"Indecent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... using them in his Magnetic Lady, where one comes out from dinner, and Relates the quarrels and disorders of it; to save the indecent appearing of them on the Stage, and to abbreviate the story: and this, in express imitation of TERENCE, who had done the same before him, in his Eunuch; where PYTHIAS makes the like Relation of what had happened ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... I could make myself intelligible; but as the case is, it is impossible to mince the matter—fashion has not yet, thank God, invaded the "Dictionary of Sea-Terms;" and ladies, when off soundings, must still be content to have "legs" like other folks—on shore they may vote it indecent to have even "ankles," for aught ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... amusement to instruction, at which he laughs, and says that in this matter he perfectly agrees with us. He expresses his strong opinion as to Dickens's reading of the "Murder of Nancy" (Oliver Twist), which he characterizes as "repulsive and indecent." ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... what he had seen. Hermotimus had enemies, who, one time when his body had lain unanimated unusually long, beguiled his wife, made her believe that he was certainly dead, and that it was disrespectful and indecent to keep him so long in that state. The woman therefore placed her husband on the funeral pyre, and consumed him to ashes; so that, continues the philosopher, when the soul of Hermotimus came back again, it no longer found its customary receptacle to ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... me according to thy Word[l]. Jonah the Prophet, tho' favour'd with such immediate Revelations, and so lately delivered, in a miraculous Way, from the very Belly of Hell[m], was thrown into a most indecent Transport of Passion, on the withering of a Gourd; so that he presumed to tell the Almighty to his Face, that he did well to be angry even unto Death[n]: Whereas this pious Woman preserves the Calmness and Serenity of her Temper, when she had lost a Child, a Son, an ...
— Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children • Phillip Doddridge
... in this case. The tricks also of robbing the bride groomes of their faculty that they can do nothing to the wives is very ordinar heir; as also that of bewitching gentlewomen in causing them follow them lasciviously and wt sundry indecent gestures; and this they effectuat sometymes by a kind of pouder they have and mix in amongs hir wine; some tymes by getting a litle of hir hair, which they boill wt pestiferous herbs; whilk act when its parfaited the women who aught ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... understand at first. Presently I saw what it expressed; in my drawing-room he was off duty, he had no longer to sit up and play a part; he would lean back and rest and draw a long breath, and forget that the day of his execution was fixed. There was to be no indecent haste about the marriage; it was not to take place till after the session, at the end of August It puzzled me and rather distressed me. that his heart should n't be a little more in the matter; it seemed strange to be engaged to so ...
— The Path Of Duty • Henry James
... papers, the way in which they associated his political conduct with an offence that was wholly unpolitical. It had amused Wilkes to set up a private printing-press at his own house. At this {65} press certain productions were printed which were no doubt indecent, which were no doubt blasphemous, but which were furthermore so foolish as to make both their indecency and their blasphemy of very little effect. One was the "Essay on Woman," written as a parody of Pope's "Essay on Man;" the other was an imitation of the "Veni Creator." Neither ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... anointed their lawful prince always recommended the duty of allegiance; and the spiritual censures were denounced on the heads of the impious subjects who should resist his authority, conspire against his life, or violate by an indecent union the chastity even of his widow. But the monarch himself, when he ascended the throne, was bound by a reciprocal oath to God and his people that he would faithfully execute his important trust. The real or imaginary faults of his administration ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... have ever been proverbial, she is impatient to measure her crude theories against the sure revelation of GOD'S Word. Where the two differ, she assumes that of course the inspired Oracles are wrong, and her own wild guesses right. She is even indecent in her eagerness to invalidate the testimony of that Book which has been the confidence and stay of GOD'S Servants in all ages. On any evidence, or on none, she is prepared to hurl to the winds the august record of Creation. Inconveniently enough for the enemies ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... at Hieropolis served by three hundred priests, who were always employed in offering sacrifices. The priests of Cybele, called Corybantes, also Galli, were not admitted to their sacred functions without previous mutilation. In the celebration of their festivals these priests used all kinds of indecent expressions, beat drums, cymbals, and behaved just like madmen: his worship extended all over Phrygia, and was established in Greece under the name of Eleusinian mysteries. In short, every thing was personified: the sea was under the empire ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... their heads to oil the wheels of the new Yuen-nan railway, and I despise him for believing it. The Chinese will not fight, and I sneer at him; he abhors me because I do. I ridicule his manner of dress; he thinks mine grossly indecent. I consider his flat nose and the plaited hair and shaven skull as heathenish; but the Chinese, eating away with his to me ridiculous chopsticks, looks out from his quick, almond-shaped eyes and considers me still a ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... him in short, savage jerks. To Straker, to Mrs. Viveash, he appeared intolerable; but he had ceased to care how he appeared to anybody. He had ceased to know that they were there. They turned from him as from something monstrous, intolerable, indecent. Mrs. Viveash's hands and mouth were quivering, and her eyes implored Straker to take her away somewhere where she couldn't see ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... for a week; his manner was as dry as a burned-out fire. She knew there was a special reason; he was displeased at Ralph Touchett's staying on in Rome. He thought she saw too much of her cousin—he had told her a week before it was indecent she should go to him at his hotel. He would have said more than this if Ralph's invalid state had not appeared to make it brutal to denounce him; but having had to contain himself had only deepened his disgust. Isabel read all this as she would have read the hour on the clock-face; ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... strike the visitor as he perambulates these miles of sculptured terraces is the complete absence of any offensive or indecent figure. Mere nudity is not, of course, an outrage to the artistic soul; but here there is not even a nude or grotesque figure. Each is draped in the fine flowing robes of the East, not in monotonous regularity but suggestive of prince and peasant, princess ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... They calculated too largely on the prospective business with California, and have too large a sum invested to make much for the future. And yet, with a smaller investment they could not perform the service, except in that dangerous, cheap, indecent way, of innumerable wants and deprivations, which the American people have begun to despise. They have had some few disasters, but none of those of a fatal character in the Pacific. The "Winfield Scott" was lost in entering the harbor of Acapulco; ...
— Ocean Steam Navigation and the Ocean Post • Thomas Rainey
... met him. I left a director's meeting and vital engagements, with indecent firmness, to meet that ship. At crack of dawn on a raw morning in March I arose and drove miles to a freezing pier to meet it. And presently, as I stood muffled in a fur coat, an elderly, grizzled, small man, grim and unexhilarating—presently the soul ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... who is at the bottom of this indecent talk of hers. I found his picture cut out of the school magazine and pasted in her diary. She's a changed child since that Lindsley came to the High School the year before ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... their own vanity. They pollute the purity of real beauty by the foul arts of beautifying, and cry out in loud rude voices in every assembly and gathering. They strut about in vain-glorious conceit, and flaunt their gaudy apparel in indecent boldness. They claim what does not belong to them and meddle with what does not concern them. They do not blush to cloud the precious jewel of modesty with the selfish airs of passion. Nothing is said which they do ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... look so much, but we are sixty). Well, be it so. We were handsome once—is this vanity at sixty? if so, our grey hairs are a hatchment for the past. We were "swells once!—hurrah!—we were!" Stop, this is indecent—let us be calm—our action was like the proceeding of the denuder of well-sustained and thriving pigs, he who deprives them of their extreme obesive selvage—vulgo, "we cut it fat." Bond-street was cherished by our smile, and Ranelagh was rendered happy by the exhibition ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various
... slept. Most of them brooded, like Harold, on the sunshine lost to them, and paced their cells like wild animals. It had, however, the advantage of giving to each man a separate bed at night, though during the day they occupied a common corridor. Some of them sang indecent songs and cursed their fellows for their stupidity, and ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... The women in New York seemed to her artificial and affected in appearance, and they walked, she thought, as if they were trying to make people look at them. The bold way they laced in their figures she regarded as almost indecent, and she noticed that they looked straight into the eyes of men instead of lowering their lashes when they passed them. Her provincialism, like everything else which belonged to her and had become endeared by habit and association, seemed ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... of the shop turned to his wife, (a very pretty woman, and dressed even to a plumed head)—shew Monsieur the little miniature, said he; she then opened a drawer and took out a book, (I think it was her mass-book) and brought me a picture, so indecent, that I defy the most debauched imagination to conceive any thing more so; yet she gave it me with a seeming decent face, and only observed that it was bien fait. After examining it with more attention than I should, had I received ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... Fielding, following the doctrine laid down in his initial chapters, has depicted him under certain conditions (in which, it is material to note, he is always rather the tempted than the tempter), with an unvarnished truthfulness which to the pure-minded is repugnant, and to the prurient indecent. Remembering that he too had been young, and reproducing, it may be, his own experiences, he exhibits his youth as he had found ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... and the price of land, but, most of all, of horses, since it was a horsey day. The screaming of a stallion came persistently from the meydan—a naughty screaming which foreboded mischief. I recognised the voice. The culprit was my own Sheytan. The screams were so disturbing, so indecent, that several of the great ones round me frowned and asked: 'Whose horse is that?' in accents of displeasure. I was ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... for the "indecent" sculptures of the Orissa temples, the same writer quotes the following from Baboo Ragendralala Mitra, in his work on the ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... printing it. He collected the news, wrote the contents, sold the paper, and received advertisements. He worked manfully, but his difficulties were enormous. He made his little journal spicy, attractive, and even impudent—though not indecent, as some have wrongly asserted—in the hope of making it popular. He worked from sixteen to eighteen hours a day, but in spite of all his efforts he lost money until the end of the third month, after which he contrived to pay the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... you: don't deny it.—'Tis base in you To be so flippant with your hands. For what Affront's more gross than to receive a friend Under your roof, and tamper with his mistress? And, last night in your cups too, how indecent And rudely ...
— The Comedies of Terence • Publius Terentius Afer
... the eulogium here given to the indecent trash of the younger Cr'ebillon: but in the age of George II. coarseness passed for ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... apparently without any surviving children, and before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of the following May, he was married a second time to Margaret Bentley. At the end of seventeen years Thomas Bunyan was again left a widower, and within two months, with grossly indecent haste, he filled the vacant place with a third wife. Bunyan himself cannot have been much more than twenty when he married. We have no particulars of the death of his first wife. But he had been married two years to his noble-minded ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... in a great roll upon it; a shaky deal table and primitive chair completed the furniture. Ornament did not wholly lack; round the walls hung a number of those coloured political caricatures (several indecent) which are published by some Italian newspapers, and a large advertisement of a line of emigrant ships between Naples and New York. Moreover, there was suspended in a corner a large wooden crucifix, very quaint, very hideous, and black ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... dynasties of despots, and reduce refractory districts to the Papal sway. For these services they were rewarded with ducal and princely titles, with the administration of their conquests, and with the investiture of fiefs as vassals of the Church. The system had its obvious disadvantages. It tended to indecent nepotism; and as Pope succeeded Pope at intervals of a few years, each bent on aggrandizing his own family at the expense of those of his predecessors and the Church, the ecclesiastical States were kept in a continual ferment of expropriation ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... her character to give it a fair chance with her critics. They one and all recommended powder for her hair and cheeks. That odour of the shepherdess could be exorcised by no other means, they declared. Her blushing was indecent. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... serious middle class. We are incapable of sending Mr. Gladstone to be tried at the Old Bailey because he proclaims his antipathy to Lord Beaconsfield. A majority in our House of Commons is incapable of hailing, with frantic laughter and applause, a string of indecent jests against Christianity and its Founder. But we are not, or were not incapable of producing a Parliament which burns or sells the masterpieces of Italian art. And one may surely say of such a Puritan Parliament, and of those ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... in making men give credit to what he delivered, not only during the time of his natural life, but even there is still no one of the Hebrews who does not act even now as if Moses were present, and ready to punish him if he should do any thing that is indecent; nay, there is no one but is obedient to what laws he ordained, although they might be concealed in their transgressions. There are also many other demonstrations that his power was more than human, for still some there have been, who have come from the parts beyond Euphrates, a ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... facetious pantomime dances here on this day every week—admired by some, the Jews especially. To the more classic taste, many of his movements—his recoil, especially—are wanting in the true antique severity—might be called, perhaps, on the whole, indecent. Still the weary pilgrim must be amused. Let us step ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... noisy Sunday dinner-parties, sitting among five or six women, to all of whom her father spoke familiarly. There were actresses, dancers or singers, who, after dinner, would settle themselves down to smoke with their elbows on the table absorbed in the indecent stories so keenly relished by their host. Fortunately, childhood is protected by a resisting candour, by an enamel over which all impurities glide. Felicia became noisy, turbulent, ill-behaved, but without being touched by all that ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... hospital which was the first ever built in Paris. But according to the descriptions of all authors who wrote at that period upon the subject, the streets were in a filthy condition in many parts of the city, and the names which have long since been changed were as dirty and indecent; some were absolutely ridiculous; as Did you find me Hard, Bertrand Sleeps, Cut Bread, John Bread Calf (alluding to the leg); the last still exists, as also Bad Advice, Bad Boys, etc. It was in this reign that the first crusade from France took place, and Louis VII was followed ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... doomed house. Thick, languid flames blocked the doorway, swaying idly, ready to fasten their fangs in anything that approached. Furniture crashed and bounded to the pavement. Mattresses were flung out to receive the indecent figures of their owners. The ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... a cross hung three chains, and combustibles were piled beneath. Sad and solemn was the silence of the vast throng assembled in the Piazza, excepting where members of the factions were raging like wild beasts and venting indecent blasphemies. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... declarations, threats, and harangues, highly censurable in any, are peculiarly indecent and unbecoming in the Chief Magistrate of the United States, by means whereof said Andrew Johnson has brought the high office of the President of the United States into contempt, ridicule, and disgrace, to the great scandal of all good ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 6: Andrew Johnson • James D. Richardson
... knives, and some of the plates were broken. He struck me so severely for this, that at last I defended myself, for I thought it was high time to do so. I then told him I would not live longer with him, for he was a very indecent man—very spiteful, and too indecent; with no shame for his servants, no shame for his own flesh. So I went away to a neighbouring house and sat down and cried till the next morning, when I went home again, not knowing what ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... and considered this. Then: "Dal," she said, "I do hate singing before that sort of audience. It is like giving them your soul to look at, and you don't want them to see it. It seems indecent. To my mind, music is the most REVEALING thing in the world. I shiver when I think of that song, and yet I daren't do less than my best. When the moment comes, I shall live in the song, and forget the audience. Let me tell you a lesson I once had from Madame Blanche. I was singing ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... complexion or their temper. Others would be compelled to confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had displaced that which they naturally inherited. No man can be expected to go thus into the details of his family history, and, therefore, it is an ill-bred and indecent thing to fling a man's father's creed in his face, as if he had broken the fifth commandment in thinking for himself in the light of a new generation. Common delicacy would prevent him from saying that he did not get his faith from ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... rejected with contempt, in two indecent lines, sung with absolute frankness and producing a furore in the audience. The ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... his mother I knew him in the street. I would like to give him a fantasia, but it is not proper for a woman to send for the dancing-girls, and as I am the friend of the Maohn (police magistrate), the Kadee, and the respectable people here, I cannot do what is indecent in their eyes. It is quite enough that they approve my unveiled face, and my associating with men; that is 'my custom,' and they think no harm ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... It had never occurred to her that it was wicked. If, as Mrs. Munday explained, it was the Devil that had whispered it to her, then what did God mean by allowing the Devil to go about persuading little girls to do indecent things? God could do everything. Why didn't He smash the Devil? It seemed to Joan a mean trick, look at it how you would. Fancy leaving a little girl to fight the Devil all by herself. And then get angry because the Devil ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. I had even written one, "The Travelling Companion," which was returned by an editor on the plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the other day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that "Jekyll" had supplanted it. Then came one of those financial fluctuations to which (with an elegant modesty) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... what is known as the "half time," or the "part time" waltz. This is a dance accompanied by a swaying and contorting of the hips, most indecent in its suggestion. It is really a very primitive form of the dance, and probably goes back to the pagan harvest and bacchic festivals. You may see traces of it in certain crude peasant dances in out-of-the-way corners of Europe. Now they teach it to immigrant girls in New York dancing ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... was moved by Lord Hilsborough and Lord Suffolk, after some wrangling between Lord Temple, Lord Halifax, the Duke of Bedford, and Lord Gower; Lord Sandwich(353) laid before the House the most blasphemous and indecent poem that ever was composed, called "An Essay on Woman, With notes, by Dr. Warburton."', I will tell you none of the particulars: they were so exceedingly bad, that Lord Lyttelton begged the reading might be stopped. The House was amazed; nobody ventured even to ask a ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... priests, endeavored in their attire to show a mingling of the male and female sex; they wore long garments like women, vergogna! they wore long hair, guai! and they SHAVED THEIR FACES! It pains me to say, that their indecent example is followed even to this day, by the priests of what should be a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... so much as cheerfulness—an indecent, extravagant sort of quality, which had no relation to facts. The mixture of his desires and hopes was, in a word, becoming torture; and lately the thought had come to him that perhaps Irene knew she ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... something to many quite overawing. The dinner, that had at first, in his hurry, seemed so long in coming on, seemed now quite as fast in going off. Not that I would have you suppose by this, that he thought the guests were showing any indecent haste to make way with the dishes that were set before them without number, and heaped up without measure, on Mr. Chamberlin's ample board. On the contrary, they partook of the good things of the table with a well-bred slowness, that would have been beyond his endurance to bear, had Mars been ...
— The Farmer Boy, and How He Became Commander-In-Chief • Morrison Heady
... Russia is the spirit of cynicism. It informs the declarations of her statesmen, the theories of her revolutionists, and the mystic vaticinations of prophets to the point of making freedom look like a form of debauch, and the Christian virtues themselves appear actually indecent.... But I must apologize for the digression. It proceeds from the consideration of the course taken by the story of Mr. Razumov after his conservative convictions, diluted in a vague liberalism natural to the ardour of his age, had become crystallized ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... him, therefore, the brunt of episcopal indignation fell. He was not a wholly exemplary person. "I mean," says La Motte, "to show you the truth in all its nakedness. The fact is that, about two years ago, when the Sieur de Mareuil first came to Canada, and was carousing with his friends, he sang some indecent song or other. The count was told of it, and gave him a severe reprimand. This is the charge against him. After a two years' silence, the pastoral zeal has wakened, because a play is to be acted which the clergy mean to ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... had made it. She had never seen a baby without a cap before, and the sight was unusual if not indecent. But Miss Kitty was a quick needlewoman, and when the new cap was fairly tied over the thick crop of silky black hair, the baby looked so much less like Puck, and so much more like the rest of the baby world, that it was ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... is plainer, and such that it becomes indecent; for from the small mantas or textiles of these regions, which are all very thin, they make a sack nine palmos long and open at both ends. They gird this in at the waist as much as may be necessary, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... to leave them to themselves; but why should they be left to themselves? Their conversation is always the most lively, while their persons are generally the most agreeable objects. No: the plain truth is, that it is the love of the drink and of the indecent talk that send women from the table; and it is a practice which I have always abhorred. I like to see young men, especially, follow them out of the room, and prefer their company to that of the ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... semi-mystical emotion, but little progress will be effected towards a due appreciation of the character of the offences referred to. It is a curious circumstance, as illustrating the change of men's view of offences, that an ordinary indecent assault, which in the Middle Ages—in Chaucer's time, for instance—would evidently have been regarded as a species of rude joke, should now be deemed one of ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... protested against the sculpture, rich and fantastic, but gloomy, it might be indecent, developed more abundantly than anywhere else in the churches of Burgundy, and especially in those of the Cluniac order. "What is the use," he asks, "of those grotesque monsters in painting and sculpture?" ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... off if 'e looks up over the edge. I've 'ad enough o' dug-outs an' observin' from the trenches, an' Coal-Box dodgin' to last me a bit, an' it's a pleasant change to be ridin' a decent 'orse on a most indecent apology for a road, an' not a Jack Johnson in sight, even if they ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... blessed principle of self-determination was in fetters. Chapter iii. lays down that all inscriptions must have the approval of the civic body. You are warned that they will not approve of sentences or words which are indecent, and that they prohibit all expressions and allusions that might give offence to anyone, to moral corporations, to religions, or which are notoriously false. No doubt, in practice, they waive the last stipulation, so that the survivors may give praise to famous or to infamous men; ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... illumination of extraordinary splendor. They were highly delighted with the beauty and the novelty of a scene such as they had never before witnessed; but her pleasure was in a great degree marred by the indecent boldness of one whose sacred profession, as well as his ancient lineage, ought to have restrained him from such misconduct, though it was but too completely in harmony with his previous life. Prince Louis de Rohan was a descendant of the great Duke de Sully, and a member ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... talkative, inquisitive and restless, busy in their own pursuits, keen sportsmen and naturally independent, absorbed in the chase from sheer love of it and other physical occupations, and not lustful, indecent, or indecently abusive. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... own, in his favour, that he has observed some decency in his accounts to you of the most indecent and shocking actions. And if all his strangely-communicative narrations are equally decent, nothing will be rendered criminally odious by them, but the vile heart that could meditate such contrivances as were much stronger evidences of his ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... commandments strictly, and yet be a most objectionable person? You might smoke, drink, listen at doors, repeat private conversations, open other people's letters, pry amongst their papers, be vulgar and offensive in conversation, and indecent in dress—altogether detestable, if your code of morality were confined to the ten commandments. But why will you talk like this, Angelica? Why will you be so defiant, when your heart is breaking, as I know ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... stuttered, "getting married—like that." Myrtle was rigid in an indignation that left her momentarily without speech. Mrs. Penny, Howat saw, drew into the slight remoteness from which she watched the conflicts of her family. "I know I'm fearfully bold, yes, indecent," Caroline went on, "and undutiful, impertinent. I'm sorry, truly, for that. Perhaps you'll forgive me, later. But I won't ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... seized at Bristol as an obscene publication. The book had been supplied in the ordinary course of business by Mr. Charles Watts, but the Bristol bookseller had altered its price, had inserted some indecent pictures in it, and had sold it among literature to which the word obscene was fairly applied. In itself, Dr. Knowlton's work was merely a physiological treatise, and it advocated conjugal prudence and parental responsibility; it argued in favor of early marriage, ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... thorns for her. She chafed under the burden and her joy was indecent when the little boy died. Until then he had believed that the path of duty was wide enough and lined sufficiently with flowers to gratify or ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... of these acts of folly, on to the prohibition of what I thought then were the maddest, most impossible, and most indecent things one could well imagine. A kind of rhythmic fervour fell on all of us; we gabbled and swayed faster and faster, repeating this amazing Law. Superficially the contagion of these brutes was ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... trotters—are at length apparent. Mary Isabella attributes it to a lightness induced by his headaches. But I think I see in it a less accidental influence. Mister Clark is at perfect staggers! the whole fabric of his infidelity is shaken. He has no one to join him in his coarse-insults and indecent obstreperousnesses against Christianity, for Holmes (the bonny Holmes) is gone to Salisbury to be organist, and Isabella and the Clark make but a feeble quorum. The children have all nice, neat ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... babbler of them all, hot with the exercise of the indecent gestures wherewith he illustrated his filthy tale, had slunk off ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... spoken to myself," said Lady Arabella, who, though she did not absolutely doubt her husband's word, gave him credit for having induced and led on Sir Omicron to the uttering of this opinion. "Doctor Thorne has behaved to me in so gross, so indecent a manner! And then, as I understand, he is absolutely ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... was accordingly slight. Lewd meant belonging to the laity; it came to mean ignorant, and then morally reprehensible. Common may be used to signify ill-bred; vulgar may be and frequently is used to signify indecent. Sabotage, from a French term meaning wooden shoe, has come to be applied to the deliberate and systematic scamping of one's work in order to injure one's employer. Idiot (common soldier) crystallizes the exasperated ill opinion of ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... after his return to town, to have sent to forbid its appearance; but his thoughts of late had crushed everything else out of his memory—he had forgotten its existence. And now, in all the pomp and parade of authorship, it was sent into the world! Now, now, when it was like an indecent mockery of the Bed of Death—a sacrilege, an impiety! There is a terrible disconnection between the author and the man—-the author's life and the man's life—the eras of visible triumph may be those of the most intolerable, though unrevealed and unconjectured anguish. The book that delighted ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Baxter Court forever. Which was as it should be. Then tumult. Probably you are not in a position to know that few spectacles are more hideous than the unrestrained grief of the poor. The things they said and did—it was unhuman, indecent. I can't describe it. As I was leaving, after a pretty bad half hour, I met the doctor at the door—one of these half-drunken quacks who live on the ignorant. That child died of diphtheria. I knew it, and he admitted it. The funeral was this breathless morning, ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... halls) has been very far from liberal, except in the one particular in which the Lord Chamberlain is equally illiberal. That particular is the assumption that a draped figure is decent and an undraped one indecent. It is useless to point to actual experience, which proves abundantly that naked or apparently naked figures, whether exhibited as living pictures, animated statuary, or in a dance, are at their best not only innocent, but refining in their effect, whereas ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... grosser portions of Scripture, and, by a reverse process, lends to the soul the vilest functions of the body, and discusses virtue in the terms of fleshliness. No knowledge can come out of this straw-splitting in vacuo; and certainly no art out of this indecent pedant's symbolism: all things are turned to dusty, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... how this condition arose may be answered very briefly. The Church ordained that marriage is indissoluble, but, this being found impossible to maintain in practice, the State stepped in with a way of escape—a kind of emergency exit. But what a makeshift it is! how flagrantly indecent! how inconsistent! Adultery must be committed. To escape the degradation of an unworthy partner another partner must first be sought, and love degraded in an act of infidelity. Adultery is, in fact, a State-endowed offence ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the Germans gave themselves up to the worst excesses. Angered doubtless by the remark which an officer had addressed to a soldier, against whom a young girl of nineteen, Mlle. Helene Proces, had made complaint of on account of the indecent treatment to which she had been subjected, they burned the village and made a systematic massacre of the inhabitants. They began by setting fire to the house of an inoffensive householder, M. Jules Gand, and by shooting ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... Carnarvon—the most curious and pathetic instance of a man of the nineteenth century speaking of one who was almost his exact prototype, in virtues and graces as in weaknesses and disabilities of temperament, during the seventeenth. It would, of course, have been indecent for Mr Arnold to bring this parallel out, writing as he did in his own name and at the moment, and I do not find any reference to it in the Letters; but I can remember how strongly it was felt at the time. His own interest in Falkland as the martyr of Sweetness ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... unworthy in return for their gifts. I have no desire to be a beggar, sir; I am very well aware of the fact that the other street musicians are satisfied to reel off a few street ditties, German waltzes, even melodies of indecent songs, all of which they have memorized. These they repeat incessantly, so that the public pays them either in order to get rid of them, or because their playing revives the memory of former joys of dancing or of other disorderly amusements. For ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... is the earnest desire of the board of lady managers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition that there be no indecent dances or improper exhibits in the Midway during the exposition, and that the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company be urged to use the utmost care in awarding the concessions for shows, in order that there may be no ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... which now waves so pleasantly with its elms and poplars. The cruel second James, afterwards king, wanted him beheaded before his own house, but the cynical second Charles was not quite so cruel as that, and rejected the proposed dramatic fancy "as indecent," Burnet says. So Lord Russell, after Tillotson had prayed with him, "laid his head on the block at a spot which the elms and poplars now hide, and it was ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... assisted me. At that I ceased calling and listened very attentively, because I thought I heard a man laughing in a peculiarly offensive manner. The heat made me sweat, but the laughter made me shake. There is no earthly need for laughter in high grass. It is indecent, as well as impolite. The chuckling stopped, and I took courage and continued to call till I thought that I had located the echo somewhere behind and below the tussock into which I was preparing to back just before I lost Mr. Wardle. I ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... God's works which doth this world adorn, There is none more fair and excellent Than is man's body, both for power and form, Whilst it is kept in sober government, But none than it more foul and indecent, Distempered through misrules and passions base, It grows a monster and incontinent, Doth lose ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... Harding. "It is becoming almost objectionable, almost indecent. At the same time the health of the body is a very interesting subject because of its effect upon the mind, even, so it seems sometimes, upon the very nature of a man. Now I—" he struck the ash off the end of his cigar—"was, I might almost say, the ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... nomination," he said aloud as Arthur turned from the window. "Of course there'd be no end to the ridicule. Didn't the chap on Harper's, when I was elected for the Senate, rig me out as a gladiator, without a stitch on me, actually, Artie, not a stitch—most indecent thing—and show old Cicero in the same picture looking at me like John Everard, with a sneer, and singing to himself: a senator! No, I couldn't stand it. I give up. I've got as high as my kind can go. But there's one ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... a sad thing, I cannot choose but say, And all the fault of that indecent sun, Who cannot leave alone our helpless clay, But will keep baking, broiling, burning on, That howsoever people fast and pray, The flesh is frail, and so the soul undone: What men call gallantry, and gods adultery, Is much more common where ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... their last observations, and Mankeltow asked questions, and Lord Lundie sort o' summarised, and I looked at the photos in the album. 'J'ever see a bird's-eye telephoto-survey of England for military purposes? It's interestin' but indecent—like turnin' a man upside down. None of those close-range panoramas of forts could have been taken ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... already in the past, Mr. Levitt," said Montcalm mildly. "Let's keep to the issue at hand. You won't deny that children see this indecent statue every day?" ...
— The Gift Bearer • Charles Louis Fontenay
... and saw that my cheek was hurt: How comes this wound? said he. Though I was not very guilty, yet I could not think of owning the thing: besides, to make such confession to a husband, was somewhat indecent; therefore I told him, that as I was going to seek for that stuff you gave me leave to buy, a porter carrying a load of wood came so close by me, as I went through a narrow street, that one of the sticks gave ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... he say in that one?' the Pussum asked, leaning forward, her dark, soft hair falling and swinging against her face. There was something curiously indecent, obscene, about her small, longish, dark skull, particularly when the ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... English language and second in the language of the Hebrews, Frederick called his fellow- lodgers together earlier than usual on the evening before Thanksgiving Day. He explained to them, in the patois which they used together, that it would be indecent for them to carry this supply of food farther than next Monday for their own purposes. He told them that the occasion was one of exuberant thanksgiving to the God of heaven. He showed them that they all had great reason for thanksgiving. And, in short, he made three heads of a discourse ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... who believe in God and blacken his character; who credit him with less knowledge than a child, and less intelligence than an idiot; who make him quibble, deceive, and lie; who represent him as indecent, cruel, and revengeful; who give him the heart of a savage and the brain of a ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... the healths of Mrs. Babbitt, Miss Babbitt, and the Other Children were softly paternal, but Babbitt had nothing with which to answer him. It was indecent to think of using the "How's tricks, ole socks?" which gratified Vergil Gunch and Frink and Howard Littlefield—men who till now had seemed successful and urbane. Babbitt and Frink sat politely, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... to two questions asked about the Queen are, it seems to me, practically certain, (1) She did not merely marry a second time with indecent haste; she was false to her husband while he lived. This is surely the most natural interpretation of the words of the Ghost (I. v. 41 f.), coming, as they do, before his account of the murder. And against this testimony ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... widow, belonging to the town of Villaro, was seized by a party of the Irish brigades, who having beat her cruelly, and ravished her, dragged her to a high bridge which crossed the river, and stripped her naked in a most indecent manner, hung her by the legs to the bridge, with her head downwards towards the water, and then going into boats, they fired ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... was about him something indescribably rural, something of the sod—not the dignity, the sturdiness of it, but rather of the pettiness, the sordidness of it. It showed in his dirty, flapping garments, his unlaced shoes, his stubble beard, in his indecent carelessness in expectorating the tobacco he was ceaselessly chewing. But these, after all, were some of his minor traits. I was soon to get an inkling of one of his major ones—his prodigious meanness. For when I rushed about and finally found a lorcha that was to sail for Bacolod and ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... have wished to learn more, but the Prince had addressed himself to the good liquor somewhat more than his head could stand, and he began to sing indecent French chansons, only to pass of a sudden to melancholy Russian popular songs. In his present condition it was impossible to think of continuing a sensible conversation ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... of a Wretched Miser, and the form had become a Scottish convention before Burns produced his Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie. As important as any of these was the example set by Ramsay and bettered by Burns of refurbishing old indecent or fragmentary songs. Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was regarded by Burns still more highly than Ramsay, and his influence was even more potent. In his autobiographical letter to Doctor Moore he tells that about ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... mind at the present writing attached himself impartially and equally to everyone in camp, no one ventured to exclusively claim him; while, after the perpetration of any canine atrocity, everybody repudiated him with indecent haste. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... preached, and it is well known to every one, only that it is not as carefully observed and practised as other works which are not commanded. So ready are we to do what is not commanded and to leave undone what is commanded. We see that the world is full of shameful works of unchastity, indecent words, tales and ditties, temptation to which is daily increased through gluttony and drunkenness, idleness and frippery. Yet we go our way as if we were Christians; when we have been to church, have said our little prayer, have observed ...
— A Treatise on Good Works • Dr. Martin Luther
... things, and they have many means of concealment. A man shuts the door, he sets somebody before the chamber; if a person comes, say that he is out, he is not at leisure. But the Cynic instead of all these things must use modesty as his protection; if he does not, he will be indecent in his nakedness and under the open sky. This is his house, his door; this is the slave before his bedchamber; this is his darkness. For he ought not to wish to hide anything that he does; and if he does, he is gone, ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... still lower," said she (all the pride of her sex revolting at the idea of such an indecent exhibition), "you don't pretend to say they stripped her below the waist! What did the Admiral say? Did he stand by and see her handled ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... man or woman not being married to each other lewdly and viciously associate and cohabit together, or if any man or woman, married or unmarried, is guilty of gross lewdness and designedly make an open and indecent, or obscene exposure of his or her person, or the person of another, every such person shall be punished by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by fine not ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... a heroic part; but the rest of those present would have considered it almost indecent to speak of it as Libbie did. She continued to clasp her hands and gaze soulfully into the ravine. Bob, having made sure that Betty was all right, had gone down to the bottom of the slope and helped the gray horse to its feet. The animal was more frightened than hurt, ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... the gossoon is indecent and dirty, O chone! In spite of his dressin' so. O chone! Let him dress up ez foine ez a king or a queen, Let him put on more wrinkles than ever was seen, You'll be sure he's no match for my ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... bore three pegged skulls somewhat white with age; eight years ago they were taken off certain wizards who had bewitched their enemies. A labyrinthine entrance of transparent cane-work served to prevent indecent haste, and presently we found ourselves in presence of the Mfumo, who of course takes the title of "Le Rei." Nessudikira was a "blanc-bec," aged twenty or twenty-one, who till lately had been a trading lad at Boma—now he must not look upon the sea. He ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... some points: it is very delightful to hear him talk. I mean it is uncommonly pleasant to hear things one has long thought very vehemently, put to one by a Master!! Par exemple. You know my mania about the indecent-cruel element in French art, and how the Frenchiness of Victor Hugo chokes me from appreciating him: just as we were going away yesterday Mr. Ruskin called out, "There is something I MUST show Aunt Judy," and fetched two photos. One, an old court with bits of old gothic ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... objection, the sheer instinctive taboo which rules the subject out altogether as indecent, has no age limit. It means that at no matter what age a woman consents to a proposal of marriage, she should do so in ignorance of the relation she is undertaking. When this actually happens (and ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... a little ashamed, a little shy, what with his gray hairs, his paternity, that there should still be a thrill in his heart, a sense of flight in him. At fifty-eight to feel like a schoolboy going home, it seemed—well, not indecent, indecorous. This thing of returning to Antrim had been a matter of pure reason, and then suddenly his heart ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... and just are all thy ways. Now immolate the tongues, and mix the wine, Sacred to Neptune and the powers divine, The lamp of day is quench'd beneath the deep, And soft approach the balmy hours of sleep; Nor fits it to prolong the heavenly feast, Timeless, indecent, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... by this time are filled with dismay. In Rossmoyne, where families are few and far between, and indecent scandal unknown, the smallest trifles are seized upon with avidity and manufactured into mountains. "A good appearance," Miss Penelope was taught at school, "is the first step in life," and here have these children been making their appearance for the first ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... and indecency, shocking as it was unnecessary. Usually, the students had contented themselves with ripping open the graves of strangers and negroes, about whom there was little feeling; but this winter they dug up respectable people, even young women, of whom they made an indecent exposure. ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... Marguerite who put an end to this indecent dispute. Its increasing violence had aroused her from her stupor. Casimir's impudence brought a flush to her forehead, and stepping forward with haughty resolution, she exclaimed: "You forget that one never raises one's voice in the chamber of death." Her words were so ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... rest here, but must be for peeping into Chambers, Closets, and Withdrawing-Rooms, ay, and into Beds too (sometimes with the Ladies in 'em) and have all things brought openly upon the Stage, tho' never so improper, and indecent. But this Objection may yet be better answer'd by Instances; and first for the Unity of Time, we may mention the Play call'd, The Adventures of Five Hours, the whole Action lasting no longer (much ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... laughter which endears. "You villain, have you been making love to Elsin Grey, that she should come babbling of Mr. Renault, Mr. Renault, Mr. Renault ere I had set foot in my own hallway? It was indecent, I tell you—not a word for me, civil or otherwise, not a question how I had 'scaped the Skinners at Kingsbridge—only a flutter of ribbons and a pair of pretty hands to kiss, and 'Oh, Cousin Coleville! Is Mr. Renault kin to me, too?—for I so take it, having ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... rule, in such cases self-revelation is not only not demanded, but not even allowable. The opening of the secret chambers of one's life to the public, confessions like those of Rousseau, are, if anything, indecent and nauseating. The case of a man in such situations is bad enough, but the remedy for it is perforce committed to his own hands. Let him put his hand to the plough and not turn back, let him grapple with the evil in his nature and subdue and transform it, let him accomplish his inner ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... to, was very cheerful without being noisy, and many of the guests were waggish, without descending to vulgarity. The old commander with all his smutty stories, with respect to the substance, never lost sight of the politeness of the old court; nor did any indecent expression, which even women would not have pardoned him, escape his lips. His manner served as a rule to every person at table; all the young men related their adventures of gallantry with equal grace and freedom, and these narratives were the more complete, as the seraglio ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Winchelsea complained of this strange method of huddling things together, and declared it highly unbecoming to see the grant made "in such a hotch-potch Bill—a Bill which really seems to be the sweepings of the other House." The Earl of Crawford declared it a most indecent thing to provide the marriage-portion of the Princess Royal of England in such a manner; "it is most disrespectful to the royal family." The Duke of Newcastle could only say in defence of the course taken by the Government that he saw nothing disrespectful or inconvenient in the manner ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... This indecent sloth is very much owing to that luxury and excess men usually practise upon this day, by which half the service thereof is turned to sin; men dividing the time between God and their bellies, when, after ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... full that night, a new comic singer of great promise having been announced, and oh! it was sad to see the youths of both sexes, little more than big boys and girls, who went there to smoke, and drink, and enjoy ribald songs and indecent jests! ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... chamber in the third story. The door was ajar. I entered it on tiptoe. Sitting on a low chair by the fire, I beheld a female figure, dressed in a negligent but not indecent manner. Her face, in the posture in which she sat, was only half seen. Its hues were sickly and pale, and in mournful unison with a feeble and emaciated form. Her eyes were fixed upon a babe that lay stretched upon a pillow at her feet. The child, like its mother, for such she was readily imagined ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... high debate admit of that indecent and repugnant expedient which the more or less parliamentary type of politician has devised and dubbed "a formula of agreement," the property of which is to render it impossible for either side to claim ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... village, is usually surrounded by a high stockade, or irregular wooden fence, the posts of which are often of great height and thickness, and sometimes headed by the frightful carving of an uncouth or indecent image." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... with the utter absence of any treatise on the hygiene of the sexual life in either sex, written in the proper spirit by a scientific man. The field had been left to quacks or worse, who, to serve their own base ends, scattered inflammatory and often indecent pamphlets over the land; or else, had one or more of the points been handled by reputable writers, it was in such a vague and imperfect manner that the reader gained little benefit from the perusal. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... neighbors all come and talk to him about it till he gets ashamed, then they all forgive him and have a feast. They're lovely people, so kind and gentle. But you'll get awfully tired of them in about a month. They have absolutely no respect for anybody's privacy. In fact, it seems slightly indecent to them for ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... dinner. What a hypocrite Society is! Everyone pretended never to have heard me before. I was allotted to Miss HORNBLOWER (worse luck!) and she positively called me "Her own!"—at my age, too! It's indecent. Complained to HORNBLOWER, who now faced round, and maintained that he was the first to bring me out. I could almost have cried. No wonder I fell flat, and injured myself. Why, Sir, SIDNEY SMITH was my godfather, and was always trotting me out as a prodigy, and trading ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... the night had not yet arrived. It was only about dusk that the indecent haste of these 'miscreants' offended the sober eyes of Madame Deluc. But we are told that it was upon this very evening that Madame Deluc, as well as her eldest son, 'heard the screams of a female in the vicinity of the inn.' And in what words does Madame Deluc designate the period ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... responsibility, half humorously, without apology or explanation. Let us avoid self-justification at all costs. Real corporal punishments apply to the sensual plane. The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack. The pained but resigned disapprobation of a mother is usually a very bad thing, much worse than the father's shouts of rage. And sendings to bed, and no dessert for a week, and so on, are crueller and meaner than a bang on the head. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... too much for the excited state of mind under which Anthony had been laboring for some hours, and with a stifled groan he fell across the bed in a fit. Godfrey alarmed in his turn, checked his indecent mirth, and dressing himself as quickly as he could, roused up his valet to run for the surgeon. The fresh air and the loss of a little blood soon restored the unfortunate young man to his senses and to a deep consciousness of his ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... Kansas-Nebraska Act was their first step, the Dred Scott decision the second; but one more step, and slavery could be fastened upon States as they had already fastened it upon Territories. Douglas protesting that to bring such a charge, incapable of proof or disproof, was indecent, Lincoln pointed out that Douglas had similarly charged the administration with conspiring to force a slave constitution upon Kansas; and afterwards took up a charge of Trumbull's that Douglas himself had at first conspired with Toombs and ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... to close the dim glazed eyes; and the other sorrowing domestics slunk away; and Charles led Emily out of the chamber of death, saddened and shocked at such indecent haste. ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Indecent language and grossly immoral situations should be excluded from the stage. When this is not done, as is frequently the case, the drama, instead of uplifting, degrades humanity. This fact has brought the stage into disrepute with many excellent people. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... thus the whole affair would collapse. But the Papal authorities did not want it to collapse; they wanted more bloodshed, and if the words which express the ungarnished truth as acknowledged by their own writers and apologists, sound indecent when describing the government of the Vicar of Christ, it only shows once more the irreconcilability of the offices of priest and king in the nineteenth century. Kanzler insisted that a crushing blow must be ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Everett warmly. "That does not excuse him. The point is, that with him they have not existed. To him they should be against his conscience, indecent, horrible! He has a greater knowledge, a much higher intelligence; he should lift the ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... march hour after hour, and if he came to a brook or a muddy place, instead of turning aside and passing over on stepping-stones or upon a fallen tree, he must go through without breaking the ranks. His companions were not altogether such as he liked to associate with. Some were very profane, and used indecent language. There was one great, over-grown Dutchman, Gottlieb von Dunk, who smoked nearly all the time when awake, and who snored terribly when asleep. But he was a good-hearted fellow for all that, and had a great many pleasant stories ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... directly sanctioned by God. He attacked the morals of the clergy and of the people and, besides renovating his own order, suppressed not only public immorality but all forms of frivolity. The people burned their cards, false hair, indecent pictures, and the like; many women left their husbands and entered the cloister; gamblers were tortured and blasphemers had their tongues pierced. A police was instituted ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Eric heard indecent words in dormitory Number 7, he was shocked beyond bound or measure. Dark though it was, he felt himself blushing scarlet to the roots of his hair, and then growing pale again, while a hot dew was left ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... when its intention became manifest. Measures however were taken to restrict the miscellaneous discussion of doctrine, which had not unnaturally degenerated into frequent displays of gross irreverence and indecent brawling; while on the other hand the use of a Litany in English instead of Latin was by Cranmer's influence introduced ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... rotten fabric of guess and speculation," and whose "mode of dealing with nature" is reprobated as "utterly dishonourable to Natural Science." And all this high and mighty talk, which would have been indecent in one of Mr. Darwin's equals, proceeds from a writer whose want of intelligence, or of conscience, or of both, is so great, that, by way of an objection to Mr. Darwin's views, he can ask, "Is it credible ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... admiration as I did for those of Ivan Tourgueneff, and none in whose personality I felt so profound an interest. Tourgueneff is far from being a model novelist, but his tales are written with wonderful power, and yet are neither indecent nor melodramatic nor rasping to the nerves. That the burden of strong natures is in proportion to their strength, that human nature in general is weak, and that the Devil still sometimes appears incarnate in the person of lovely woman, seem to form his theory of life. Hence ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... you!" "You tried to cheat Nincan!" "You want to build a watch-house!" "You have an old ewe at home now, that you did not come honestly by!" "You denied your own hand!"—with other ribaldry still more gross and indecent. But the most singular part of the scene was a number of little boys, dressed in black and white, who all wore badges of the parties to which they belonged, and were provided with a syringe, and two canteens, one filled with rose-water, and ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... taste for sculpture," Mrs. Ebley said. "People may call it what names they please, but I consider it immoral and indecent." ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... for me in a high-voiced Spanish accent: "I ordered the music stopped; I will not permit such an indecent exhibition ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... saw and understood the smile, and became more angry than ever. She drew her chair close to the table, and began to fidget with her fingers among the papers. She had never before encountered a clergyman so contumacious, so indecent, so unreverend,—so upsetting. She had had to deal with men difficult to manage;—the archdeacon for instance; but the archdeacon had never been so impertinent to her as this man. She had quarrelled once openly with a chaplain of her husband's, a clergyman whom ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... and exposed her poor old scalp, with its thin, forlorn wisps and patches of grey hair, grotesque, almost indecent, in its nudity. But the coiffeur measured it in sublime seriousness, putting his tape this way and that way, while Madame Valiere's eyes danced in ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... you doing, Josie?" asked her grandfather again, "dressed up in that indecent manner and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... old song. Percy says it was an indecent ballad. Shakespeare alludes to it in his Twelfth Night, act ii. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... with amazement. She knew that hitherto Bonaparte had always sought to avoid the sight of a woman in her condition; he had frequently said that he thought there was nothing more indecent than for a female to join in the dance under such circumstances, and now it was he who asked her ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... strolling companies of minstrels, jugglers, and jesters, who went about the country, and acted secular pieces composed of comic stories, jokes, and dialogues, interspersed with dancing and tumbling. The whole performance was very absurd and often indecent, and the clergy did their utmost ...
— Old English Sports • Peter Hampson Ditchfield |
