"Sensual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... together? It was founded largely on her superiority to the world he had known; and here it was necessary for him to convince himself that his wedding had not been merely the result of romantic accident. He knew that the sensual had had almost no part in it, it had been mental; an act of pity crystallizing his revolt against what he felt to be the impotence of "Christian" ethics. Yet this was not sufficient; for he, like Rhoda, had found under his wife's immobility the ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... "All our limbs and sensual organs, in fact, our whole body and life, are but an accretion round and a fostering of the spermatozoa. They are the real "He." A man's eyes, ears, tongue, nose, legs and arms are but so many organs and tools that minister to the protection, education, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... little child more in this sensual and pleasure-loving Africa, land of sin and of carnal productiveness, where children are born and die like the leaves. But the son of Monnica and Patricius was predestined: he was not to die in the cradle like so many other ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... affirm that my life has been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: from my birth I was made an intellectual creature, and intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my schoolboy days. If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an excess not yet recorded {1} of any other man, it is no less true that I have struggled against this fascinating enthralment with a religious ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... religion arose with a singular power of advance, which it retains to this day. The union of the spiritual with the material, of the sensual with a fatalistic theology, made the followers of Mahomet eager for heaven by way of the battle-field. The Jews had now no unity; Christianity had become divided into sects cursing each other; the Persian ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... been called, but in spite of the parted curtains he had dropped off again into that drowsy, dozy state when sleep becomes a sensual pleasure almost consciously savoured. In this condition he might have remained for another hour if he had not been disturbed by a violent ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... conflict, and starting, with the stigmata of the scuffle still on his body, a surprising new theory that the things of the soul alone matter, and that love of honour is the first of the moral virtues. We see him, the cynic and sensual brawler of 1640, turned within a few years into a model of regularity, the anarchist changed into a serious citizen with a logical scheme of conduct, the atheistical swashbuckler become the companion of saints and pitching his ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... non-smoking Saxons were probably far more intemperate in drinking than the modern English; and Lane, the best authority, points out that wine is now far less used by the Orientals than at the time of the "Arabian Nights," when tobacco had not been introduced. And in respect to yet more perilous sensual excesses, tobacco is now admitted, both by friends and foes, to be quite as much a sedative as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... aristocrat, whose life is one continued round of licentious pleasures and sensual gratifications; or the gloomy enthusiast, who detests the cheerful amusements he can never enjoy, and envies the healthy feelings he can never know, and who would put down the one and suppress the other, until he made the ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... a Communist, all that is commonly called wild and visionary. Ay! but being visionary is something. It shows a soul, a being not altogether sensual; a creature who looks forward for ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... trust in the Arm that could not be broken; to conquer and subdue the passions of my nature, and by the help of God to try and bring them in subjection to the will of the Spirit, and not of the flesh, which is carnal, sensual, and devilish. I determined that there should be no lack on ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... results in a swelling tide of miserable little lives. Consider what it will mean to have perhaps half the population of the world, in every generation, restrained from or tempted to evade reproduction! This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and sensual, is possible. On the principles that will probably animate the predominant classes of the new time, it will be permissible, and I have little or no doubt that in the future it ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... of some human beings are as moles, grubbing in the earth for worms. They have no eyes to see God's sky with the stars in it. To such "Three Weeks" will be but a sensual record of passion. But those who do look up beyond the material will understand the deep pure love, and the Soul in it all, and they will realise that to such a nature as "the Lady's," passion would never have run riot until it was sated—she would have daily grown nobler in her desire to make ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... buoyant, searching shrewdness which had characterised it in Adams Street. His step was not as sharp and firm. He was given to thinking, thinking, thinking. The new friends he made were not celebrities. They were of a cheaper, a slightly more sensual and cruder, grade. He could not possibly take the pleasure in this company that he had in that of those fine frequenters of the Chicago resort. ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... greeted him curtly. The maire now had leisure to study his appearance more closely. He had high cheek-bones, protruding eyes, and a large underhung mouth which, when he was pleased, looked sensual, and, when he was annoyed, merely cruel. The base of his forehead was square, but it rapidly receded with a convex conformation of head, very closely shaven as though with a currycomb, and his ears stood out almost at right angles to his skull. The ferocity that was his by nature he seemed ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... action in real life, but contrasted them with another character which may be said to form the reverse side of his hero's. Honest Sancho represents the material principle as perfectly as his master does the intellectual or ideal. He is of the earth, earthy. Sly, selfish, sensual, his dreams are not of glory, but of good feeding. His only concern is for his carcass. His notions of honor appear to be much the same with those of his jovial contemporary Falstaff, as conveyed in his memorable soliloquy. In the sublime night-piece ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... jollier; his strong intellect struggled against increasing sensual tendencies. What the issue might have been, I know not. He died suddenly, and his destiny was transferred to another sphere. So there dropped out of California-life a partisan without bitterness, a satirist without malice, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... staggered at the austerity of Christ's morality not less has it been shocked at the quality of His mercy. His gentleness to the sensual sinner has been compared, with amazement, to the sternness of His attitude to the sins of the spirit. Not the profligate or the harlot but the Pharisee and the scribe were those who provoked His sternest rebukes. And perhaps the most characteristic of all His dealings with such matters ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... her little drama, whereas Helene Boehlau grants to the historical figures of Old Weimar participation at least in episodes. Clara Viebig can compass no great characters or persons of superior intelligence; even men she hardly shows otherwise than in their sensual brutality. She succeeds best with simple, vegetative natures of elemental instincts and eruptive passions, like the women of the Eifel, whose life of hardship, unhappiness in love, and maternal sorrows she knows ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... with that sense of utter well-being, of almost sensual satisfaction, which only one who is shivering with fever knows. And at first very small things were enough to fill him with content: the smoothness of the pillow's sleek linen; the shadowy light of the ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... affection to one's own countrymen, and (without detriment to one's faith) to refuse due honour to those of higher dignity, to cast off all regard to reason, human and divine, and, in contempt of heaven and earth, to be guided by one's own sensual inventions? I shall, therefore, omit those ancient errors common to all the nations of the earth, in which, before Christ came in the flesh, all mankind were bound; nor shall I enumerate those diabolical idols of my country, which almost ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... sunshine is perpetual. The earth yields delicious fruits for their sustenance three times per year. But these enjoyments were confined to the persons who were of rank and distinction. Their Elysium was a sensual heaven. How very different is the Christian's future ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... sojourn upon it is passed, to quote from an early Letter on this subject, either "in happy ignorance and full oblivion, or in a state of quiet slumber, a sleep full of rosy dreams ". But on the other hand, if their earth-lives have been low and brutal, selfish and sensual, they will, like the suicides, be conscious to the fullest extent in this undesirable region; and they are liable to develop into terribly evil entities. Inflamed with all kinds of horrible appetites which they can no longer satisfy directly now they are without a physical body, they gratify ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... that carnal and voluptuous men could not see their genii, because their mind was not sufficiently pure, nor enough disengaged from sensual things; but that men who were wise, moderate, and temperate, and who applied themselves to serious and sublime subjects, could see them; as Socrates, for instance, who had his familiar genius, whom he consulted, to whose advice he listened, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... sedentary life. The Bedouin rots when he takes root. City life contaminates, degrades him. His virile qualities and his religion both lose their best when he leaves the desert. Contact with the cities of Philistia and the fertile plains of the Canaanites, with their sensual agricultural gods, demoralized the Israelites.[1184] The prophets were always calling them back to the sterner code of morals and the purer faith of their days of wandering. Jeremiah in despair holds up to them as a standard ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... plants, the most natural and instructive hieroglyphics of our expected resurrection and immortality, besides what they might conduce to the meditation of the living, and the taking off our cogitations from dwelling too intently upon more vain and sensual objects: that custom of burying in churches, and near about them, especially in great and populous cities, being both a novel presumption, indecent, and very prejudicial to health.—Evelyn's ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... man. He sits on his horse with much ease and grace, though there is a slight stoop in his shoulders. His legs are crooked, owing to which cause he appears awkward when on his feet, though he wears a long cloak to conceal the deformity. Sensual indulgence has weakened a constitution not naturally strong, and increased that mildness which has now become a defect in his character. He is not stern enough to be just, and his subjects are less fortunate under his easy rule ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... sustains the region of Sensibility, while the temporal bone lodges the organs of the most sensual, selfish, and violent impulses, the action of which is downward into the muscular and visceral organs of the body. The sphenoid bone as it extends up touches the base of the front lobe and of the Ideal region, where ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... During the day, the men on shore were seen to work hard, and make all the preparations before they abandoned themselves to the sensual gratification of intemperance. The tent was pitched, the fire was lighted, and all the articles taken on shore rolled up and stowed away in their places; they were seen to sit down and dine, for they were within hail ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... between her and Mr. Imlay. He sent a physician to her; and Mrs. Christie, at his desire, prevailed on her to remove to her house in Finsbury-square. In the mean time Mr. Imlay assured her that his present was merely a casual, sensual connection; and, of course, fostered in her mind the idea that it would be once more in her choice to live with him. With whatever intention the idea was suggested, it was certainly calculated to increase the agitation of her mind. In one respect however it produced ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... interviewing the principal singers, one of whom he described in one of the leading journals (Olive, at least, was sure it was only he who could write like that) as "a dear little woman with baby dimples and kittenish movements." The Tarrants were apparently given up to a measure of sensual ease with which they had not hitherto been familiar, thanks to the increase of income that they drew from their eccentric protectress. Mrs. Tarrant now enjoyed the ministrations of a "girl"; it was partly her pride (at any rate, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... Gustave Herve in his old age—at least no one of the same power. He, perhaps you have read, taught absolute Materialism and Socialism developed to their logical issues. Patriotism, he said, was a relic of barbarism; and sensual enjoyment was the only certain good. Of course, every one laughed at him. It was said that without religion there could be no adequate motive among the masses for even the simplest social order. But he was right, it seemed. After the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... of Conscientiousness gives us the control of our impulses and selfish or sensual inclinations to qualify for the performance of duty, its antagonist gives the vigor to the sensual, violent and selfish passions, and prompts to the utter disregard of duty. The one being vertically above the centre of the brain, the other must be vertically below it; one being on the upper the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... cheeks on fire, and blood astir, eyes large and lustrous as the eyes of Juno, with bold carriage and in free toilettes, step forward out of the past with the proud and insolent graces of the divinities of some Bacchanalia." With the provocative and sensual charm which is so powerful in its appeal, she had a rare skill in displaying her beauty to its fullest advantage. Her cult of the toilette, the Duc de Luynes tells us, went with her even by night. She never ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... : ekkapti. select : elekti, elelekti. selfish : egoista. semicolon : punktokomo. semolina : tritikajxo. send : sendi, (—"for") venigi. sensation : sensacio, sense : sento, senco. sensitive : sentema. sensual : volupta. sentence : frazo, jugxo, verdikto. sentiment : sento, opinio. sentimental : sentimentala. separate : apart'a, -igi, disigi, malkunigi. serfdom : servuto. sergeant : sergxento. series ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... But in the Middle Age, this feeling had no religious root, by which it could connect itself rationally, either with actual wedlock or with the noble yearnings of men's spirits, and it therefore could not but die down into a semi-sensual dream of female-saint-worship, or fantastic idolatry of mere physical beauty, leaving the women themselves an easy prey to the intellectual allurements of the more educated ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... ourselves to any system or effort as absolutely true or good, nor condemn any as utterly false. All knowledge and arts are related to religion. They refine man and aid him in his emancipation from whatever is sinful and sensual. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... should we shrink from admitting that the value of character really is increased when it is regarded as surviving bodily death? Disbelief in Immortality would, I believe, in the long run and for the vast majority of men, carry with it an enormous enhancement of the value of the carnal and sensual over the spiritual and intellectual element ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to be of our own time. It is the crude representation of modern Italian life that you see, realistic, unique, and precious, but for the most part base and horrible beyond words. All the disastrous, sensual, covetous meanness, the mere baseness of the modern world, is expressed there with a naivete that is, by some miraculous transfiguration, humorous with all the grim humour of that thief death, who has gathered these poor souls with the rest because someone loved them and ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... too weak is the temptation For one whose soul to nobler things aspires Than sensual desires! Ah, could I, by some sudden aberration, Lend and delude to suicidal death This Christ ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Ulford were of a similar type. Both were strong, healthy, sensual, slangy, audacious in a dull kind of fashion—Lady Holme did not call it dull—serenely and perpetually intent upon having everything their own way in life. Both lived for the body and ignored the ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... and yet the educational principles which it naturally suggests are too often jostled aside, and practically neglected. It plainly teaches us, that the young ought to be made aware of the comparative nothingness of temporal and sensual objects, when placed in competition with those which refer to their souls and eternity; and that the subjects which are to be taught them in the school, should tend to produce these feelings.—But this is not always the case; and even ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... looked at us with a kind of wonder and a kind of mockery in her dark eyes. And when she spoke to us her voice was marvellously soft with a rich softness that made me, being then of a very sensual disposition, think instantly of old wine and ripe fruit, and darkened alcoves, and the wayward complaining of lutes. Indeed, wherever Monna Vittoria went she seemed to carry with her an atmosphere of subtle seclusion, of a cloistered lusciousness, of dim, green, guarded ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... unwisdom and coarse mockery, between violence and a pretence of moral austerity, he understands only the sorriest motives; thinks the whole thing feigned, and fancies the stranger, so effeminate, so attractive of women with whom he remains day and night, but a poor sensual creature, and the real motive of the Bacchic women the indulgence of their lust; his ridiculous old grandfather he is ready to renounce, and accuses Teiresias of having in view only some fresh source of professional profit to himself in connexion with some new-fangled oracle; his ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... and moustache were the pink of venerable sweetness. Age, probably in consequence of inordinate precautions, had left no mark upon his hands; and the Maletroit hand was famous. It would be difficult to imagine anything at once so fleshy and so delicate in design; the taper, sensual fingers were like those of one of Leonardo's women; the fork of the thumb made a dimpled protuberance when closed; the nails were perfectly shaped, and of a dead, surprising whiteness. It rendered his aspect tenfold more redoubtable, that a man with hands like these should keep them devoutly folded ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... inscrutable, incredible portion of herself, some dark and fierce and sensual thing lay there at her feet. It was not incredible or inscrutable to itself. It was indeed splendidly unashamed. It gloried in itself and in its suffering. It lived on its own torture, violent and exalted; Jane could hardly bear its nearness and its utterance. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... arrogant, rigid, and inexorable; but he relaxed the discipline, and lavished the treasures of the church on his dependent clergy, who were permitted to imitate their master in the gratification of every sensual appetite. For Paul indulged himself very freely in the pleasures of the table, and he had received into the episcopal palace two young and beautiful women as the constant ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... symbolism gives a thousand indications that in prehistoric ages, among the worshippers of the Serpent and the Fire, all the deepest feelings of men, whether artistic, religious, or sensual, were concentrated on the real or fancied affinities of natural objects with an earnestness of which we of the present age have no conception. Poetry, as it exists for us, is a pretty rococo fancy; to the worshippers and framers of myths it was a truth of tremendous significance. ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... like to the woman who sat beside the ruler that I did not doubt them to be mother and daughter. At a word from the elder the younger began to dance; and her dance was Oriental, slow at first, but holding every eye with its sensual fascination. The girl was a mistress of the art; and not a man in the room withdrew his gaze from her till she made an end and stood motionless before the ruler. He said a few words I could not hear, and then the daughter turned to the mother ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... Southerner through and through in that sentimentality. To me chivalry means all that is narrow, cruel, and rapacious in man. The philandering knights were sensual boobies, the simpering dames soulless wantons. Life meant simply the rule of the strong, the slaughter of the weak. Servitude was its law and robbery its methods. Have you ever traveled in out-of-the-way places in ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... Scott's father, when his son incautiously expressed some relish for his porridge, dashed a handful of salt into it with an instinctive sense that it was his duty as a father to prevent his son enjoying himself. Ruskin's mother gratified the sensual side of her maternal passion, not by cuddling her son, but by whipping him when he fell downstairs or was slack in learning the Bible off by heart; and this grotesque safety-valve for voluptuousness, mischievous as it was in many ways, had at least the advantage that ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... them anew with increased vigour no more to be parted from them. It is then that my transports give them every diversity of modulation: it is I who triumph over the first of these musical thoughts, and the shape I give it I call symphony. Yes, Bettina, music is the link between intellectual and sensual life. ...
— Sketch of Handel and Beethoven • Thomas Hanly Ball
... own eyes, falling continually into idolatry, civil war, and slavery to the heathens round about. Nothing more shows the truth of this history than its humility, its continual confession of sin, its readiness to confess the ugly truth that the Jews are a foolish, ignorant, unmanageable, lawless, sensual race, stiffnecked and rebellious, always resisting the Holy Spirit. The immense difference between the Old Testament history and that of all other nations is, that it is a history not of their virtues, but of their sins; and ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... moved with graceful ease into Elysian bowers of sensual joy. There he remained to breathe its poisoned air and feed upon the husks of ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... authorities, are most elaborately carved, and are used for the conveyance of the gods through the village streets upon festival occasions. There is hardly one of these cars, in South India at any rate, which is not disfigured by grossly sensual carvings such as ought to bring blushing shame to any decent and self-respecting community. They are open to the public gaze, and children of the village play under their shadow, and gaze daily upon their vile and disgusting sights. The government ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... their operations are now conducted with more regard to the decencies. This is worth remembering when we are occasionally offended by his frankness on subjects to which we are not accustomed to allude; he is not an unclean or a sensual writer, but the waters of decency have risen since his time and submerged some ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... mirror the image of life. Her figure was very slim and strong, and of a just proportion; red tresses lay like a crown over her brow; her eyes, of a very golden brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped, was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression. Something in both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo of an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood a while unpleasantly attracted and wondering at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... identify him as Henry d'Albret, King of Navarre. They conjecture the name of Hircan to be derived from Ilanricus, a not uncommon fashion of spelling Henricus. It might, however, simply come from hircus, a he-goat, for Hircan is a man of gross, sensual tastes. ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... of the wood, evolved by the hot sun, stole up to my nostrils, as if I had been an idol in its niche. Many trees mingled their fragrance into a thousand-fold odor. Possibly there was a sensual influence in the broad light of noon that lay beneath me. It may have been the cause, in part, that I suddenly found myself possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a conviction of the folly of attempting to ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... should be associated in their minds with the high purpose to which some day it may be put. Before the boy goes to a boarding-school he should have imbibed from his father the desire for moral cleanliness, the knowledge of good and of evil, and a cordial dislike for everything that is sensual, self-indulgent, or nasty. Talks on such subjects should be very infrequent, but I believe that, if "depolarisation" is to be achieved, they must be repeated every now and then during later childhood and in adolescence. To attempt to impart all ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... he was attacked by a disease which carried him off at the age of forty-two. There is a tradition that he installed forty-eight images of Buddha in his mansion, and for their services employed many beautiful women, so that sensual excesses contributed to the semi-hysterical condition into which he eventually fell. That is not impossible, but certainly a sense of impotence to save his father and his family from the calamities he clearly saw approaching was the proximate cause ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the forest. I was, I own, often tempted to recur to the lawless feats of my boy-hood, and knock down the almost tame pheasants that perched upon the trees, and bent their bright eyes on me. But they were the property of Adrian, the nurslings of Idris; and so, although my imagination rendered sensual by privation, made me think that they would better become the spit in my kitchen, than the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... you may cut off the one! For a man in prosperity, though he be bound to thank God for his gifts, wherein he feeleth ease, and may be glad also that he giveth thanks to God; yet hath he little cause of comfort in that he taketh his ease here, unless you wish to call by the name of comfort the sensual feeling of bodily pleasure. I deny not that sometimes men so take it, when they say, "This good drink comforteth well mine heart." But comfort, cousin, is properly taken, by them that take it right, rather for the consolation of good hope that men take ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... gospel is from God, to such neglecters Of the grace it offers, it must be "a favor of death unto death!" And is not their number great? Doth it not increase from year to year, from age to age? To these who are taken up with sensual pleasures, and with minding only earthly things, St. Paul would say "even weeping you are enemies to the cross of Christ, and your ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... wisdom, 'Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? ... What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou canst tell?'—which has likewise been the question of every age that has not been altogether sunk in sensual delights—is answered once for all in the incarnate and crucified and ascended Lord, by and in whom all heaven has stooped to earth, that earth might be lifted to heaven. Every child of man, though lonely ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... statement smote upon the heart of the young man, and made him silent and thoughtful. He felt that, but for his neglect of duty—but for his abandonment of himself to sensual and besotting pleasures, this suffering, ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... the care they took of him during his fits of debauchery; and he was not unmindful of it when he had the wherewithal to compensate them. Like most of those wayward inebriates who followed the sea as a calling, he was a perfect sailor; and even his capricious sensual habits did not prevent him being sought to rejoin vessels ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... milk—the milk of human kindness. The smile of the lost picture called "La Gioconda" is by fanciful people regarded as something very wonderful. It is really the clever portraiture of the habitual "leer" of a somewhat wearied sensual woman. It had a fascination for the great Leonardo, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... own life; a relic suggesting an earlier opulence. He is big-framed, but his flesh is shrunken, as though the wind of conceit were oozing out of him day by day. His cheeks and stomach hang flabbily. His blond mustache is getting thin and discloses his full, sensual lips. His hands are thick and soft, always stained with nicotine. He lives in constant terror of his wife, and all the pockets of his coats are burned full of holes from his hiding his cigarettes in them when he thinks he hears his wife coming. I have never seen her, but she ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... her eyes and lips, and during the last few days remaining to him, his Madonna obtained Florette's joyous expression, while the sensual, alluring charm, that had been peculiar to the mouth of the musician's daughter, soon hovered around ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... which he was singularly free. No charge has been more audaciously or persistently brought by ignorant writers or believed by an ill-informed public in England and America than that of morbid sensuality. Just as Wagner's dramas have been called licentious, so his character has been described as sensual, in defiance of easily ascertainable facts. Not long ago the discovery was made that his health had been undermined by loose living when he was young. It is easy to invent such charges, for which there is not a particle of evidence, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... employed a friend in India to forge the plausible account he had received of her lover's death—and finally, as the finishing stroke to all this deep-laid villany, he had overcome his avaricious propensities, and made Elinor his wife, not to gratify a sensual passion, but the ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... dancing girl, barefooted and naked save for the slightest suggestion of covering about her waist and bust, was the centre of attraction. For five minutes she held the crowd spell-bound with a dance so beautifully sensual no theatrical manager would have dared present it. Yet it was received by the only burst of applause which broke the monotony ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... institutions of chivalry which it is now the fashion to deride (how unjustly!) were among the first scions of this plant of heavenly origin. They bore the impress of heaven, faint and distorted indeed, but not to be mistaken! Devotion to an ideal good,—self-sacrifice,—subjugation of selfish and sensual feelings; wherever these principles are found, disguised, disfigured though they be, they are not of the earth,—earthly. They, like the fabled amaranth, are plants which are not indigenous here below! The seeds must come from above, from the source of all that is pure, of ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... consider the character of the Andalusians in general, we shall find little to surprise us in this predilection for the Gitanos. They are an indolent frivolous people, fond of dancing and song, and sensual amusements. They live under the most glorious sun and benign heaven in Europe, and their country is by nature rich and fertile, yet in no province of Spain is there more beggary and misery; the greater part of the ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... instincts of our nature. If then the heart lives, and fails of its due object; if it does not meet with the supreme term of its repose, its indefinite aspirations attach themselves to objects which cannot satisfy them, and thence arise stupendous aberrations. With some, it is the pursuit of sensual gratifications; they rush with a kind of fury into the passions of their lower nature. With others it is the ardent pursuit of riches, power, fame,—feelings which are always crying more: More! ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... despotic governments of Asiatic nations, tyranny, oppression, and slavery are sure to prevail; and these personal accomplishments, so far from being of use to the owner, serve only to deprive her of liberty, and the society of her friends; to render her a degraded victim, subservient to the sensual gratification, the caprice, and the jealousy of tyrant man. Among savage tribes the labour and drudgery invariably fall heaviest on the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... Maori chief waging war from the lust of blood or the pride of local dominion. His complexion is bloodless, yet so healthy that a passing observer would afterward speak of it as ruddy. His face is broad, with a character nose, sensual lips, and very high cheek bones; the cranium is full and the brow speaking, while the head runs back to an abnormal apex at the tip of the cerebellum. His straight, lusterless black hair, duly parted, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... morning in her life, so far. Her baby fascinated her, also the tug of its lips, giving her the queerest sensation, almost sensual; a sort of meltedness, an infinite warmth, a desire to grip the little creature right into her—which, of course, one must not do. And yet, neither her sense of humour nor her sense of beauty were deceived. It was a queer little affair with a tuft of black hair, in grace greatly ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stock-in-trade of learning, counselled others to practise prudence and moderation, and themselves retired to the service of their muses. Others again, broke away altogether from the Christian faith and the principles of Christian morality. They took delight in a new life of Heathenism, devoted sometimes to sensual pleasures and gross immoralities, sometimes to the indulgence of refined tastes and the enjoyment of art. These latter never raised a weapon against the Church, but for the most part accommodated themselves to her forms. In her teachings, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... as well as normal growth of mind. Even in its intellectual activity the school is recognizing the importance of making the child mind an active machine for thought, rather than a passive storehouse for information. Though less emphasized, the training for sensual growth is becoming of ever increasing importance in the new education. Above all, the aesthetic side of child life is being expanded in an effort to round out ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... breast a heart beating—an organ so wonderful in its sensitiveness, so perfect in its consciousness of good, that the least throb and thrill of pleasure that it feels is worth years and ages of mere sensual life enjoyment. The body having tasted of all happiness whereof it is capable, and having found that it is good, is saturated with its own ease and enjoys less keenly. But the heart is the border-land between body and soul. The heart can love and the body can love, but the body can only love ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... the gusts from the mountain hollows, were beating in their faces, for enthusiasm is never scoffed at by the noble, simple-minded, genuine Welsh, whatever treatment it may receive from the coarse-hearted, sensual, selfish Saxon." ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... from the hills, fruits from vine and tree, spices from grove and forest, vegetables from field and garden, fish from stream and sea; every resource of Mother Earth that could contribute to appetite or sensual pleasure was brought to the king's table. Singers, minstrels, dancers, magicians, entertainers of every description were summoned to the palace that they might contribute to the vanity of the monarch, and impress the onlooking nations ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... only one in European costume, and at the first glance at the man, with his heavy fat sensual-looking face and lurid eyes, Ned recalled his companion's words: "Whatever you see, do ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... good meal. It was delightful to see how he ate. Few troubles will destroy a growing lad's hunger; and indeed it has always been to me a marvel how the feelings and the appetites affect each other. I have known grief actually make people, and not sensual people at all, quite hungry. At last I thought I had better not ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... gone to her room and did not expect him. Well, the sensual coil was broken, and if he did not follow her now she would understand that it was broken. He had wanted freedom this long while. They had come to the end of the second period, and there are three—a year ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... flashed light and life, in later days, once more into the Roman leaven. What a dirty, filthy page the whole Gothic middle-age is at best! It lies like a huge body struck with apoplexy, and only restored to its sensual life by the sharp lancet, bringing blood, of these same infidels, these stinging Saracens. Go into the mountains back of us, hunt up the costumes that still remain, and see where they all come from—the East. Look at the crescent earrings and graceful twisted gold-work, from—the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... laughing gentlemen for help, repulsing Praille's embraces, fending off the other satyr who would drown her sorrows in fizz. If this were play-acting, it excelled the finest efforts of Adrienne Lecouvreur! De Praille had now grasped her firmly by the waist and shoulders, his sensual breath was on her cheek, a ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... the infinite, existing in the soul itself, cannot be satisfied by any earthly longing, sensual gratification, or external possession. Made 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever,' man is ruined and eternally miserable if he refuse to fulfil the destiny for which he was created. His misery springs from the root of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the senses, avarice, and vanity. The Church then will be founded on mortification of the flesh, poverty, and humility. Pleasures and honours follow in the train of wealth; but poverty puts an axe to the roots of pride and sensual enjoyments. Some, says David, blaming them, glory in the multitude of their riches; and St. Paul exhorts the rich of this world not to ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... Hardy, which is established as a Restaurant within this beautiful building, and however interested my countrymen may feel in all that is intellectual, yet at the same time they possess that much of the sensual, as to have a very strong predilection for a good dinner, of the quality of which few are better judges; but with them it is not only as regards the excellence of the viands, but also they have their peculiar tastes as to ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... irresolute, gazing at her. He was a sensual man, and her physical beauty annoyed him. He would have liked to sit down alone with her and take her hand in his own and talk to her about her "soul" while gloating over her body. But in the "old tramp's" presence there was nothing ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... some well-meaning persons have placed a marble slab on the wall of the cemetery with a medallion-profile of Keats on it and some mediocre lines of poetry. The face is ugly, and rather hatchet-shaped, with thick sensual lips, and is utterly unlike the poet himself, who was very beautiful to look upon. 'His countenance,' says a lady who saw him at one of Hazlitt's lectures, 'lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had the expression as if he had been looking on ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... of grim humour about them, expressing his passionate affection and venting his despair. This was the first time that I had come in contact with passion, but it was a passion that without having any unnatural or sensual element in it, nevertheless, from a person of the same sex, excited a feeling of displeasure, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... living in the past, of reflection upon those long-since vanished joys, the loss of which has caused the sorrow! For the children of the world, for the striving, for the seeker of inordinate enjoyments, for the ambitious, for the sensual, solitude is but ill-adapted—only for the happy, for the sorrow-laden, and also for the innocent, who yet know nothing of the world, of neither its pleasures nor torments, of neither ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... each," says Edward Everett, "by the cultivation of every talent, by watching with an eagle's eye for every chance of improvement, by redeeming time, defying temptation, and scorning sensual pleasure, to make himself useful, honored, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... bliss ye give, That heaven's bright scenes seem bursting on the soul, With joy I'd yield each sensual wish, to live For ever ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... Mahaffy, "was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident thinker could have called it secure." Which also was Plato's view of it; who went so far as to say that Pericles had made the Athenians lazy, sensual, and frivolous. When we find Aeschylus at the start at odds with it, and Plato at the end condemning it wholesale,—for my part I think we hardly need bother to argue about it further. Both were men who saw from a standpoint ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... was deliberately proposing to marry her. Supported by the nerve his half-drunken condition inspired, his senses were so inflamed that he took the whole matter for granted. She looked into his sensual young face, the hard eyes, and at the loose lips that surrounded his unclean teeth, and something like panic seized her. However, she knew she must ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... of April 1492, Michelangelo lost his friend and patron. Lorenzo died in his villa at Careggi, aged little more than forty-four years. Guicciardini implies that his health and strength had been prematurely broken by sensual indulgences. About the circumstances of his last hours there are some doubts and difficulties; but it seems clear that he expired as a Christian, after a final interview with Savonarola. His death cast a gloom over Italy. Princes and people ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... knows where, leaving his bride in sorrow and anguish. He falls into the hands of Venus, who holds court in the Hoerselberg near Eisenach, and Tannhaeuser, at the opening of the first scene, has already passed a whole year with her. At length he has grown tired of sensual love and pleasure, and notwithstanding Venus' allurements he leaves her, vowing never to return to the goddess, but to expiate his sins by a holy life. He returns to the charming vale behind the Wartburg, he hears again the singing of the birds, the shepherds playing ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Paris I'm considered even terribly unconventional. I've met all sorts of men, but I've never met a man like Arabian. But the other day—don't you remember?—you summed him up. You said he had no education, no knowledge, no love of art or literature, that he was clever, sensual, idle, acquisitive, made of iron, with nerves of steel. Don't ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... pitied him for the blood in his veins. The boy had then and all his life certain physical difficulties she could never understand. The blood did not flow freely through his long body. His feet and hands were always cold and there was for him an almost sensual satisfaction to be had from just lying perfectly still in the station yard and letting the hot ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... house in Hume Park Square. You'll have been there? Hev' ye not? Imphm. I thought so. Well, they'd had thought difficulty in paying the rent...." The story droned on perpetually, breaking off into croonings of sensual pity; and Yaverland sat listening to it with such rage, that, as he soon knew from the narrator's waggish look, the vein in his ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... from which lamps of an antique pattern hung by chains and threw down a soft red glow. Heavy imitation Eastern curtains deadened the hum of voices and rattle of cups. The air was warm and scented, the light dim, and Foster, who had often camped in the snow, felt amused by the affectation of sensual luxury as he ate iced cakes and languidly watched the people. He could only see two or three men, one of whom he had noticed at the hotel and afterwards passed in the street. This was probably a ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... harness that needed mending, the dust sticking to the resin-stains on the cracked walls, and the gumbo soil on the dirty floor. As Charnock glanced up a level ray touched his face and showed a certain sensual coarseness that one missed when the light was normal. Festing, however, knew the look, and although he had not remarked it when he first met Charnock, thought ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... of a peasant of the canton bordering the wire; and she looked like that type of German-Swiss—handsome, sensual, bad-tempered, but not stupid. ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... they belong to the province of the ecclesiastical historian. The Four Masters record the work of desecration in touching and mournful strains. They tell of the heresy which broke out in England, and graphically characterize it as "the effect of pride, vain-glory, avarice, and sensual desire." They mention how "the King and Council enacted new laws and statutes after their own will." They observe that all the property of the religious orders was seized for the King; and they conclude thus: "They also made archbishops and bishops for ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... called "wisdom," as stated above (Q. 47, A. 2, ad 1), we may distinguish a threefold prudence corresponding to the three kinds of temptation. Hence it is written (James 3:15) that there is a wisdom which is "earthly, sensual and devilish," as explained above (Q. 45, A. 1, ad 1), when we ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas |
