"Impious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or the impiety of his ransacked closet. If he had fallen in a common slaughter of libellers and blasphemers, I could well believe that nothing more was meant than was pretended. But when I see, that, for years together, full as impious, and perhaps more dangerous writings to religion, and virtue, and order, have not been punished, nor their authors discountenanced; that the most audacious libels on Royal Majesty have passed without notice; that the most treasonable invectives against the laws, ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... the beginning of the Yuga, there sprang from thy lotus-like navel, Brahma himself, and lord of all mobile and immobile things, and whose is this entire universe! When the dreadful Danavas Madhu and Kaitava were bent on slaying Brahma, beholding their impious endeavour thou wert angry, and from thy forehead, O Hari, sprang Sambhu, the holder of the trident. Thus these two foremost of the deities have sprung from thy body in order to do thy work! Even Narada it was who hath told me this! O Narayana, thou didst, in the forest of Chaitraratha, ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... "this scoundrel deserves admiration! Thou wilt cleave to Moses and yet defendest thou that which the law condemns? Ha! Fathers of Israel, the impious words call for vengeance." ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... persecutions, they persecuted the Druids and others. Heathenism, therefore, as in other respects erroneous, was erroneous in point of persecution. I do not say every heathen who persecuted was therefore an impious man: I only say he was mistaken, as such a man is now. But, says the honorable gentleman, they did not persecute Epicureans. No: the Epicureans had no quarrel with their religious establishment, nor desired any religion ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... no lenten wicks watch out the night; I am the booth where Folly holds her fair; Impious no less in ruin than in strength, When I lie crumbled to the earth at length, Let you not say, "Upon this reverend site The righteous groaned and beat ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... moment the old villain was a prisoner. I heard his discordant voice break quaveringly into sudden vehemence and volubility; now croaking—now shrieking as he oscillated between protests, threats, and impious appeals to the God who will "judge the secrets of men!" And thus lying and raving, he was removed from the room, and placed in the same coach with his beautiful and abandoned accomplice, already arrested; and, with two gendarmes sitting beside them, they were ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Cato, and Cicero. They came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as retribution beyond the grave, no future state of consciousness, no immortality of the soul; consequently death was considered too mild a punishment for the impious treason of the conspirators; and a penalty, which should keep alive instead of extinguishing suffering, was advocated. We learn from this extraordinary argument, as Merivale well says, how utter was the religious scepticism among the brightest intellects of ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... or Bad in it, he ought to discover, and mark very exactly all its Virtues, and Vices, for that is a sure way to find out the Truth, which is more valuable than all things else whatever. If I had written against Plato with a Design to Decry his Works, I should be as Impious as[21] Zoilus, but on the contrary, I would praise him, and if in doing so I have Improved any of his Defects, I have done nothing worthy of Complaint, and which was not necessary for my Design. Notwithstanding this, I have put some Bounds to this Liberty, and ...
— The Preface to Aristotle's Art of Poetry • Andre Dacier
... influence of a theatre on public morals; yet, I fear, though the most moral plays are incapable of doing much good, the turn of others may make a mischievous impression, by embodying in verse, and rendering apt for the memory, maxims of an impious or profligate tendency. In this point of view, there is, at least, no edification in beholding the horrible crimes unto which OEdipus is unwillingly plunged, and in witnessing the dreadful punishment he sustains, though innocent of all moral ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... the mouth, and probably never looking in at all. How vividly the whispered eagerness of the outcasts round David is reproduced! They think it would be 'tempting Providence' to let such a chance slip. They put a religious varnish on their advice. It would be almost impious not to kill Saul, for here was the hand of God evidently fulfilling a prophecy! There may have been some unrecorded prediction of the sort which they seem to quote; but more probably they are only referring to David's designation to the crown, which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... with ashes and grease is the outward and visible sign of sanctity. And so, in the golden age, when men did everything that is wise and right, there was established a caste whose office it was to remove that sign from secular chins. How impious and revolutionary then must it be for a man who is not a barber to tamper with his own beard, thus taking the bread out of the mouths of barbers born, and blaspheming the wisdom of the ancient founders of civilization! ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... soul. He was not impious. He had been religiously brought up in the family of the late Governor Cavendish. He was accustomed to be devout during divine worship. And on this occasion he wrestled with Satan—that is, with himself—and tried to fix his mind in succession on anthems, psalms, ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... of every word which proceeds from the mouth of God; as it is said, "By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth" (Ps. xxxiii. 6). The following story is also told: In the hour when Nimrod, the impious, cast Abraham into the midst of the fiery furnace, Gabriel said before the blessed God, "Lord of the world, I will go down and cool the flame, and deliver the righteous One from the furnace of fire." The blessed God said to him, "I am the ONE in this world, and ...
— Hebrew Literature
... Numidian malcontents, and from him the sect of Donatists took its name; they denied the orders of those ordained by Caecilianus, and hence the validity of the Sacraments administered by them. Excommunicated themselves, "they boldly excommunicated the rest of mankind who had embraced the impious party of Caecilianus, and of the traditors, from whom he derived his pretended ordination. They asserted with confidence, and almost with exultation, that the apostolical succession was interrupted, that all the bishops of Europe and Asia were infected by the contagion of guilt ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... should. What he did find was that the Will of God was inscrutable and absolute; that it was man's duty to follow where God's hand led; and, if God's hand led towards violent excitements and extraordinary vicissitudes, that it was not only futile, it was impious to turn another way. Fatalism is always apt to be a double-edged philosophy; for while, on the one hand, it reveals the minutest occurrences as the immutable result of a rigid chain of infinitely predestined causes, on the other, it invests the wildest incoherences of conduct or of circumstance ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... things, as stated above (AA. 6, 7). Accordingly if this other thing that we ask for ourselves be not useful for our beatitude, we do not merit it; and sometimes by asking for and desiring such things we lose merit for instance if we ask of God the accomplishment of some sin, which would be an impious prayer. And sometimes it is not necessary for salvation, nor yet manifestly contrary thereto; and then although he who prays may merit eternal life by praying, yet he does not merit to obtain what he asks for. Hence Augustine says (Liber. Sentent. Prosperi sent. ccxii): "He who faithfully ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of ignorance, ignorance is also the child of fear; the two react on, and produce each other. The more men dread Nature, the less they wish to know about her. Why pry into her awful secrets? It is dangerous; perhaps impious. She says to them, as in the Egyptian temple of old—"I am Isis, and my veil no mortal yet hath lifted." And why should they try or wish to lift it? If she will leave them in peace, they will leave her in peace. It is enough that she ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... with endless interlarding of proverbs did Pride relate how this impious malignant had been the means of the young man, Charles Stuart, making good his escape when otherwise he must have fallen into their hands. He accused him also of the murder of his son and of four other stout, God-fearing troopers, ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... wickeder things are advancing more successfully and abandoned manners are creeping on day by day, those foul shrines of an impious assembly are increasing throughout the whole world. Assuredly this confederacy should be rooted out and execrated. They know one another by secret marks and signs. They love one another almost before they know one another. Everywhere, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... trick. Having approached her with musical flattery, he fled from her with fear and abhorrence. For a time the highest and holiest of human affections was to his darkened mind no more than a carnal appetite; and he strove to conquer the emotions which he feared would rouse within him a riot of impious passions. With fasting and cruel discipline he would fain have killed the devil that agitated him, whenever he passed a pretty girl in the street. As a lay Carthusian he wore a hair-shirt next his skin, disciplined his bare back with scourges, slept on ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... overloaded with Indian superstitions and a crude cosmology, which pass under the name of Buddhism. Accordingly, Buddhist scholars have confused not seldom the doctrine of the Buddha with these absurdities, and thought it impious to abandon them. Kaiseki,[FN121] for instance, was at a loss to distinguish Buddhism from the Indian astronomy, which is utterly untenable in the face of the fact. He taxed his reason to the utmost to demonstrate the Indian theory and at the same time to refute the Copernican ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... your friendship to my unnatural nephew thus far. But I know you have been privy to his impious designs upon my wife. This evening she has told me all. Her good nature concealed it as long as was possible; but he perseveres so in villainy, that she has told me even you were weary of dissuading him, though you have once actually hindered him ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... evening, as she sat gently holding my hands and trying to check my tears; but, just for that reason, it seemed to me that this should not have happened; her anger would have been less difficult to endure than this new kindness which my childhood had not known; I felt that I had with an impious and secret finger traced a first wrinkle upon her soul and made the first white hair shew upon her head. This thought redoubled my sobs, and then I saw that Mamma, who had never allowed herself to go to any length of ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and impious custom of war, which all condemn in the case of individuals, is openly avowed by our own country, and by other countries of the great Christian Federation, nay, that it is expressly established by international law, ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... came into White's the morning of earthquake the first, and heard bets laid on whether it was an earthquake or the blowing up of powder-mills, went away exceedingly scandalized, and said, "I protest, they are such an impious set of people, that I believe if the last trumpet was to sound, they would bet puppet-show against Judgment." If we get any nearer still to the torrid zone, I shall pique myself on sending you a present of cedrati and orange-flower ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... that,' he answered, 'and I wouldn't dare,' he added soberly enough. And even as I had spoken there came to me the same feeling that he had expressed. It was as though something passed out of the grey rock that struck my heart as a hand strikes an impious lip. We turned away—uneasily, and faced Thora coming through a breach on ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... saint [ironically]; Pharisee; sabbatarian[obs3], formalist, methodist, puritan, pietist[obs3], precisian[obs3], religionist, devotee; ranter, fanatic, juramentado[obs3]. the wicked, the evil, the unjust, the reprobate; sons of men, sons of Belial, the wicked one; children of darkness. V. be impious &c. adj., profane, desecrate, blaspheme, revile, scoff; swear &c. (malediction) 908; commit sacrilege. snuffle; turn up the whites of the eyes; idolize. Adj. impious; irreligious &c. 989; desecrating ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... but mine is the oldest. A flood came—sent by the gods, for the woman was impious. The king must ride with her into the sea and leave her there, himself to come back, and so save ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... came trouble in Jerusalem. King Agrippa's palace stood on Mount Zion, looking towards the Temple; and he built a lofty story, from whose platform he could command a view of the courts of the Temple, and watch the sacrifices. Our people resented this impious intrusion, and built a high wall to cut off the view. Agrippa demanded its destruction, on the ground that it intercepted the view of the Roman guard. We appealed to Nero, and sent to him a deputation; ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... were hardly capable of containing the officiating clergy, much less the multitudes of the faithful. Touching the graves, removing them to a more suitable place, was out of the question; in the eyes of the early Christians no more impious sacrilege could be perpetrated. There was but one way left to deal with the difficulty; that of cutting away the rock over and around the grave, and thereby gaining such space as was deemed sufficient ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... illustration after what has been said elsewhere; it would have been well for his age if all its children had been as clear-sighted in these matters as he, to whom the practices connected with these delusive sciences seemed, and justly so from his point of view, not less impious than futile. His "Canon Yeoman's Tale," a story of imposture so vividly dramatic in its catastrophe as to have suggested to Ben Jonson one of the most effective passages in his comedy "The Alchemist," concludes with a moral of unmistakeable ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... seen there had utterly converted him to a belief in the fury of Lurgha and he had been frightened out of his simple wits, fleeing without making the search he had intended. But Lurgha had seen him there, had read his impious thoughts.... ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... chills at reading some of the awful oaths administered to the partisans of those secret societies. They proposed to war against God, to sweep away all salutary checks against the indulgence of passion, to level the alter and the throne, and advocated the claims of those impious theories that in modern times have found their fullest development ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... seems somewhat difficult to comprehend; and no one, unacquainted with the ecclesiastical history of those ages, could imagine the height of zeal and violence with which it was then inculcated. The decree of the Lateran council calls the Monothelites impious, execrable, wicked, abominable, and even diabolical, and curses and anathematizes them to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... And what shall we say of a government that avowedly steps forward, with the insolence of an open enemy, and creates a new vice, for the sake of loading it with a tax? What right has such a government to punish our follies? And who can look without disgust on the impious figure it makes, in holding the scourge in one hand, and the temptation in the other? You cannot hesitate to declare, in your constitution, THAT ALL ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 1: Curiosities of the Old Lottery • Henry M. Brooks
... ATHEISTS OVERTURNED.—For, as we have shown the doctrine of Matter or corporeal substance to have been the main pillar and support of Scepticism, so likewise upon the same foundation have been raised all the impious schemes of Atheism and Irreligion. Nay, so great a difficulty has it been thought to conceive Matter produced out of nothing, that the most celebrated among the ancient philosophers, even of those who maintained the being of a God, have thought Matter to be uncreated and ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... dismal knaves!" at last he growled. But now grim Ranulph tangled beard tore And wrung his hands and sighed and groaned and swore With loud complaints and woeful lamentations, With muttered oaths and murmured objurgations, With curses dire and impious imprecations. ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... they vent their discontent in loud clamours, if your doors, or your counsels, are shut against them. Dexterous in mischief, they have never learnt the science of doing good. Odious to earth and heaven, impious to God, seditious among themselves, jealous of their neighbours, inhuman to strangers, they love no one, by no one are they beloved; and while they wish to inspire fear, they live in base and continual apprehension. They will ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... except you reckon Misfortune herself. But for what cause I fall at thy knees, now hear: if I appear to you to suffer these ills justly, I would be reconciled to them; but if otherwise, be thou my avenger on this man, this most impious of false friends; who revering neither the Gods beneath[12] the earth, nor the Gods above, hath done this most unholy deed, having often partaken of the same table with me, [and in the list of hospitality the first of my friends; ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... Kitty, in a loud whisper. The suggestion that she had power to drive him away seemed almost impious. She felt ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... world's history. All other crimes appear less atrocious than this scorn of a Saviour's love—this trampling under foot the blood of the covenant. While no finite mind could have conceived it possible, that Almighty love should be so slighted, yet the Spirit of prophecy announced this impious ingratitude, long before the incarnation. When Isaiah saw the glory of Christ, and spake of him, he also saw that he would be despised and rejected of men. And by all their hostility to the doctrines of grace, sinners are only verifying the description, which inspiration gave long ago, ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... love with somebody or other. He is strong, he is simple, he is pure, and should he escape the dart? Depend on it, he has fallen in love not once or twice, but often and often. And the probabilities are, he has been loved, though not so often. And—this would be an impious speculation if I were nephew of the blood—how has he behaved, in the rare latter event? As a man in the presence of a miracle done for his sole benefit. He has exulted, then doubted its reality, then betaken himself to the broad prairie, where he is most ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... harmonizing with arbitrary government, accorded perfectly with the despotism of the Tokugawas, the "Tycoons" who in Yedo ruled from 1603 to 1868. Nothing new was permitted, and any attempt at modification, enlargement, or improvement was not only frowned and hissed down as impious innovation, but usually brought upon the daring innovator the ban of the censor, imprisonment, banishment, or death by enforced suicide.[10] In Yedo, the centre of Chinese learning, and in other parts of the country, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... afterwards made Bishop of Oxford by King James: who was full of satirical vivacity and was considerably learned, but was a man of no judgment and of as little virtue, and as to religion rather impious: after he had for some years entertained the nation with several virulent books writ with much life, he was attacked by the liveliest droll of the age, who writ in a burlesque strain but with so peculiar and entertaining a conduct ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... knelt while the child poured forth her humble adoration, and she prayed most earnestly, that the deep feeling of reverence she had just witnessed in her adopted one, might never be displaced or blunted by contact with an impious and careless world. ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... wreath renewed, and the rich smoke Curl from the costly censer slow and sweet. From Egypt soon the sorrow-soothing rites Divulging spread; before your [7] idol forms By every hearth the blinded Pagan knelt, Pouring his prayers to these, and offering there Vain sacrifice or impious, and sometimes With human blood your sanctuary defil'd: Till the first BRUTUS, tyrant-conquering chief, Arose; he first the impious rites put down, He fitliest, who for FREEDOM lived and died, The friend of humankind. Then did your feasts ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... throne No longer shelters the uneasy king, And outworn sceptres and imperial crowns Now grow fantastic as an idiot's dream. These perish with the kingly pastime, war, And war's blind tool, the monster, Ignorance! Both hateful in themselves, but this the worst. One tyrant will remain—one impious fiend. Whose name is Gold—our earliest, latest foe! Him must the earth destroy, ere man can rise, Rightly self made, to his high destiny, Purged of his grossest faults; humane and kind; Co-equal with his fellows, ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... were dilating strangely, and the consummate tempter hurried on. He exalted the grandeur of the Emperor's task, yet craftily made success appear simple and easy. The forces of "the arch-rebel Benito Juarez" were concentrated in "a horde of impious thieves calling themselves the Army of the North." But Miramon, His Majesty's own general, was hastening to meet them. One decisive battle, and there would be no more rebels. The nation must then recognize that the Empire had sustained itself ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... to notice is the Abbe Raynal's Histoire philosophique et politique des Etablissemens et du Commerce des Europeens dans les Deux Indes, published in 1771 at Geneva, and, after a first attempt at suppression in 1779, finally burnt by the order of the Parlement of Paris of May 25th, 1781, as impious, blasphemous, seditious, and the rest. Like many another eminent writer, Raynal had started ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... nor caused vexation to others—neither showed anger nor favour to particular persons. The doctrine that they were the working managers in the affairs of the Cosmos, celestial and terrestrial, human and extra-human, he not only repudiated as incompatible with their attributes, but declared to be impious, considering the disorder, sufferings, and violence, everywhere visible. He disallowed all prophecy, divination, and oracular inspiration, by which the public around him believed that the gods were perpetually communicating ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... opened and read it, with the result that by the time it was finished there was perhaps no more angry clergyman in the British Empire. The description of himself looking as though he had eaten a hatful of crab-apples; the impious remarks about the Thirty-nine Articles; the suggestion that Godfrey, instead of going to bed as he had ordered him to do that evening, was wandering about London at midnight; the boldly announced intention of the writer of not going to church—indeed, ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... and should be reserved to illustrate the literature of your country, when you are not called upon to expose it in her defence, or in the rescue of the innocent. Private war, a practice unknown to the civilised ancients, is, of all the absurdities introduced by the Gothic tribes, the most gross, impious, and cruel. Let me hear no more of these absurd quarrels, and I will show you the treatise upon the duello, which I composed when the town-clerk and provost Mucklewhame chose to assume the privileges of gentlemen, and challenged each other. I thought of printing ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... full of dark personal motive; it was perhaps history most of all that this company was, as a matter of course, governed by such considerations as put divorce out of the question. "Ces gens-la don't divorce, you know, any more than they emigrate or abjure—they think it impious and vulgar"; a fact in the light of which they seemed but the more richly special. It was all special; it was all, for Strether's imagination, more or less rich. The girl at the Genevese school, an isolated interesting attaching creature, then both sensitive ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... her vain enmity I fear, Another foe alarms Hippolytus. I fly, it must be own'd, from young Aricia, The sole survivor of an impious race. ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... errand at such a moment. It is a sacred errand when any one, be he priest or layman, carries the best he can give to the bedside of the dying. I said this to Jacques when M. le Cure had passed and the bell went tinkling on along the street. 'Jacques,' said I, 'I do not call it impious, like this good woman, but I call it inhuman. What! a man goes to carry help to the dying, and you show him ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant
... went on his way to the gaoler's room, leaving Brotteaux sorrowful and the Pere Longuemare trembling and green as a leaf, more dead than alive to see the impious wretch laugh on ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... hearse. When they came back, the one who was inside got out and said that he was Lazarus risen from the dead. This act so inflamed some of the white gentlemen that they had the firemen arrested and prosecuted. These two impious gentlemen became so indignant because of their arrest that they set fire to the chapel and burned it to the ground. These communicants, being homeless again, went back to the house of William Beckett on L Street and commenced ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... wicked, thought Philip, and impious, to pray for luck; he felt that perhaps he ought not to ask a blessing upon the sort of labor that was only a venture; but yet in that daily petition, which this very faulty and not very consistent young ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... and, with the persuasive words of a wise old woman, warned her that she must not let her ambition soar too high. Greater than all skilled craftswomen was the great goddess Athene, and were Arachne, in impious vanity, to dream that one day she might equal her, that were indeed a crime for any god ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... imaginable pretext serve to palliate so atrocious a crime, or excuse the woman who first committed it, and the man who joined in the rebellion? Would they indeed have been less criminal, if a seraph of glory had proposed to them the impious deed? Was not the faculty of reason which they had received from God, sufficient to make them understand what revelation has taught us, that if an angel from heaven were to proclaim any thing contrary to what God has commanded, it ought ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... and he was almost out of patience with the apostle for writing things which came so handy to the lips of the unregenerate. He commenced an industrious search for a text which should completely annihilate the impious carpenter, when that individual ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... at a funeral, when the door opens, and the corpse advances in a gap of daylight, all is changed. Like a superterrestrial antiseptic, an extrahuman disinfectant, the liturgy purifies and cleanses the impious ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... ring glittering upon the bride's fingers, the metal and fashion of the wine pots; for at such seasons there is leisure and luxury to be curious. But in a "day of judgment," or in a "day of lesser horrors, yet divine," as at the impious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the actual eye of an agent or patient in the immediate scene would see, only in masses and indistinction. Not only the female attire and jewelry exposed to the critical eye of the fashion, as minutely as the dresses in a lady's magazine, in ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the cards on the table that evening. His sense of guilt was purely conventional, while my mother's sense of innocence existed in the absence of false instruction, and in the purity of her intentions. One had been taught no exaggerated and false notion of sin,—nay, a notion that is impious, as it is clearly impious in man to torture acts that are perfectly innocent, per se, into formal transgressions of the law of God,—while the other had been educated under the narrow and exaggerated notions of a provincial sect, and had obtained a species of ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... illusions might have bound him to support James II., dethroned and fugitive; but no obligation of that sort existed in the case of a prince who had left England at his nurse's, breast, and who had grown up in exile. In the Athalie of Racine, Joad (Jehoiada) invokes upon the impious queen: ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... fire shall league together, angry heaven to earth respond, Strong Poseidon with his trident break thy impious-vaunted bond; Where thou passed, with mouths uncounted, eating up the famished land, With few men a boat shall ferry Xerxes to the Asian strand. Haste thee! haste thee! they are waiting by the palace gates for thee; By ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... Swallows skim the pleasing flood, Grows giddy, but ne'er drinks to do him good: Alike resolv'd to flatter, or to cheat, Nay worship Onions, if they cry, come eat: A foe to Faith, in Revelation blind, And impious much, as ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... long been entombed, we fear without hope of a happy resurrection. Nevertheless, into this splendid ruin, hieroglyphed with the most brilliant images the modern mind has yet conceived, we are about to dig,—not with the impious desire of dragging forth the intellectual tenant, now in the fourth century of its everlasting repose, but, haply, to discover in the outer chambers and passages of the pyramid some relics of the individual architect, his family and mode of life. In fact, we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... new piety of God and the pope, that for money they allow a man who is impious and their enemy to buy out of purgatory the pious soul of a friend of God, and do not rather, because of that pious and beloved soul's own need, free it for pure ...
— Martin Luther's 95 Theses • Martin Luther
... notorious that the use of these compliments implies not any design of service." This expression in particular they reprobated for another reason. It was one of those, which had followed the last degree of impious services and expressions, which had poured in after the statues of the emperors had been worshipped, after the titles of eternity and divinity had been ushered in, and after thou had been exchanged for you, and it had taken a certain station, and flourished among these. ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... this we beseech thee, O master, for thine own sake refrain From the blasphemous madness of pride, from the fever of impious gain." ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... O God! with impious will, Have made these Negroes turn Thy mill! Their human limbs with chains we bound, And bade them whirl Thy mill-stones round; With branded brow and fettered wrist, We bade them grind this ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... But impious fate was again against them. Fernanda snubbed any conciliatory remark that they made to her in favour of the Indian. If she noticed that the senoritas arranged the chairs, so that he would have to sit by her side, she instantly upset their manoeuvres ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... contributed to my suspicions. The account I then heard, almost convinced me, that he was a murderer. I trembled for you;—the more so that I had heard the guests mention your name in a manner, that threatened your repose; and, knowing, that the most impious men are often the most superstitious, I determined to try whether I could not awaken their consciences, and awe them from the commission of the crime I dreaded. I listened closely to Montoni, and, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... was recognized by no one. That great truth had not then even dawned upon the world. The noble toleration so earnestly advocated by Bayle and Locke a century later, was almost a new revelation to the human mind; but in the sixteenth century it would have been regarded as impious, and rebellion against God to have affirmed that error was not to be pursued and punished. The reformers did not advocate the view that a man had a right to believe what he pleased, and to disseminate that belief. ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... her ears. "Don't tell me that he has ordered this impious, cruel, cowardly act. He is a lion: and this comes from the heart of cowardly curs. What is to be done, woman? tell me; for you are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... everybody had a right to their own opinions, grounds or no grounds, and that the weaver, as everybody knew, was partly crazy. Mr. Macey, though he joined in the defence of Marner against all suspicions of deceit, also pooh-poohed the tinder-box; indeed, repudiated it as a rather impious suggestion, tending to imply that everything must be done by human hands, and that there was no power which could make away with the guineas without moving the bricks. Nevertheless, he turned round rather sharply on Mr. Tookey, when the zealous deputy, feeling that ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... Antonio Agapida) could exceed the thankfulness to God of the pious king Ferdinand for having enabled him to eradicate from Spain the empire and name of that accursed heathen race, and for the elevation of the cross in that city wherein the impious doctrines of Mahomet had so long been cherished. In the fervor of his spirit he supplicated from heaven a continuance of its grace and that this glorious triumph might be perpetuated.* The prayer of the pious monarch was responded ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... earlier stages of his quarrel with Philip, Boniface built great hopes on Edward's support, and strongly urged him to fight for holy Church against the impious French king. But Edward had suffered too much from Boniface to fall into so obvious a trap. His hold over his own clergy was so firm that Winchelsea himself had no chance of taking up the papal call to battle. Thus it was that Unam sanctam produced ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... abroad her mental rays. But can we think that Providence will stay Man's footsteps here upon the upward way? Mankind in understanding and in grace Advanc'd so far beyond the Giants' race? Hence impious thought! Still led by GOD'S own Hand, Mankind proceeds towards the Promised Land. A time will come (prophetic, I descry Remoter dawns along the gloomy sky), When happy mortals of a Golden Age Will backward turn the dark historic page, And in our vaunted race of Men behold A form as gross, a ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Martin and his Lateran synod anathematized the perfidious and guilty silence of the Greeks: one hundred and five bishops of Italy, for the most part the subjects of Constans, presumed to reprobate his wicked type, and the impious ecthesis of his grandfather; and to confound the authors and their adherents with the twenty-one notorious heretics, the apostates from the church, and the organs of the devil. Such an insult under the tamest reign could not pass with impunity. Pope Martin ended ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... strictest sense, intolerable; not because it aims at the extinction of life, but of every thing which gives life its value—of virtue, of reason, of repose in God, or in truth. With what heart may we suppose that a genuine Spaniard would read the following impious address from the Deputation, as they were falsely called, of his apostate countrymen at Bayonne, seduced or compelled to assemble under the eye of the Tyrant, and speaking as he dictated? 'Dear Spaniards, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... of Grandmother's voice would have made the dead stir. "Ain't I showed it to you, in the paper?" To question print was as impious as to doubt ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... they came, in communion with God, to the point where they have no need of Christ, seemed to him impious. There is no way of knowing that we are in fellowship with God, except by comparing what we feel that this fellowship has given us, with that which we historically learn that the fellowship with God gave to Christ. This is the sense and this the connexion in which Ritschl ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... descendants. Built into the structure of a temple, or buried beneath the edifice, one of their principal objects was to preserve the name and deeds of the writer from oblivion. Like similar documents found on the sites of Assyrian and Babylonian cities, they sometimes include curses upon any impious man, who, on finding the inscription after the temple shall have fallen into ruins, should in any way injure the inscription or deface the writer's name. It will be obvious that the writers of these inscriptions intended that they should ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... his soul serene in those heights "where one feels the joys and sorrows of all peoples as one's own." It has been the labor of my life to bring together the minds of our two nations; and the atrocities of impious war shall never lead me to soil ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... shaken to its last paralysis. In such a paroxysm of dissolution That son of mine was born; by that first act Heading the monstrous catalogue of crime, I found fore-written in his horoscope; As great a monster in man's history As was in nature his nativity; So savage, bloody, terrible, and impious, Who, should he live, would tear his country's entrails, As by his birth his mother's; with which crime Beginning, he should clench the dreadful tale By trampling on his father's silver head. All which fore-reading, and his act of birth Fate's warrant that I read his life aright; To save ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... observed, that alchymy had become a mere covert for secret and deadly sins. That the practisers of it were apt to scruple at no means to satisfy their inordinate greediness of gold. Some had been known to use spells and impious ceremonies; to conjure the aid of evil spirits; nay, even to sell their souls to the enemy of mankind, so that they might riot in ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... begging for my country, even unsuccessfully, that would have been worship, acceptable to the gods. But theft is never worship—how then can I offer this gold? Ah me! I am doomed to death myself, must I desecrate my country with my impious touch? The way to put the money back is closed to me. I have not the strength to return to the room, take again that key, open once more that safe—I should swoon on the threshold of my husband's door. The ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... into being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle...; and on the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime against one's forefathers to bring it into question. The authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers lived it.—The higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Terre Australe commue, a romance written by Gabriel de Foigny (pseud. J. Sadeur), describing the stay of Sadeur on the southern continent for more than thirty-five years, The original edition, made in Geneva in 1676, is said to contain "many impious and licentious passages which were omitted in the later editions." Sabin (xviii. 220) gives a list of editions, the first English translation appearing in 1693. It is possible that the author owed the idea of his work ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... labor he was to undertake in the region in which his hero strength—so the impious king hoped—would not accompany him. This was a fight with the dark powers of the underworld. He was to bring forth from Hades Cerberus, the dog of Hell. This animal had three heads with frightful jaws, from ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... long residence at Damascus, and the nature of his calling, his absence was sure to be noticed. Why not have selected for their victim some more obscure individual, on whom their barbarous fanaticism might have exercised their impious rites with impunity? Bah! why waste time by pursuing the ridiculous absurdities of these ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... I ravish'd from my native strand? What savage race protects this impious gain? Shall foreign plagues infest this teeming land, And more than ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... the inequality of the towers produce rather an unfavourable effect. During the revolution, this august edifice was converted into a sulphur and gunpowder manufactory, by which impious prostitution, the pillars are defaced, and broken, and the whole is ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... psalms; so that in their zeal they endured a little tediousness. The next objectionable circumstance in this wild ebullition of philosophical wantonness is the apparent burlesque of some liturgies; and a wag having inserted in some copies an impious prayer to Bacchus, Toland suffered for the folly of others as well as his own.[114] With the South Sea bubble vanished Toland's desire of printing books at his own risk; and thus relieved the world from the weight of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... such edifices; an organ-loft, from which weird noises issue at every opening or closing of a door; a vaulted roof, which echoes one's footsteps with a moan, as of some outraged spirit hovering in empty space, and ejaculating piteously, "Another impious intruder after the sacramental plate! another plebeian sole trampling on the brasses of the De Montacutes, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... sig. aa. iij. So far the matter looks well, and the prospect is not hopeless. These glosses, however, were revised by another master of the Apostolic Palace, Sixtus Fabri, and were edited, under the sanction of Pope Gregory XIII., in the year 1580; and from this authentic impression the impious panegyric has not been withdrawn. The marginal abridgment has, in compliance with Manriq's direction, been exterminated; and this additional note has ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... peasant. He is original sin in all its brutish simplicity."—"The peasant passed from paganism to Christianity mostly through miracles; he would go back at less cost from Christianity to paganism.... It is only lately that a monster exists, the impious peasant.... The rustic, in spite of school-teachers, even in spite of the cures, believes in sorcerers and in sorcery the same as the Gauls and Romans."—Therefore the means employed against him are wholly external. ("Vie de Mgr. Dupanloup," by Abbe Lagrange, pastoral notes ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... now fresh from war and recent strife, 'Tis impious the sacred things to touch Till in the living ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... temple of Victoria on the Palatine until such time as its own temple was ready to receive it, and the goddess of Victory seemed to respond to its presence, for did not Hannibal leave Italy the very next year? And who would be so impious as to suggest that to Scipio and not Cybele belonged the glory, and that a strong Roman army in Africa affected Hannibal more than a sacred stone ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... system, but of harsh, protesting cries—Panta chorei kai ouden menei. All things give way: nothing remaineth. There had been enquirers before him of another sort, purely physical enquirers, whose bold, contradictory, seemingly impious guesses how and of what primary elements the world of visible things, the sun, the stars, the brutes, their own souls and bodies, had been composed, were themselves a part of the bold enterprise of that romantic age; a series ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... the most buoyant heart that ever swelled with maternal devotion. I sometimes think I would rather have never existed, that I could forfeit all the grand privileges of a created being destined for a noble end, rather than have become the mother of impious and ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... he had seen him a minute earlier; if only something—could it have been that impious knave, Jeffrey? he wondered—had not struck him so violently in the back and hurled him to the boat, where he lay almost senseless till the vessel had glided from them down the river! Well, she was gone, and Jeffrey in her. He was but a common serving-man, after all, who, if he knew ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... I declare and testify to you that you shall observe none of the impious customs of the pagans, neither sorcerers, nor diviners, nor soothsayers, nor enchanters, nor must you presume for any cause, or for any sickness, to consult or inquire of them; for he who commits this sin loses unavoidably the grace of ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... not thee profane with impious shag, Nor poison thee with nigger-head and twist, Nor with Kentucky, though the planters brag That it hath virtues ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... exercise it, and has otherwise earned his daily bread; and its results should be free to all. There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this. He puts on a bold front with the world, to be sure, and brazens it out as Business; but he knows very ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not easily find satisfaction in this cheap pardon. There is something in conscience which will not allow it to believe that God can simply condone sin: to take forgiveness for granted, when you realise what you are doing, seems to a live conscience impious and profane. In reality, the tendency to take forgiveness for granted is the tendency of those who, while they properly emphasise the personal character of the relations of God and man, overlook their universal character—that is, exclude from them that element of ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... vulgarisation of the Bible story in the common sense; she inspired and transfused it so that wherever she appeared people irresistibly forgot the matter for her, or made private acknowledgments to the effect that something was to be said even for an impious fantasy which gave her so unique an opportunity. To Arnold her vivid embodiment of an incident in that which was his morning and evening meditation made special appeal, and though it was in a way as if she ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... sinner, or in word or deed, That will not Justice heed, Nor reverence the shrine Of images divine, Perdition seize his vain imaginings, If, urged by greed profane, He grasps at ill-got gain, And lays an impious hand on holiest things. Who when such deeds are done Can hope heaven's bolts to shun? If sin like this to honor can aspire, Why dance I still ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... taking everything for granted that will serve your turn. For you are not ashamed to rob O. Cromwell himself, and make use of his canting assurances from Heaven and answering condescensions: the most impious Mahometan doctrine that ever was ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... of India, death is Yama, the soul of the first man, departed to be the king of the subterranean realm of the subsequent dead, and returning to call after him each of his descendants in turn. To the good he is mild and lovely, but to the impious he is clad in terror and acts with severity. The purely fanciful character of this thought is obvious; for, according to it, death was before death, since Yama himself died. Yama does not really represent death, but its arbiter and messenger. He is the ruler over the dead, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... blown on the haughty races and withered their roots. The prosperity of the impious has never passed to their descendants. Thrones themselves, and royal succession have failed, to effeminate and worthless princes; and the history of the crimes and excess of the great is, at the same time, the history of their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... the state of degradation to which she had, for ages, been subjected—when we consider not only what it has done, but what it is destined yet to do for her advancement,—it is impossible not to shrink from the presence of an impious, and above all an unprincipled atheistical female, as from an ungrateful and ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... of the changes which our earth has undergone, as they lead with infallible evidence to the proof of an existence of this globe at a period almost infinitely more remote than that at which man became its inhabitant, have been stigmatized as impious. The intolerant theologian, adhering with pertinacity to his own system of interpretation, fulminates anathemas against all who find in natural appearances convincing evidence, that the earth was not suddenly and by a single fiat called into existence in the exact, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... my bosom fire, And waste my soul with care; But ah! how bootless to admire, When fated to despair! Yet in thy presence, lovely fair, To hope may be forgiv'n; For sure 'twere impious to despair, So ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... that the very volume in which our reverend friend Dibdin so heartily condemns these inexcusable bandits, should be seized on as a receptacle for their ill-gotten prizes. May the spectre of Thomas Frognall Dibdin haunt the souls of these impious rascals, and torture them with never-ceasing visions of unobtainable and rare portraits, non-existent autographs, and elusive engravings in general! They even dare to profane your sacred work, the Biblia of book-lovers, by the 'insertion' of ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... other side of the hollow bridle-way which crossed the hill. To make for home he had first to walk some little distance along it; and scarcely had he descended into it for that purpose, when he found himself in the front of a band of revellers, who were returning from some scene of impious festivity. They were arrayed in holiday guise, as far as they studied dress at all; the symbols of idolatry were on their foreheads and arms; some of them were intoxicated, and most ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... that we could say to the contrary, dispute publicly concerning the Christian religion with more zeal than discretion; and with so much heat, that he not only preferred our worship to theirs, but condemned all their rites as profane; and cried out against all that adhered to them, as impious and sacrilegious persons, that were to be damned to everlasting burnings. Upon his having frequently preached in this manner, he was seized, and after trial he was condemned to banishment, not for ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... when Talleyrand and Bonaparte must have agreed about some new measure to indirectly chastise impious writers, the Senators Garat, Jaucourt, Roederer, and Demeunier, four of the members of the senatorial commission of the liberty of the Press, were sent for, and remained closeted with Napoleon, his Minister Portalis, and Cardinal Caprara for two hours. What was ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... thus sift out what reliable residue is possible. Finally, my task will be to show that Simon taught a system of Theosophy, which instead of deserving our condemnation should rather excite our admiration, and that, instead of being a common impostor and impious perverter of public morality, his method was in many respects of the same nature as the methods of the theosophical movement of to-day, and deserves the study and consideration of ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... impassioned cult which to Brother Archangias savoured of heresy. In his opinion it was she who would save the Church by some matchless prodigy whose near appearance would entrance the world. She was the only miracle of our impious age—the blue-robed lady that showed herself to little shepherdesses, the whiteness that gleamed at night between two clouds, her veil trailing over the low thatched roofs of peasant homes. When Brother Archangias coarsely asked him if ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola |
