"Purgatorian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Over and over again came these few sad notes, increasing in number, fainting, despairing, and reviving again; till at last, with a fluttering of agonized wings, as of a soul struggling up out of the purgatorial smoke, the music- bird sprang aloft, and broke into a wild but unsure jubilation. Then, as if in the exuberance of its rejoicing it had broken some law of the kingdom of harmony, it sank, plumb-down, into the purifying ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... one fair face sublimes my love, For it hath weaned my heart from low desires; Nor death I heed nor purgatorial fires. Thy beauty, antepast of joys above Instructs me in the bliss that saints approve; For, Oh! how good, how beautiful must be The God that made so good a thing as thee, So fair an image of the Heavenly Dove. Forgive me if I cannot turn away From those sweet eyes ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... stars awhile, Dante, turning to the north to get his bearings, perceives Virgil has been joined in this ante-purgatorial region by Cato, who wonderingly inquires how ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... been somewhat more careful in stating the views of his adversaries. Referring to the use of indulgences, he says: 'The Romish Church permits crime for certain considerations.' The Roman Catholic doctrine as actually held is, that an indulgence is a remission of a portion of the earthly or purgatorial punishment due to any sin, after it has been duly repented of, confessed, abandoned, and restitution made so far as possible. It can consequently never mean a pardon for sins to come, as is often ignorantly ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Pope Leo X. was in want of money: and one of the recognised methods of obtaining it was the sale of Indulgences—that is to say, remissions in the duration of Purgatorial sufferings, ratified by His Holiness, and purchasable for cash. The whole thing being simply a commercial transaction, the Indulgences were offered at popular prices. There was nothing new in the method. The Lay Princes had no objections to the sale in their territories, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... Or scrawl, as Wood and Barclay walk, 'gainst time. Behold—Ye Tarts!—one moment spare the text! 309 HAYLEY'S last work, and worst—until his next; 310 Whether he spin poor couplets into plays, 311 Or damn the dead with purgatorial praise. 312 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... at last. Outside, the rain poured down in torrents, and the wind moaned and sobbed in the garden and about the walls of that desolated old palace. How that night comes back to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire. It glowed on the black walls and floor like the reflection of purgatorial flame. Beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all. Adriance sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... are these? Why sit they here in twilight? Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows, Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish, Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked? Stroke on stroke of pain,—but what slow panic, Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets? Ever from their hair and through their hand palms Misery swelters. ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... sort of a tin outbuilding, where some 150 R.A. men of all batteries were sitting or lying on their kit round the walls and down the centre; like lost souls, I pictured them, sitting round one of Dante's purgatorial retreats. I felt exactly like going to school again for the first time, though, of course, I soon found them all very friendly. I learned that there was no food to be got till to-morrow, but I foraged about till I found ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... visit the earth in farther births and acquire in future transmigrations their complete attainment of Nirwana. They believe likewise in the existence of hells which are the abodes of demons or tormentors, and in which the wicked undergo a purgatorial imprisonment preparatory to an extended probation upon earth. Here their torments are in proportion to their crimes, and although not eternal, their duration extends almost to the infinitude of eternity; those who have been guilty ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... salt-water seem almost to lose their capacity of being burnt. Perhaps it was for this reason that, in the ancient "lyke-wakes" of the North of England, a pinch of salt was placed upon the dead body, as a safeguard against purgatorial flames. Yet salt melts ice, and so represents heat, one would think; and one can fancy that these fragments should be doubly inflammable, by their saline quality, and by the unmerciful rubbing which the ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... last Sabbath. Christ is the embodiment of Christianity, and His coming to the world was 'tidings of great joy'; His coming to every sinful heart should be 'tidings of great joy.' But I fear that I led some to dread His coming, as they would purgatorial fires. How did the All-powerful One come? As a little, helpless child, that he might disarm our fears and enlist our sympathy. How did He live? The humblest among the humble, that no one on earth should be too lowly to go straight to His side with his griefs. How did He act? ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... of the past be forgotten: all that I now remember of many a weary night and day is the vision of a great soul in torment, and through purgatorial fires the ineffable tenderness of the real man emerging, with his passionate appeal to justice and baffled desire for truth. To those who could not follow the wanderings of the wearied brain it was nothing but a horrible ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... lot of the married woman in the working class where she is wife, mother, cook, laundress, needlewoman, charwoman, and often many other things combined, is the most heartbreakingly cruel and tortured slavery; but you are escaping the probability of such a purgatorial existence. Take comfort in knowing that a great percentage of men are infinitely superior to the laws under which they live, because law is determined by public opinion, and though it restrains and modifies public ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... consummate skill he worked on the tender feelings of parents, of mothers, who were mourning the loss of children, or of children who had lost their parents. He impersonated the departed in their agonies in purgatory, he made the people hear the pitiful moaning of the victims in the purgatorial fires, and transmitted their heartrending appeals for speedy help to the living. He clinched the argument by playing on the people's covetousness: for the fourth part of a gulden they could transfer a suffering soul safely to the home of the ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... and Flora McIvor. Suppose they were brought together to share the comforts (cold comforts they would be) of life, to pass days together, to meet every morning at breakfast; with what a ludicrous sense of relief, at the close of this purgatorial period, would not the unhappy novelists have fled from these deserted heroes and heroines, and the precious proprieties of their romance, to the very driest and mustiest of human bores,—gratefully rejoicing that the world was not filled with such creatures as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... prison the Castle of Palliano exists at the present day. Has its symbol of the phoenix attained a new meaning, and is it possible that erring souls issue from its gates, their stains burned clean by purgatorial flame? ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... manner of my leaving your earth I do not exactly know, as I took my departure in the heat of a fever of intoxication, contracted at your too hospitable mansion; but, on my arrival here, I was fairly tried, and sentenced to endure the purgatorial tortures of this infernal confine for the space of ninety-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days, and all on account of the impropriety of my conduct yesternight under your roof. Here am I, laid on a bed of pitiless furze, with my aching head reclined on a pillow of ever-piercing ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... said Cortes coldly, 'and, you heathen dog, your tongue shall be dragged from you with red-hot pincers. For you, Sarceda, I thank you for your confidence. If you have no worse crime than a love affair upon your soul, I think that our good chaplain Olmedo will frank you through the purgatorial fires. But we waste words and time. This man has the secret of the treasure of Guatemoc and of Montezuma. If Guatemoc and his nobles will not tell it, he at least may be forced to speak, for the torments that an Indian can endure without a groan will soon bring truth bubbling from the lips of ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... of the papacy were greatly increased. It attached all who went to its authority by its dispensation, not only from purgatorial pains but from the penalty of sin here and hereafter. It made freemen of all who wore the sign of the cross, and absolved from all allegiance except to itself. By persuading departing lords to make over their sovereignty to him, the pope became the arbiter and consecrator ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... educative effect of the belief in a future life even when expressed in the crude and inadequate metaphor of reward and punishment. Few of us, I venture to think, have reached the moral level at which the belief—not in a vindictive, retributive, unending torment, but in a disciplinary or purgatorial education of souls prolonged after death—is without its value. At the same time it is a mere caricature of all higher religious beliefs when the religious motive is supposed to mean simply a fear of punishment and hope of personal reward, ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... sometimes say the same of our own sad Carlyle—though often an ennobling sadness, is almost as often only peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth. The sallies of the two German authors remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats. They lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... discomfiture of the temporary post commander turned this night of thanksgiving, so far as he was concerned, into something purgatorial. The sight of his sentry, bound, gagged and bleeding,—the discovery of the ladder and of the escape of the prisoner, for whom he was accountable, had filled him with dismay, yet for the moment failed to stagger his indomitable self esteem. There ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... vaunted furnace was but a cool retreat where thoughts of great-coats were possible, compared with this. And if that nether region of whose fires so much is sung by poets and other men possessed, can offer hotter heats, let them be produced. Those Purgatorial ardencies for the gentle suggestion of torment to thin shades can have little in common with these perspiration-compelling torridities. Why does not some ingenious Yankee improve such times for the purchase, at a ruinous discount, of all thick clothes? I tremble lest some one should offer me ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... of the apparition, the court, from the behaviour assumed by Hamlet, has believed his mind affected; and when he enters her room, Ophelia, though such is the insight of love that she is able to read in the face of the son the father's purgatorial sufferings, the picture of one 'loosed out of hell, to speak of horrors,' attributes all the strangeness of his appearance and demeanour, such as she describes them to her father, to that supposed fact. But there is, in truth, as little ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... between them which signifies the perfect understanding! And oh, she did not know a tenth of it, deary; not a tenth of it! It was one of those subtle, hidden things, nothing tangible or dreadful—like a purgatorial state of mind which may result in brimstone or lovely angels with harps. Neither could she do anything about it since they were both perfect dears and always would be. Not for worlds, in Trudy's estimation, would they ever take it upon themselves to prove the brittleness ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... he look once more, though to an envious soul the sight of a brother's happiness is like the torment of purgatorial fire. Richard is standing with his hand extended towards him. He is pleading the cause of the mean and cowardly enemy who betrayed him. He pities and forgives him; he even loves him still, for is ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... the beginning of purgatorial weeks that were soon to tell on Hester. They actually brought out a streak of gray through her hair, which Lottie promptly dyed and worked under into the lower part of her coiffure. For herself, Hester would ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... dishonoured tabernacle, the princess prayed she might continue to be numbered with the dead. But it seems it was too late, her spirit was replaced by the least dignified of entrances, and her startled family beheld the body move. The seemingly purgatorial labours, the helpful kindred spirit, and the horror of the princess at the sight of her tainted body, are ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... about the ninth or tenth day of my purgatorial performances; and certainly if there be any merit in fleshly mortifications, these religious exercises of mine should stand my part hereafter. A review had been announced in the Phoenix-park, which Fanny had expressed herself most desirous ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... stillness over the hedgeless fields stretching to the boundary of poplars; and to Gwendolen the talk within the carriage seemed only to make the dreamland larger with an indistinct region of coal-pits, and a purgatorial Gadsmere which she would never visit; till at her mother's words, this mingled, dozing view seemed to dissolve and give way to a more wakeful vision of Offendene and Pennicote under their cooler lights. She saw the gray shoulders of the downs, the cattle-specked fields, the shadowy ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... dark and winding path that she must tread from that night onward to its hidden, shadowy ending. Mrs. Prowde, through her many contented years, blamed in turn Hazel, Abel, Albert, the devil, and (only tacitly and, as it were, in secret from herself) God. If there is any purgatorial fire of remorse for the hard and selfish natures that crucify love, it must burn elsewhere. It does not touch them in this world. They go as the three children went, in their coats, their hosen, and their hats all complete, nor does the smell of ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... breakfast passed all too soon. The young scout rose, for he was on-duty, but the long rollers on the lake forbade the going forth. Van's was a pleasant place to wait, but he chafed at the delay; his pride would have him make a record on every journey. But wait he must. Skookum tied safely to his purgatorial post whined indignantly—and with head cocked on one side, picked out the very hen he would like to utilize—as soon as released from his temporary embarrassment. Quonab went out on a rock to bum some ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... underplot of The Fatal Marriage which contain some excellent comedy, Southerne took directly from The Night Walker; or, The Little Thief (printed as Fletcher's in 1640 and 'corrected by Shirley' in 1633 according to Herbert's license). The purgatorial farce may be traced to the Decameron, Day III, 8. 'Ferondo, mangiata certa polvere, e sotterrato per morto: e dall' abate, chi la moglie di lui si gode, tratto dalla sepoltura, e messo in prigione e fattogli credere, che egli e in purgatoro; e poi risuscitato . . .' It is the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... Church in such an unscholarly way that he could not in any probability rise to a higher grade through all his career than that of the humble curate wearing his life out in an obscure village or city slum—that might have a touch of goodness and greatness in it; that might be true religion, and a purgatorial course worthy of being ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... over to the slaves, who stew, broil, and baste them with infernal sauce. It frequently happens that these wretches have to stick their own wives, daughters, fathers, sons, or brothers upon the spits, and to keep up the purgatorial fire beneath them; a truly horrible and tragic employment, rendered yet more so, since their overseer, a capricious devil, like all understrappers of great lords, stands behind them with a whip in order to ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... broke the silence with its frivolous click. The tears were raining down my cheeks. She did not look at me now. She stood grasping the table with one tense hand, her white face thrown a little back. Just as she had stood, I knew, eight purgatorial ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... near two hundred souls Had left their bodies; and what's worse, alas! When over Catholics the Ocean rolls, They must wait several weeks before a mass Takes off one peck of purgatorial coals, Because, till people know what's come to pass, They won't lay out their money on the dead— It costs three francs for every mass ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... suddenly taken by another and gently but fervently pressed. Instinctively, I guessed who it was, and, on looking up, was less surprised than delighted to see Mr. Huntingdon smiling upon me. It was like turning from some purgatorial fiend to an angel of light, come to announce that the ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress,[657] a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories, of Adam's fall[658] and curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial[659] and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... had devised for barricading the door. It was from this place he had so suddenly risen at the call of Blue Peter, and to it he had as suddenly withdrawn again—to pass in silence and loneliness through his last purgatorial pain.[1] ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... Tophet and the valley of Hinnom where the offal from the thousands of sacrifices was perpetually rotting and being burned, so taking his parable from an incident, as usual)—He yet "went and preached after death to the spirits in prison," probably to those who were then enduring some such purgatorial punishment. After all, this sentence of King Solomon as to a fallen tree, so often misapplied, is not one of the higher forms of inspiration; even St. Paul qualifies his own sometimes; and there are several disputable texts ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... festival. At the door were pedlars selling little books, in which were printed the offices for Christmas-tide, with stories of S. Felix and S. Catherine, whose devotion to the infant Christ had wrought them weal, and promises of the remission of four purgatorial centuries to those who zealously observed the service of the Church at this most holy time. I knew that the people of Florence were preparing for Christmas in their own way. But it was not our way. It happened that ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... and had seen many cities, and the manners of many men—and of some women,— singing-women, I mean, in their public character; for the Consul, correct of life as of ear, never sought to undeify his divinities by pursuing them from the heaven of the stage to the purgatorial intermediacy of the coulisses, still less to the lower depth of disenchantment into which too many of them sunk in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... ascent in mystic paths, up and up by degrees in the light; passing through the contemplative life in the transept, soaring in the choir into the full glory of the unitive life, far away now from the purgatorial life, the dark passage ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... an education which should equip them with all of the culture of our schools, beside giving them a knowledge of the sciences of agriculture and of mechanics. Those boys and girls who were planning to go to college required an advance course in those purgatorial topics which, for some inexplicable reason, are still regarded as necessary preliminaries to a college education. Most of the girls in Lowville and the immediate vicinity hope to marry sooner or later, and ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... Pit into the measureless air of Mr. White's Kansas plains is like waking from death to life. We are still among dreadfully fallible human beings, but we are no longer among the damned; with the worst there is a purgatorial possibility of Paradise. Even the perdition of Dan Gregg then seems not the worst that could befall him; he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his studies than otherwise, and, indeed, took a real pleasure in some classical authors—Homer and Horace, for example—as any lad who has turned sixteen who has brains, and is not absolutely idle, is likely to do. He was strong, active, popular; he had passed from the purgatorial state of fag to the elysium of fagger. But still his blood seemed turned to champagne, and his muscles to watch-springs, when the cab, which carried him and his portmanteau, passed through the gate into the drive which curved up to the door of Holly Lodge. For Holly Lodge ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... of the divine self-oblivion which floated those ghosts of the two immortal lovers through the bounds of their purgatorial circle, and for us to whom the minutes were ages, as for them to whom all time was unmarked, the power of supreme love swept out circumstance. Such embraces cast the soul beyond happiness, into no known region of sadness, but we drew ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to have been attained. The whole man is what in his ordinary state he only tends to be; he has realised the highest perfection of which he is capable; only his 'best self' now remains; his lower self has been left behind without need of the purgatorial fire of contention with the environment to destroy it."—T. Whittaker, Essays and Notices, Psychological ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... exist a purifying fire for the souls of those who have died in the love of God but without having satisfied divine Justice. Lastly, the Council of Trent under Pius IV in 1563, in the twenty-fifth session, issued the purgatorial decree beginning Cura catholica ecclesia, Spiritu Santo edocta, wherein it deduces that, after the office of the mass, the petitions of the living, their prayers, alms, and other pious works are the surest means ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... deathly pale by reason of his long estrangement from the light. On sight of the abbot he ran and threw himself at his feet, saying:—"My father, it has been revealed to me that 'tis to your prayers and those of St. Benedict and my lady that I owe my release from purgatorial pain, and restoration to life; wherefore 'tis my prayer that God give you a good year and good calends, to-day and all days." "Laud we the power of God!" said the abbot. "Go then, son, as God has restored thee ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... blessed in his disappointment; that to triumph in wickedness, and to continue in it and to prosper to the end, was the last, worst penalty inflicted by the divine vengeance. [Greek: Hin' athanatos e adikos on]—to go on with injustice through this world and through all eternity, uncleansed by any purgatorial fire, untaught by any untoward consequence to open his eyes and to see in its true accursed form the miserable demon to which he has sold himself—this, of all catastrophes which could befal an evil man, was the deepest, lowest, and most savouring of hell, which the purest of the Grecian moralists ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... illustrated by "La Gioconda" scarcely justifies even an elementary moral disquisition. Moreover, what Ponchielli provoked is so much worse than what he himself did that his condemnation can go no further than purgatorial fires. It is in the operas of his pupils and would-be imitators, like Giordano, Tasca, and others, that filth and blood are supposed to fructify the music which rasps the nerves, even as the dramas revolt the moral stomach. In view of the products of the period ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and about the walls of that desolated old palace. How that night comes back to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed upon the hard features of the bronze Dante, like the reflection of purgatorial flames, and threw long black shadows about us; beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all, Adriance sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one such life as his. Somehow the wind with all ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... the same to you and me, And it may be our several spiritual needs Are best supplied by seeming different creeds. And, differing, we agree in one Inseparable communion, If the true life be in our hearts; the faith Which not to want is death; To want is penance; to desire Is purgatorial fire; To hope is paradise; and to believe Is all of heaven ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various |
