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Celibate   /sˈɛlɪbət/   Listen
Celibate

noun
1.
An unmarried person who has taken a religious vow of chastity.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Celibate" Quotes from Famous Books



... lunatic, who wandered for half a lifetime in the Val d'Ema, subsisting precariously upon entirely vegetable food—roots, herbs, and the like; another is the superior part of a convict, hung in Arezzo for numerous offences; a third is that of a very old man who lived a celibate from his youth up, and by his abstinence and goodness exercised an almost priestly influence upon the borghesa. When, by this miscellaneous lecture, he has both amused and edified his hearers, he ingeniously turns the discourse ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum

... of the cave where Hasan and Husain lay concealed from their enemies and thus prevented it from being searched. Some of them have Pirs or spiritual preceptors, these being Muhammadan beggars, not necessarily celibate. The ceremony of adhesion is that a man should drink sherbet from the cup from which his preceptor has drunk. They do not observe impurity after a death nor bathe on ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... bad time," mused the celibate, suddenly kindled into passion. "One lives but once in this world, and one must live one's life, ...
— Married • August Strindberg

... outbursts in nuns and Roman Catholic female devotees who lead celibate lives are very numerous; I will, however, call attention to but one other: St. Veronica was so much in love with the divine lion that she took a young lion to bed with her, fondled and kissed it, and allowed it to suck her breasts.[99] Throughout sacred literature, beginning with the ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... French agricultural life and the justification of M. Zola; their presence is one of the blessings of England. How will it be in Ireland when the exodus is more complete than it is even now, and when the villages and rural districts are left solely to peasant proprietors and a celibate clergy? The Romish Church has never been famous for teaching those things which make for intellectual enlightenment and social improvement. The difference between the Protestant north and the rest of Roman Catholic Ireland, as between the Protestant and ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton

... question is often given to the young, even before the question arises; and it is given in the lives of men and women. The lives of those who are nobly celibate, or nobly married, are in themselves so moving a plea, that few who have been closely in contact with them are left untouched. It is the ideal realized that is the best defence of the ideal. But let us admit that, too often, the actual marriage is a very pitiful comment on our morality, ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden

... the soutane was proof that the cure was a true Norman he had not passed a lifetime in these fertile gardens forgetful of the fact that the fine art of good living is the one indulgence the Church has left to its celibate sons. ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... to wish it evil.[4] The disabused epicurean who wrote Ecclesiastes, thought so little of the future, that he considered it even useless to labor for his children; in the eyes of this egotistical celibate, the highest stroke of wisdom was to use his fortune for his own enjoyment.[5] But the great achievements of a people are generally wrought by the minority. Notwithstanding all their enormous defects, hard, egotistical, scoffing, cruel, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... been remarked on as a personable man. And things came about as Kettle shrewdly anticipated they would. The Lady Emir had not remained unmarried all these years through sheer distaste for matrimony. She had been celibate through an unconquerable pride of blood. None but men of colored race had been around her in all her wars, her governings, and her diplomacies; and always she had been too proud to mate with them. But here now stood before her a male of her own race, handsome, upstanding, and obviously ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... term this is not the place to speak in detail. But it may suitably be stated that sixteenth-century standards in these matters were not so high as those of the present day. 'If gold ruste, what shal iren do?' The highest ecclesiastical authorities were unable to check a nominally celibate priesthood from maintaining women-housekeepers who bore them families of children and were in many cases decent and respectable wives to them in all but name; indeed in Friesland the laity for obvious reasons insisted upon this ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... pregnant and give suck, unless it was to call attention to the fact that children will be a hindrance on the day of judgment?"[241] When such views were entertained of marriage, it need not seem remarkable that Tertullian and St. Paul of Nolan, like Tolstoy to-day, discovered the blessings of a celibate life after they were married and ran away from their wives.[242] Jerome finds marriage useful chiefly because ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... people. And they might in that case be right if the reasons were purely numerical: that is, if every woman were willing to take a husband if one could be found for her, and every man willing to take a wife on the same terms; also, please remember, if widows would remain celibate to give the unmarried women a chance. These ifs will not work. We must recognize two classes of old maids: one, the really superfluous women, and the other, the women who refuse to accept maternity on the ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... a barometer, a window-door which opened on the hanging gardens, and chairs of dark mahogany covered with horse-hair. The salon had little curtains of some old green-silk stuff, and furniture of painted white-wood covered with green worsted velvet. As to the chamber of the old celibate it was furnished with Louis XV. articles, so dirty and disfigured through long usage that a woman dressed in white would have been afraid of soiling herself by contact with them. The chimney-piece was ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac

... if from afar off, to the touch of her infinite solicitude and abasement, the joy and the shame of her love. As he watched and knew his lips tightened and his face paled with the throb of his own renunciation, he folded his celibate arms in the habit of his brotherhood and was caught up into a knowledge and an imitation of how the spotless Original would have looked upon a woman suffering and transported thus. The poverty of the play faded out; he became ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... Granville, the landlady who had mysteriously receded into the unknown before the advent of Sarah and Hilda, but with whom George Cannon must have had many interviews. No doubt the room was an epitome of the character of Mrs. Granville, presumably a fussy and precise celibate, with a place for everything and everything in its place, and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... in his life Has washed the dishes with his wife Or polished up the silver plate— He still is largely celibate. ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley

... physical sex. With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather that I am defective, while the church is universal. It takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... a negative type of religion is to pile precautions on precautions. Thus the dairyman, in order to be equal to his sacred office, must observe taboos without end. He must be celibate. He must avoid all contact with the dead. He is limited to certain kinds of food; which, moreover, must be prepared in a certain way, and consumed in a certain place. His drink, again, is a special milk, which must be poured out with prescribed formulas. He is inaccessible ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... is almost superfluous to observe, has long since decided to call herself The Island of Saints, an assertion akin to the national challenge of trailing the coat-tails, and believers in hereditary might, perhaps, be justified in assuming a strictly celibate sainthood. Be that as it may, Irish people have ever been prone to extremes, and, in spite of the proverb, there are some extremes that never touch, and chief among them are those that concern religion. Religion, or rather, difference of religion, is a factor in every-day ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... warm a celibate. But what avail will your scheme be if the men Drag us for all our ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes



Words linked to "Celibate" :   religious person, chaste



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