were they stars of heaven, and that melodious harmony which arose from their movements, was it the song of the spheres, of which poets and seers have reported so many ravishing things? ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... smile upon her face; and never were the two gazers tired of gazing, and of smiling as they gazed. Luise, they thought, had seemed a little sad as well as weary when she alighted at the dear familiar door. But this smile was so full of joy unspeakable, so fraught with beatific meaning, so reflective of beatific vision, that it laughed their fears away, and spoke volumes where the seeming sorrow ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... and all nations,—like that more awful communion of saints in the holy church universal,—and feel a sympathy with departed genius, and with the enlightened and the gifted minds of other countries, as they appear before him, in the transports of a sort of vision beatific, bowing down at the same shrines, and flowing with the same holy love of whatever is most pure, and fair, and exalted, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... arrival of the first gift, a little silver vase from Miss Allison McIntyre, which would always suggest the donor's love of flowers and her garden which she shared lavishly with the whole Valley, Betty had been in a beatific state of mind over the loving favor showed her by her friends. Her pleasure reached high tide, however, when the last one arrived, a box marked from Warwick Hall. It was from Madam Chartley. The box was so big that they ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... smitten. The charms of Clio and Sabrina, and every former flame, were merged in the rising glories of Clarinda—as by a classical apotheosis Miss Kitty was now known to his entranced imagination; and in every vision of future enjoyment Clarinda was the beatific angel. But when he decided in favor of Northampton, Miss Jennings showed a will of her own, and absolutely refused to go with him. To the romantic lover the disappointment was all the more severe, because ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... conceivable extension of creatural faculties, or any conceivable hallowing of creatural natures, can make the creature able to gaze upon God. I know that it is often said that the joy of the future life for men is what the theologians call 'the beatific vision,' in which there shall be direct sight of God, using that word in its highest sense, as applied to the perceptions of the spirit, and not of the sense. But I do not think the Bible teaches us that. It does teach ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... had seams like the wrinkles in the parchment skin of extreme old age. She carried a wooden figurehead under her bowsprit, the face and bust of a woman on whom an ancient woodcarver had bestowed his notion of a beatific smile; the result was an idiotic simper. The glorious gilding had been worn off, the wood was gray and cracked. The Polly's galley was entirely hidden under a deckload of shingles and laths in bunches; the after-house was broad and loomed high above the rail in contrast ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... "Spiritual Franciscans," as they were called, or Fraticelli, were those curious mediaeval bodies of Beguins and Beghards. Hopelessly pantheistic in their notion of the Divine Being, and following most peculiar methods of reaching on earth the Beatific Vision, they took up with the same doctrine of the religious duty of the communistic life. They declared the practice of holding private property to be contrary to the ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... unforeseen at the old Manor House, seemed to Amelie the work of Providence for a good and great end—the reformation of her brother. If she dared to think of herself in connection with him it was with fear and trembling, as a saint on earth receives a beatific vision that may only ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to go forward with his bombers. Presently came Warren, bright and jaunty as a bird, and carrying his left arm. 'I'm all right,' said Montag, 'got a cushy one here.' On his heels came G.A.; his face was that of a man fresh from the Beatific Vision. Much later, when I had managed to get transport to push him away, I asked him, 'Got your stick, G.A.?' This was a stout stave on which he had carved, patiently and skilfully, his name, 'H.T. Grant-Anderson,' and a fierce and able-looking ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... on every side. He attempted to point out a higher life, by which sorrow would be forgotten. He could not prevent sorrow culminating in old age, disease, and death; but he hoped to make men ignore their miseries, and thus rise above them to a beatific state of devout contemplation and the practice of virtues, for which he laid down ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... art or praise from her lips that gave her listener such an exquisite thrill of pleasure? He did not stop to consider, for he was not in an analytical mood at that time. He was on the crest of the spiritual wave that was sweeping him heavenward, or towards some beatific state of which he had not dreamt before. His face glowed ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... beatific coast I've come to visit thee, For I am Frognall Dibdin's ghost," Says Dibdin's ghost ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... which was suspended in his room, and scarce had time to pronounce the aspiration of his Order, "Sancta Trinitas, unus Deus, miserere nobis," ere his head was severed from his body, and he entered upon the beatific vision of the Three in One, for Whom he had so gladly sacrificed ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... Adrian wag his tail and hear him whine to keep the check; Bob looked at the poor fellow's wistful eyes and handed it back with a quizzical little smile and said, 'Oh, I guess I'd run it; it can't hurt anything.' The light that came into Adrian's eyes was positively beatific, and he shook Bob by the hand, and twirled his cane, and waved his gloves in a sort of canine ecstasy, and trotted to the cashier's window with the check like a dog with a bone. It is the largest piece of real money he has had in six months, the boys say, and he has spent it for clothes. To-morrow ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... required to which they are unequal. With mediocrity they are always welcome; however little mind they bring, they want still less to exhaust the author's inspiration. They are relieved of the load of thought; and their nature can lull itself in beatific nothings on the soft pillow of platitude. In the temple of Thalia and Melpomene—at least, so it is with us—the stupid savant and the exhausted man of business are received on the broad bosom of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of March closes, but the administration seems to enjoy the most beatific security. I do not see one single sign of foresight,—this cardinal criterion of statesmanship. Chase measures the empty abyss of the treasury. Senator Wilson spoke of treason everywhere, but the administration seems not to go to work and to reconstruct, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... fumbling is heard outside the door. It is opened suddenly; JACK BARTHWICK seems to fall into the room. He stands holding by the door knob, staring before him, with a beatific smile. He is in evening dress and opera hat, and carries in his hand a sky-blue velvet lady's reticule. His boyish face is freshly coloured and clean-shaven. An overcoat is ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that is breaking my heart, though I knew I was lost as soon as I saw your beatific look on the day you got back with Nora. The first week I came none of you could do enough for me. Now it's all Nora, darling." ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... if it does anything," he said, with an optimism which was largely the outgrowth of his beatific mood, which in its turn was born of his nearness to Evadna and her gracious manner toward him. "We promised not to molest them on their claims. But if they get over the line to meddle with our water system, or carry any in buckets—which they can't, because ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... not have worried. It would have taken more than one pie to have injured the digestion of such a boy as Towsley. He lay in beatific slumber, his sunny hair gleaming in the rays from his visitor's candle, his long lashes sweeping his dirty cheeks, and his lips ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... upon the Beatific Vision, he passed on into glory. What is written concerning his Lord and Master might with almost literal truth have been inscribed over his grave: The zeal of Thy house ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... and loveliest of your adorable sex, your slave prostrates himself before your stainless and beatific feet (bowing low and kissing his fingers). Illustrious Ladies, I pray you ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris |
