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Incontinency   Listen
noun
Incontinency, Incontinence  n.  
1.
Incapacity to hold; hence, incapacity to hold back or restrain; the quality or state of being incontinent; lack of continence; failure to restrain the passions or appetites; indulgence of lust; lewdness. "That Satan tempt you not for your incontinency." "From the rash hand of bold incontinence."
2.
(Med.) The inability of any of the animal organs to restrain the natural evacuations, especially urination, or defecation, so that the discharges are involuntary; as, incontinence of urine.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Incontinency" Quotes from Famous Books



... fiend would be able to outwit the plans of the Son of Man for human redemption. In early infancy, already, this Merlin showed his miraculous powers, for he testified in his mother's behalf when she was accused of incontinency. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... so poignant and timely. She was still young and naive, with some girl's freshness. But she did not want any more the fight, the battle, the control, as he, in his incontinence, still did. She was so natural, and he was ugly, unnatural, in his inability to yield place. How hideous, this greedy middle-age, which must stand in the way of life, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... him know the truth of your story, he reconsidered the matter, and, smiling at the incontinence of old G—— M——, he said it would be necessary to keep you here for six months longer, in order to pacify him; the less to be lamented,' he added, 'because your morals would be sure to benefit by your residence here. He desired that I would show you every kindness and attention, and ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost

... reproves him; Piety and Exercise add their efforts to reform him, but discover him to be as much knave as fool. The two latter hold him while Discipline lays on the whip, till he affects contrition; but he is soon wheedled into a relapse by Idleness, Incontinence, and Wrath, who, however, profess to hold him in contempt. Wrath gives him the Vice's sword and dagger, and they all promise him the society of Nell, Nan, Meg, and Bess. Fortune then endows him with wealth; he takes Impiety, Cruelty, and Ignorance ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... in its moral aspect is Aristotelian. Sins are divided into three great classes, incontinence, bestiality and malice. Incontinence is punished in the five upper circles; bestiality and malice in the City of Dis, lower Hell. More particularly stated, Dante's scheme of punishment in the underworld, not considering the vestibule ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery

... abound in wretched, hateful vices, so that they make the whole world reek! Oh me! where is the purity of heart and perfect charity which should make the incontinent continent by contact with them? It is quite the contrary: many a time the continent and the pure are led by their impurities to try incontinence. Oh me! where is the generosity of charity, and the care of souls, and distribution to the poor and to the good of the Church, and their necessities? You know well that men do quite the contrary. Oh me miserable! ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... the language of a man who thinks that he has been injured. He proceeds to describe the course of his conduct, and the train of his thoughts; and, because he has been suspected of incontinence, gives an account of his own purity: "That if I be justly charged," says he, "with this crime, it may come upon me ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... Brittanicarum literarum lumen et decus." By another contemporary he is called the "inventive Skelton." As a priest he was not very holy; for, in a day when the marriage of the clergy was worse than their incontinence, he contracted a secret marriage. He enjoyed for a time the patronage of Wolsey, but afterward joined his enemies and attacked him violently. He was laureated: this does not mean, as at present, that he was poet laureate of England, but that he received a degree of which that ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... Feredia, who died so tragically, having been a lodger in her house. She was also interviewed by the author, who, under the name of Valentine, gave on the stage of the Gymnase-Dramatique the story of the incontinence and punishment of Josephine de Merret. This Vendome tavern-keeper pretended also to have lodged some princesses, M. Decazes, General Bertrand, the King of Spain, and the Duc and Duchesse of ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... notwithstanding some exaggerations and errors that may be pointed out in the Chronicles, he still appears in the same light. Effeminacy, drunkenness, gluttony, dissoluteness, and unnatural crimes were the distinguishing characteristics of his court. He was himself an example of incontinence." This is a nice character to travel with down the page of history. He quarrelled with his brothers, and with his uncle, and kept up the family character in an exceedingly satisfactory manner, considering that he was unmarried. The statement ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various

... sisters often listened for the report of a pistol in the dead of the night, till watchful eye and hearkening ear grew heavy and dull with the perpetual strain upon their nerves. In the mornings young Bronte would saunter out, saying, with a drunkard's incontinence of speech, "The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it; he does his best—the poor old man! but ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell

... of others, in the teeth of their daily life and practice, is nothing short of disgusting. "Oh, Geordie, jingling Geordie," said King James, in the novel, "it was grand to hear Baby Charles laying down the guilt of dissimulation, and Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence!" ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... are: The local congestion, such as occurs at the menstrual period, or in certain cases of pelvic inflammations, or in early pregnancy; constipation; sedentary habits; congestion of the liver; incontinence of urine, and diabetes. When dependent on the latter, the malady is most obstinate in yielding to treatment. Indigestible foods or drinks, the rubbing of the clothes, the friction of walking, and the heat of the bed act as exciting causes in ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... the report of a pistol in the dead of the night, till watchful eye and hearkening ear grew heavy and dull with the perpetual strain upon their nerves. In the mornings young Bronte would saunter out, saying with a drunkard's incontinence of speech, 'The poor old man and I have had a terrible night of it. He does his best—the poor old man!—but it's all over with me'" (whimpering) ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... flabby organ still half full of urine. This retained urine is liable to decompose and give off ammonia, which dissolves the epithelial cells, exposing the raw, mucous membrane and causing the worst type of cystitis. Suppression and incontinence of urine are common also to obstruction of the urethra by stone or otherwise; hence this source of fallacy should be excluded by manual examination along the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... merits an eternal punishment, advances first the common reason, that the person offended is infinite, and then also this second reason, quod non cessante peccato non potest cessare poena. And the Jesuit Father Drexler says in his book entitled Nicetas, or Incontinence Overcome (book 2, ch. 11, Sec. 9): 'Nec mirum damnatos semper torqueri, continue blasphemant, et sic quasi semper peccant, semper ergo plectuntur.' He declares and approves the same reason in his work on Eternity (book 2, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... it worth while to hobble Rocinante, feeling sure, from what he knew of his staidness and freedom from incontinence, that all the mares in the Cordova pastures would not lead him into an impropriety. Chance, however, and the devil, who is not always asleep, so ordained it that feeding in this valley there was a drove of Galician ponies belonging to certain Yanguesan carriers, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject; to run them into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose." There was in Spenser a facility for turning to account all material, original or borrowed, an incontinence of the descriptive faculty, which was ever ready to exercise itself on any object, the most unfitting and loathsome, as on the noblest, the purest, or the most beautiful. There are pictures in him which seem meant to ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... but also on all the rest who had been accused, to show their hatred of what had occurred. Hence the whole episode in which the women were concerned seemed now to be due not so much to their feminine incontinence[49] as to a kind of madness inspired by supernatural powers. (Valesius, ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio

... the Abbot thanked him with a look, and added, that she was suspected of witchcraft, seeing Mald her mother was a notorious witch, and the wench herself the byword and scorn of all the country-side. Sorcery, therefore, or incontinence—"whichever you will," said he. "Any stick will do ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett

... with such mysterious reverence of the nuptial tie, that it will not allow it to be unloosed for any cause whatsoever, that arises after the union is made. And this is said to be built on the divine revealed law; though that expressly assigns incontinence as a cause, and indeed the only cause, why a man may put away his wife and marry another[c]. The civil law, which is partly of pagan original, allows many causes of absolute divorce; and some of them pretty severe ones, (as if a wife goes to the theatre or the public games, without ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone

... should send word to his wife, so that she might not be anxious about him, but Planchet replied with much sagacity that he was very sure his wife would not die of anxiety through not knowing where he was, while he, Planchet, remembering her incontinence of tongue, would die of anxiety if ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... instilled their venom into the innermost recesses of society; and the spirits of a great majority of the citizen being in that combustible state in which a feeble spark will suffice to kindle a formidable conflagration, the whole Colony was inflamed and distracted by the incontinence ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... fourth place, the incontinence sometimes spreads to the daytime, and the child is wet both by day and night. Further, in bad cases it is not uncommon to find incontinence of faeces making its appearance also. These extensions of the fault only take place when the management continues to be very faulty, when the ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron

... divides rectal fistulae into penetrating and non-penetrating, and suggests salves for the non-penetrating and the actual cautery for those that penetrate. He warns against the possibility of producing incontinence by the incision of deep fistulae, for this would leave the patient in a ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... the Attorney General of Maryland, shows some of the consequences of this "forbidding to marry." "A slave has never maintained an action against the violator of his bed. A slave is not admonished for incontinence, or punished for fornication or adultery; never prosecuted for bigamy." Again, God has written his commandment, that children should honor their parents. How, then, can He approve of a system, which pours contempt on the relation of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... hence she had always behaved towards the foundling with rather more kindness than ladies of rigid virtue can sometimes bring themselves to show to these children, who, however innocent, may be truly called the living monuments of incontinence. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... affair of passion. Luther had come to middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed; and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical usage, or else he considered that the circumstances of the time required ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... had come. Its comic Irishman kept the Committee on the stage, and in Queen Anne's time the thorough Tory still relished the stage caricature of the maintainers of the Commonwealth in Mr. Day with his greed, hypocrisy, and private incontinence; his wife, who had been cookmaid to a gentleman, but takes all the State matters on herself; and their empty son Abel, who knows Parliament-men and Sequestrators, and whose profound contemplations are caused by the constervation ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... women of the world would gain more from temperance and unselfishness and delicacy of men in sexual functioning in marriage than from sexual continence before marriage. Of course, I do not propose that ideal sexual conditions in marriage may justify pre-marital incontinence, but I make this sharp contrast simply to emphasize the belief that sexual intemperance and selfishness of men in marriage causes more mental and physical suffering of women than does sexual incontinence of men before marriage, and I am not forgetting the vast problem of social ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow

... irritation may provoke an outburst of maniacal rage, or a fit. Consequently, they require the most careful, but firm training, right from birth, to bring them up with a minimum of nerve-strain. Twitchings, night or day terrors, sleep walking, and incontinence of urine often trouble them. They should be examined by a doctor ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... Or do his grey hairs any violence? But Beauty, like the fair Hesperian tree Laden with blooming gold, had need the guard Of dragon-watch with unenchanted eye To save her blossoms, and defend her fruit, From the rash hand of bold Incontinence. You may as well spread out the unsunned heaps Of miser's treasure by an outlaw's den, And tell me it is safe, as bid me hope 400 Danger will wink on Opportunity, And let a single helpless maiden pass Uninjured in this wild surrounding waste. Of night or loneliness it recks ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... marriage, and the birth, in circumstances of wretched loneliness, of an illegitimate baby. The father annoyed Lee excessively; he was the anciently familiar inaccurate shape of conventionalized lust without an identifying human trait. Not for a second did Lee believe in his grease-pencilled incontinence and perfidy; but the child he seduced, incidents of the seduction charged with the beauty of pity, thronged Lee's mind with sensations and ideas. However, it was the world surrounding the central motive, the action, that ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... thither on a party of pleasure, which we all knew would be agreeable to you; and that you and my brother should meet as if by accident. But it appears that Sir Arthur, when he has any favourite project in view, can scarcely forbear being communicative, not from principle but from incontinence. ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft

... variety of such reasons and pretensions. What is legally fixed on the Continent of Europe, is here left to the caprice and greediness of the Sheikhs, and the liberality or stinginess of the trader. As to incontinence, this is more a secret crime. But the sexual habits of the Touaricks, and their domestic amours, are purity itself, compared to the sensuality which disfigures and saps the vitals of society in all the southern nations of Europe. The hardships of The Desert are the greatest safeguards against ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... shadow" for lack of less subservient auditor, and though, as the years pass, I find that I become more loose of soul and in broad daylight indulge the liberty of muttering my affairs and addressing animals and plants and of confiding secrets to the chaste moon—poets and dramatists term such incontinence of speech soliloquy and employ it for the utterance of edifying inspiration—it is because it is impossible to be ever quite alone. Not so very long ago in Merrie England if a person muttered to himself it was enough on which to establish a charge of wizardry; but ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... chief ground, if any, for hostility against them; the frailties of the few simply weakened the prestige of all and broke the pedestal of their moral superiority. My own investigations convinced me that the friars' incontinence was generally regarded with indifference by the people; concubinage being so common among the Filipinos themselves it did not shock them in the pastor's case. Moreover, women were proud of the paternity of their children begotten ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... David Battle; Susannah Silence hath sat tied in a chair, before her door, with a cleft stick upon her tongue, for being too free in the use of that member; divers godly persons have connected themselves with the congregation, and two unworthy Achans been driven therefrom—the one for incontinence, until he repent thereof, and the other for denying the ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... natural religion to the test You've just demolished the revealed with—quick, 820 Down to the root of all that checks your will, All prohibition to lie, kill and thieve, Or even to be an atheistic priest! Suppose a pricking to incontinence— Philosophers deduce you chastity Or shame, from just the fact that at the first Whoso embraced a woman in the field, Threw club down and forewent his brains beside, So, stood a ready victim in the reach Of any brother savage, club in hand; 830 Hence saw the use ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning

... Bessus or a Moron. The delightful encounter between the jester and the bear in the crowning interlude of La Princesse d'Elide shows once more, I may remark, that Moliere had sat at the feet of Rabelais as delightedly as Shakespeare before him. Such rapturous inebriety or Olympian incontinence of humour only fires the blood of the graver and less exuberant humourist when his lips are still warm and wet from the well- spring of ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... appearances may suggest to the contrary. This is the problem of race. Granted that one knows something of the parents, it is admissible to draw a conclusion about the child: any kind of offensive incontinence, any kind of sordid envy, or of clumsy self-vaunting—the three things which together have constituted the genuine plebeian type in all times—such must pass over to the child, as surely as bad blood; and with the help of the best education ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... action has stained him, and he is all crooked with falsehood and imposture, and has no straightness, because he has lived without truth. Him Rhadamanthus beholds, full of all deformity and disproportion, which is caused by licence and luxury and insolence and incontinence, and despatches him ignominiously to his prison, and there he undergoes the punishment ...
— Gorgias • Plato

... to thentent that the ordre of priesthood be had in dew reuerence according to the dignite therof, and that none occasions of incontinence growe bee the famylyarite of seculer people. Plese it my Lord Mayre, Aldirmen, and Comon Counsyll, to enacte that no maner persone beyng free of this citee take, receyue, and kepe from hensforth ony ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various

... inscription, "Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here," leads into a Vestibule, or Ante-Hell, a dark plain separated from Hell proper by the river Acheron. Hell proper then falls into three great divisions for the punishment of the sins of Incontinence, Bestiality, and Malice, which are punished in nine circles, each circle sub-divided. Circle One is the Limbo of the Unbaptized. Circles Two, Three, Four, and Five are reserved for the punishment of the sins of Incontinence, Lasciviousness, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb

... Edmund Spenser described the Irish Protestant clergy of the period as "bad, licentious, and most disordered." "Whatever disorders," he writes, "you see in the Church of England, you may find in Ireland, and many more, namely, gross simony, greedy covetousness, incontinence, careless sloth, and generally all disordered life in the common clergyman. And, besides all these, they have their particular enormities; for all Irish ministers that now enjoy church livings are in a manner mere ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... him of an anecdote of the reign of Charles the second. When that monarch had been guilty of some gross breach of decorum and decency with a loose woman, which attracted the notice of the clergy, it was resolved to reprove him for his incontinence and public transgression. The body of the clergy came to the bottom of the audience room; one of them, of the name of Douglass, persuaded the others to let him go up singly to his majesty, in order that he might rebuke ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various

... is glad, at any rate, that he does the costs of conversation, better or worse. In the rest is no hope. Stille, Borck are accomplished military gentlemen; but of tacit nature, reflective, practical, rather than discursive, and do not waste themselves by incontinence of tongue. Stille, by his military Commentaries, which are still known to soldiers that read, maintains some lasting remembrance of himself: Borck we shall see engaged in a small bit of business before long. As to Munchow, the JEUNE MORVEUX of an Adjutant, he, though his manners ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... amount of inquiry into this subject, that I can find no proofs whatsoever of Tasso's having made love to Leonora; though I think it highly probable. I believe the main cause of the duke's proceedings was the poet's own violence of behaviour and incontinence of speech. I think it very likely that, in the course of the poetical love-making to various ladies, which was almost identical in that age with addressing them in verse, Torquato, whether he was in love or not, took more liberties with the princesses than Alfonso ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt

... beautifully, and efficiently will be to die. For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence. To make life convenient for the breeding of such people will seem to them not the most virtuous and amiable thing in the world, as it is held to be now, but an exceedingly ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... attendants, she immediately fell in love with him—"the battle-axe of prudence dropped from her hand; the vessel of continence became a sport to the waves of confusion; while the avenues leading to the fortress of reason remained unguarded, the sugar-cane of incontinence triumphantly raised its head above the rose-tree of patience." The prince had also observed the lady, as she stood on the terrace of her house, and was instantly enamoured of her. He sends an old woman (always the obliging—"for ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... forbidden, turn away their eyes from beholding vanity, and finally dash their little ones—i.e. their carnal thoughts—upon a rock (and Christ is the Rock), suppress their passions, and frequently and devoutly resort to God in prayer. These are undoubtedly the most effectual remedies for incontinence in ecclesiastics and servants of God. St. Paul said aright that the doctrine of those who forbid marriage is a doctrine of demons. Such was the doctrine of Tatian and Marcoin, whom Augustine and Jerome have mentioned. But the Church does ...
— The Confutatio Pontificia • Anonymous

... 161—227. Notwithstanding the honors and rewards which were bestowed on those virgins, it was difficult to procure a sufficient number; nor could the dread of the most horrible death always restrain their incontinence.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... or incontinence of faeces are constant symptoms. In young men priapism is common—the corpus cavernosum penis is filled with blood without actual erection. There is other evidence of vaso-motor paralysis in the form of dilatation ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... invented by the Pope's son. And his father pardoned him the deed, and others as bad, by a secret bull, absolving him from all pains and penalties that he might have incurred through youthful frailty or human incontinence!" ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... Flodden Field, became queen of England. The king now fancied that his domestic felicity was complete; but, soon after his marriage, it was discovered that his wife had formerly led a dissolute life, and had been unfaithful also to her royal master. When the proofs of her incontinence were presented to him, he burst into a flood of tears; but soon his natural ferocity returned, and his guilty wife expiated her crime by death on the ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... whose protection she will find a situation more fitting her qualities and habits than the Castle of Falkland, while her Highness the Duchess of Rothsay abides there. She hath charged the said reverend brothers so to deal with the young woman as may give her a sense of the sin of incontinence, and she commendeth thee to confession and penitence.—Signed, Waltheof, by command of an high and mighty Princess"; ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... of, despair, where he sorrowfully told his wife that, having fallen into this misfortune, he was resolved to kill himself: to which she roundly replied, "'tis but reason you should, seeing that having so often experienced the incontinence of my tongue, you could not take warning: but let me kill myself first," and without any more saying ran herself through the body with a sword. Vibius Virrius, despairing of the safety of his city besieged by the Romans ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... must not close this chapter without saying a few words about its morals. It has been called the most licentious city in Europe, and, I have no doubt, with the most perfect justice. Vienna may surpass it in the amount of conjugal infidelity, but certainly not in general incontinence. Very nearly half the registered births are illegitimate, to say nothing of the illegitimate children born in wedlock. Of the servant-girls, shop-girls, and seamstresses in the city, it is very safe to say ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... long time what you must do. You have sense enough: don't give way to drunkenness and incontinence of speech; don't give way to sensual lust; and, above all, to the love of money. And close your taverns. If you can't close all, at least two or three. And, above ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... the phlebotomist:—He walks sideling along; he is proud; he stoops awhile before seating himself; he has an envious and evil eye; he is a gourmand, but he defecates little at a time; he is suspected of incontinence, robbery, and murder. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various

... all-knowing Editor, Renouard's only friend and crony, wanted to know more than the rest of the world. From professional incontinence, perhaps, he thirsted for a full cup of harrowing detail. And when he noticed Renouard's schooner lying in port day after day he sought the sailing master to learn the reason. The man told him that ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... had not been present. Lebyadkinwas the only one who might have chattered, not so much from spite, for he had gone out in great alarm (and fear of an enemy destroys spite against him), but simply from incontinence of speech-But Lebyadkin and his sister had disappeared next day, and nothing could be heard of them. There was no trace of them at Filipov's house, they had moved, no one knew where, and seemed to have vanished. Shatov, of whom I wanted to inquire ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... intrigue with Pompeia, Caesar's wife, and his sacrilegious intrusion into the mysteries of the Bona Dea. The Romans had a proverb, "Clodius accuset Moechos?" (Juv., 'Sat.' ii. 27). That "Steenie" should lecture on the "turpitude of incontinence!" ('The Fortunes of Nigel,' ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... attributed considerable importance to purity, or, to use a more adequate term, to cleanliness. Before every ceremony the officiating priest had to submit to ablutions, sometimes to fumigations or anointing, and to abstain from certain foods and from incontinence for a certain time. Originally no moral idea was connected with this purification. It was considered a means of exorcising malevolent demons or of putting the priest into a state in which the sacrifice performed by him could have the expected effect. ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... successful flight. I do confess them nurseries of the arts, In which they flourish most; where, in the beams Of warm encouragement, and in the eye Of public note, they reach their perfect size. Such London is, by taste and wealth proclaimed The fairest capital in all the world, By riot and incontinence the worst. There, touched by Reynolds, a dull blank becomes A lucid mirror, in which nature sees All her reflected features. Bacon there Gives more than female beauty to a stone, And Chatham's eloquence to marble lips. Nor does the chisel occupy alone The powers of sculpture, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... British freedom in those chaotic days; and when our Continental rivals were not jeering at the grotesqueness of it, they were lauding this particular form of madness to the skies, as well they might, seeing that our insensate profligacy and incontinence meant their gain. The cause of a foreigner, good, bad, or indifferent—that was the cause Clement Blaine most loved to champion in his journal. An attack upon anything British, though the author of it might be the basest creature ever outlawed from any community—that ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... jealousy. He interprets every trifle in the worst sense, to the prejudice of her honesty, and is so full of caprices and scruples that, if he had his will, he would have her shut up and never suffered to go abroad again, if not made away, for her incontinence. All his politics are speculative and for the most part impracticable, full of curious niceties, that tend only to prevent future imaginary inconveniences with greater real and present. He is very superstitious of having ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... even held him accountable for the obscure deaths of his wife Elizabeth and his son Carlos; but M. Gachard has shown that this suspicion is unfounded. Philip appears perhaps to better advantage in his domestic than in his political relations. Yet he was addicted to vulgar and miscellaneous incontinence; toward the close of his life he seriously contemplated marrying his own daughter Isabella; and he ended by taking for his fourth wife his niece, Anne of Austria, who became the mother of his half-idiotic son and successor. We know of no royal family, unless it may be the Claudians of Rome, ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... Corioli taken by C. Martius; from that he is surnamed Coriolanus. Banishment and subsequent conduct of C. M. Coriolanus. The Agrarian law first made. Sp. Cassius condemned and put to death. Oppia, a vestal virgin, buried alive for incontinence. The Fabian family undertake to carry on that war at their own cost and hazard, against the Veientians, and for that purpose send out three hundred and six men in arms, who were all cut off. Ap. Claudius the consul decimates his army because he had ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius

... walks there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it be? With the hure, as himself calls it, or black boar's-head, fit to be 'shaken' as a senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,—and burning fire of genius; like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions? It is Gabriel Honore Riquetti de Mirabeau, the world-compeller; man-ruling Deputy of Aix! According ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... self-abuse wrong?" It comes under the head of incontinence, which the Bible and all serious moral teachers so firmly condemn. But why? Doctors are beginning to say that unless it is excessive it does no particular harm either to the brain or the body. Its victims worry about it—But need they? Here at least the answer is easily found because it is ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray

... their skins." J. C. Feo Cardoso (Memoir published in Paris in 1825) attributes the decadence of Angola and Benguela to three reasons; rare marriages amongst the higher orders; poverty amongst the lower; and the immorality and incontinence of both. Lopes de Lima (p. 149 loc. cit.) traces the decline and fall of Christianity in the eighteenth century to the want of priests, to the corruption of the regular clergy (Carmelites and Franciscans), for whom West Africa, like Syria and Palestine, was made a ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... her treatment and diet. It was not that she was wanted for the care of the little boy; the squire was too jealous of the child's exclusive love for that, and one of the housemaids was employed in the actual physical charge of him; but he needed some one to listen to his incontinence of language, both when his passionate regret for his dead son came uppermost, and also when he had discovered some extraordinary charm in that son's child; and again when he was oppressed with the uncertainty of Aimee's long-continued illness. Molly was not so good or so bewitching a listener to ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... sweetish; on expression they yield a considerable quantity of insipid oil: hence they are recommended (boiled in milk, or triturated with water into an emulsion) against coughs, heat of urine, and the like. They are also said to be useful in incontinence of urine; but experience does not warrant their having any virtues of ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... This was a name of the robber Procrustes, who was slain by Theseus. Halcyone, the daughter of his son Scyron, having been guilty of incontinence, was thrown into the sea by her father, on which she was changed into a kingfisher, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... first circle are the whole unbaptised world—heathens and infants—melancholy, though not tormented. Here also is found the Elysium of Virgil, whose Charon and other infernal beings are among the agents of torment. In the second circle the torments commence with the sin of incontinence; and the punishment goes deepening with the crime from circle to circle, through gluttony, avarice, prodigality, wrath, sullenness, or unwillingness to be pleased with the creation, disbelief in God and the soul ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... men of sound sense, regretted the almost fatal incontinence which, in the year of his greatest private troubles, led his friend to make a parade of them before the public. He speaks more than once of his unhappy tendency to exhibit himself as the dying gladiator, and even compares him to his peacock, screeching before his ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... other diseases in regard to which excess in alcoholics acts as a powerful predisposing cause, such as gout, gravel, aneurism, paralysis, apoplexy, epilepsy, cystitis, premature incontinence of urine, erysipelas, spreading cellular inflammation, tendency of wounds and sores to gangrene, inability of the constitution to resist the attacks of epidemics. I have had a fearful amount of experience of continued fever in our infirmary during many epidemics, and in all my experience I ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... the mistress of every vice, devising one shameless pleasure after another, insensibly plunges into unmentionable debauchery, experienced in every form of brutal lust." The jealous Roman husband's furious desire to prevent the consequences of his wife's incontinence was by no means well served by the use of such agents; on the contrary, the women themselves profited by the arrangement. By means of these eunuchs, they edited the morals of their maids and hampered the sodomitical hankerings, active or otherwise, of their husbands: ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... Coquette entraps the Heart of the Jew, against whom Pallet enters into a Conspiracy, by which Peregrine is again disappointed, and the Hebrew's Incontinence exposed. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... restrained from accomplishing it? Knowledge is not virtue in the sense that mere reason or mere perception can control the will. And this is the conclusion that Aristotle also comes to when he says: "Some people say that incontinence is impossible, if one has knowledge. It seems to them strange, as it did to Socrates, that where knowledge exists in man, something else should master it and drag it about like a slave. Socrates was wholly opposed to this idea; he denied the existence of ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... who disliked him far more, General Charles Lee, in the excess of his hatred, charged Washington in 1778 with immorality,—a rather amusing impeachment, since at the very time Lee was flaunting the evidence of his own incontinence without apparent shame,—and a mutual friend of the accused and accuser, Joseph Reed, whose service on Washington's staff enabled him to speak wittingly, advised that Lee "forbear any Reflections upon the Commander in Chief, of whom for the first time I have heard ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford

... the good diamond loseth his virtue by sin, and for incontinence of him that beareth it. And then it is needful to make it to recover his virtue again, or else ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown

... vice? Is it from ignorance of what is good? Well, what is more weak and feeble than the blindness of ignorance? Do they know what they ought to follow, but lust drives them aside out of the way? If it be so, they are still frail by reason of their incontinence, for they cannot fight against vice. Or do they knowingly and wilfully forsake the good and turn aside to vice? Why, at this rate, they not only cease to have power, but cease to be at all. For they who forsake the ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius

... unlike a butter-churn, which the adventurous woman that hath two husbands at one time is to wear on her shoulders, her head peeping out at the top only, and so led about the town, as a penance for her incontinence." Samuel Pepys has an entry in his diary respecting seeing a similar barrel at the Hague, in the year 1660. We have traces of this mode of punishment in Germany. John Howard, in his work entitled "The State of Prisons in England and Wales," 1784, thus writes: "Denmark.—Some (criminals) of the lower ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews

... Land Richard of England was satiated with the glory and misfortunes of his first adventure; and he presumed to deride the exhortations of Fulk of Neuilly, who was not abashed in the presence of kings. "You advise me," said Plantagenet, "to dismiss my three daughters, pride, avarice, and incontinence: I bequeath them to the most deserving; my pride to the knights templars, my avarice to the monks of Cisteaux, and my incontinence to the prelates." But the preacher was heard and obeyed by the great vassals, the princes of the second ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... some classic platitude; anyone who knew him might have foretold the speech into which he presently broke. He did this in the refectory where there was a convenient step up at the end. Beginning with the customary confession of incontinence, "could not let the occasion pass," he declared that he would not detain them long, but he felt that everyone there would agree with him that they shared that day in no slight occasion, no mean enterprise, that here was one of the most promising, one of the most momentous, nay! he would go further ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... ordered them all to be massacred in one night; and scarcely seven hundred of them succeeded in escaping by flight. The private morals of Dagobert were not more scrupulous than his public acts. "A slave to incontinence as King Solomon was," says his biographer Fredegaire, "he had three queens and a host of concubines." Given up to extravagance and pomp, it pleased him to imitate the magnificence of the imperial court at Constantinople, and at one time he laid hands for ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... one more so than he. A priest told me yesterday—Sunday, the twenty-first of June—that it was public talk that no woman had escaped from him with her honor, when he could accomplish her ruin; and that further, through his great and scandalous incontinence, he twice ordered the priest to marry him to his own niece, and used every means with the priest and Father Soria to secure a dispensation, although the latter showed him how little that measure profited. He has so tyrannized over this colony by his actions ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair

... in making water owing to the length of the prepuce and the extreme narrowness of its orifice, which may even be scarcely large enough to admit the head of a pin. This congenital phimosis is, I may add, not an infrequent occasion of incontinence of urine in children, and is also an exciting cause of the habit of masturbation, owing to the discomfort and irritation which it constantly keeps up. In every case, therefore, where any difficulty attends ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... abbot of Alba-domus, his opinion of a certain woman whom he had seen; upon which the holy man confessed, with tears in his eyes, his predilection for her, and received from three priests the discipline of incontinence. For as that long and experienced subtle enemy, by arguing from certain conjectural signs, may foretell future by past events, so by insidious treachery and contrivance, added to exterior appearances, ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis

... the moral law when he visited the harlot at Gaza. He was wofully weak in character when he yielded to the blandishments of Delilah and wrought his own undoing, as well as that of his people. The disgraceful slavery into which Herakles fell was not caused by the hero's incontinence or uxoriousness, but a punishment for crime, in that he had in a fit of madness killed his friend Iphitus. And the three years which he spent as the slave of Omphale were punctuated by larger and better deeds than those of Samson ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... destruction of this membrane. It is often absent in children soon after birth; while it may remain entire after copulation. Hence, the presence of the hymen does not absolutely prove virginity; nor does its absence prove incontinence, although its presence would be ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... answer thus return'd: "Wherefore in dotage wanders thus thy mind, Not so accustom'd? or what other thoughts Possess it? Dwell not in thy memory The words, wherein thy ethic page describes Three dispositions adverse to Heav'n's will, Incont'nence, malice, and mad brutishness, And how incontinence the least offends God, and least guilt incurs? If well thou note This judgment, and remember who they are, Without these walls to vain repentance doom'd, Thou shalt discern why they apart are plac'd From these fell spirits, and less wreakful pours Justice divine ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... cruelly punished. The unfortunate offender was buried alive in a vault constructed beneath the Fo'rum by the elder Tarquin. The terror of such a dreadful fate had the desired effect; there were only eighteen instances of incontinence among the vestals, during the space of ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... obscured by artificial means; hence its prevalence among those who can afford for a time to dissipate their strength, or have some means of replenishing it. And imprudence is common where the penalty is insidious. The corruption entailed by gluttony, inebriety, and incontinence may be slow and doubtful, or apparently remitted in moments of recovery; but if one indulge himself in foolhardiness or violence, he is like to be repaid on the spot. Hence the latter forms of imprudence are ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... and uncle, grandchildren and cousins. The family was still too feebly established to count for much in the structure of society, which still rested firmly upon the clan.[137] Nevertheless the marriage bonds were drawn much tighter than among Indians of the lower status, and penalties for incontinence were more severe. The wife became her husband's property and was entitled to the protection of his clan. All matrimonial arrangements were controlled by the clan, and no member of it, male or female, was allowed to remain unmarried, except for certain religious reasons. The penalty ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... Hero-handled body, whose delight Made him disdain each other epithite. And as amidst th' enamour'd waves he swims, The god of gold[46] of purpose gilt his limbs, That, this word gilt[47] including double sense, The double guilt of his incontinence Might be express'd, that had no stay t' employ The treasure which the love-god let him joy In his dear Hero, with such sacred thrift As had beseem'd so sanctified a gift; 30 But, like a greedy vulgar prodigal, Would ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe

... only to that of Christianity, and superior to every heathen system that the world has seen.[1] It forbids the taking of life from even the humblest created animal, and prohibits intemperance and incontinence, dishonesty and falsehood—vices which are referable to those formidable assailants, raga or concupiscence, doso or malignity, and moha, ignorance or folly.[2] These, again, involve all their minor modifications—hypocrisy and anger, unkindness and ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... outlined by Patanjali is known as the Eightfold Path. The first steps, (1) YAMA and (2) NIYAMA, require observance of ten negative and positive moralities-avoidance of injury to others, of untruthfulness, of stealing, of incontinence, of gift-receiving (which brings obligations); and purity of body and mind, contentment, self-discipline, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common and rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if they do not advocate the despatch of children to public institutions, still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens on others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of squalor and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is far more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public institutions can possibly ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... loves. The morals of weavers were horribly decried in Greece. The Italians have given birth to a proverb concerning the lubricity of lame women. The Spanish, in whose veins are found many mixtures of African incontinence, have expressed their sentiments in a maxim which is familiar with them: Muger y gallina pierna quebrantada [it is good that a woman and a hen have one broken leg]. The profound sagacity of the Orientals in the art of pleasure is altogether expressed by this ordinance of the caliph Hakim, founder ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac



Words linked to "Incontinency" :   incontinence, excreting, voiding, enuresis, urinary incontinence, elimination, incontinent



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