"Polygamous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... explain that they drop into the habit of saying what is not true. Wise is the woman who never insists on an explanation. Love can make its own world in a solitude a deux, but marriage cannot. Nominally monogamous, all cultured society is polygamous; often even polyandrous. Moralists say that a soul should resist passion. They might as well say that a house should resist an earthquake. The whole world is just now on its knees before the poorer classes: all the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... love; all his transgressions, the fault of his morbid disposition, come home to him; he takes the blame of his sin upon his own shoulders, while the seeker of love revenges himself on his victims for his own shortcomings. The seeker of love is by nature polygamous, while the slave of love is, as a rule, monogamous (and consequently has little success with the opposite sex). Both aspire to a union of sensual and spiritual eroticism, but in both cases the union is a failure. All the repulsive and terrible manifestations ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... majority of cases, does not desire intercourse except for procreation and about as frequently as above indicated is, without any reasonable doubt, due to hereditary tendencies. Under primeval conditions, and in fact, until comparatively recent times, the vast majority of mankind were polygamous, the strong men of the race—those who procreated their kind—having as many wives as they could support and protect, the weak men of the race being crowded aside, sometimes castrated, to become the burden bearers for ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... dreadful thing to suggest that those highly respectable pseudo-spinsters, the Sister Arts, supposedly cozily immune in their polygamous chastity (for every suitor for favor is popularly expected to be wedded to his particular art)—I repeat, it is very dreadful to suggest that these impeccable old ladies are in danger of being ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... that the Dakotas are polygamous, as savage people generally are, and that my experience proves to me that missionaries who go among these people make a great mistake in attacking this institution until after they have ingratiated ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... The allusion is to the late Mr. W. Hepworth Dixon, and his writings on the Polygamous ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... The polygamous imagination of the Hindoos runs riot in many of their stories. To give another instance: The Kathakoca, or Treasury of Stories (translated by C.H. Tawney, 34), includes an account of the adventures of King Kanchanapura, who had five hundred wives; and of Sanatkumara who beheld ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Count he felt the nervous work No more than any polygamous Turk, Or bold piratical skipper, Who, during his buccaneering search, Would as soon engage a hand in church As a hand on board ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... with the exception of a reference to impotence as a ground for divorce which no English actress would have ventured on in any case. Within the last few months a very amusing comedy with a strongly polygamous moral was found irresistible by the Lord Chamberlain. Plenty of fun and a happy ending will get anything licensed, because the public will have it so, and the Examiner of Plays, as the holder of the office testified before the Commission of 1892 (Report, ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... like the pulse of spring, and women are many in the world, some of whom have pretty faces and proper figures. Also, although the fact is overlooked by convention, it has pleased Nature to make man polygamous in his instincts, though where those instincts end and what is called love begins, is a thing almost impossible to define. Probably in truth the limit lies beyond ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... for purposes of civilization, are secondary and valueless in the final analysis, if there is no corresponding moral development and social power. The evolution of the family, based upon monogamy, is one of the chief glories of Christianity over against the libertinism and polygamous practices of paganism. ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... councils" in common, are not associated together, but "they dwell in vaulted caves on mountain heights," such as the famous Corycian cavern which is near the top of a mountain on Parnassus. There "each man rules his wives and children," evidently a herding polygamous condition of the family; "nor do they (the Cyclops) care for one another." Still further, "they have no ships with crimson prows," no navigation, no commerce which seeks "the cities of men" and binds them together in the bond of society ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... nation was unquestionably a polygamist, and the general history of patriarchal life shows that a plurality of wives and concubines were national customs. In the earlier part of Egyptian history, Menes is said to have founded a system of marriage, ostensibly monogamous, but in reality it was polygamous, because it allowed concubinage. As civilization advanced, the latter became unpopular, and "although lawful, was uncommon," while polygamy was expressly forbidden. Solomon, according to polygamous principles, with his thousand women, should have enjoyed a most felicitous condition. Strange that ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... apparently, by the charms of their song{235}, by their beauty or their power of courtship, as in the dancing rock-thrush of Guiana. Even in the animals which pair there seems to be an excess of males which would aid in causing a struggle: in the polygamous animals{236}, however, as in deer, oxen, poultry, we might expect there would be severest struggle: is it not in the polygamous animals that the males are best formed for mutual war? The most vigorous ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... has never developed the morals and inhibitions which your people find so necessary. We are polygamous, and not apt to be jealous. She offers to give you to me as a royal husband in return for the privilege of being your slave, your housekeeper, your body-servant as it ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... of different import comes from a village on the island of Siminor, just south of Bongao. There, it is said, lives an old Moro who so loved his wife, and strange to say, in this polygamous community, his only wife, that when she died he watched her grave long beyond the appointed time, after which he had his house built over her burial-place, and there lives to this day, still faithful to the mouldering bones beneath him. Surely a proof that great love sometimes ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... "what else can you do? Men are polygamous animals, and we women have to make up our minds to it. Goodness knows I had to when the old colonel used to go hanging around those English barmaids at the 'Cock and Hen.' Be a little blind, girl—that's what nine wives out ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... order of Natatores, or Swimmers; the most familiar tribes of which are ducks, swans, geese, auks, penguins, petrels, pelicans, guillemots, gulls, and terns. They mostly live in the water, feeding on fish, worms, and aquatic plants. They are generally polygamous, and make their nests among reeds, or in moist places. The flesh of many of the species is eatable, but that of some is extremely rank and oily. The duck is a native of Britain, but is found on the margins of most of the European lakes. It is excessively ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... rear itself without definite historical foundations. These foundations we can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not start in America. He was brought from a definite social environment,—the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding influences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... matter. But when it comes to performance of promises the gitana* is true to the Rom.** It is because she is no gipsy that they follow her now to watch. And it is because men say that Americans are Mormons and polygamous, and very swift in the use of revolvers, that all follow instead of ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... of one of my most subtle pleadings of defence, to wit, that I have already offered to marry the plaintiff according to my country's laws, but that she did definitely decline such a marriage as polygamous (which it is indubitably liable to become at any moment), consequently, that my said contract is nilled ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... against a water barrel standing at the corner of the barn, she watched the farmyard comedy which was rapidly threatening to disturb the general peace. A large hen with a late-hatched brood of chicks, whose colors suggested the polygamous conditions under which her matrimonial affairs were carried on, with feathers ruffled and comb flaming, with head lowered and beak agape, was angrily defying an absurd-looking pig which had scarcely passed ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... affectionate manner, and the next moment savagely gore her. Hate and cruelty for the most part rule in the animal world. A few of the higher animals are monogamous, but by far the greater number of species are polygamous or promiscuous. There is no mating or pairing in the great bovine tribe, and none among the rodents that I know of, or among the bear family, or the cat family, or among the seals. When we come to the birds, we find mating, and occasional pairing for life, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... he knew that he loved her. Yet he delighted in Labiskwee. And what was this feeling of delight but love? He could demean it by no less a name. Love it was. Love it must be. And he was shocked to the roots of his soul by the discovery of this polygamous strain in his nature. He had heard it argued, in the San Francisco studios, that it was possible for a man to love two women, or even three women, at a time. But he had not believed it. How could he believe it when he had not had the experience? Now it was different. He did truly love ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... remain undecided, is whether the British race was migratory or not, though that such is the habit of the species in most parts of the European continent is beyond dispute. Equally uncertain as yet is the question whether it is polygamous or not—the evidence being perhaps in favour of its having that nature. But one of the most singular properties of the bird is the presence in some of the fully-grown males of a pouch or gular sac, opening under the tongue. This extraordinary feature, first discovered by James Douglas, a Scottish ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various |
