"Immodesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... garments I behold Inspir'd with purple, pearl and gold, I think no other, but I see In them a glorious leprosy That does infect and make the rent More mortal in the vestiment. As flowery vestures do descry The wearer's rich immodesty: So plain and simple clothes do show Where virtue walks, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... pass it upon any but one's self. One cannot tear off all coverings from the hearts and minds of others, whereas one could strip one's own moral deformities naked, and that species of self-accusation does seem to me a kind of immodesty. One naturally shrinks, too, from speaking of deep and awful things, and then there is the all but insuperable difficulty of putting one's most intimate convictions, the realities of one's ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... should be forced to call the figure a Victory and place its date no earlier than the second century B.C. However this may be, the statue is justly one of the most famous in the world. It represents an ideal of purity and sweetness. There is not a trace of coarseness or immodesty in the half-naked woman who stands perfect in the maidenly dignity of her own conquering fairness. Her serious yet smiling face, her graceful form, the delicacy of feeling in attitude and gaze, the tender moulding of breast and limbs, make it a worthy companion of the Hermes or Praxiteles. ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... however, be over-stimulated, and the extravagancies of dress and manner which Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the opera, or any fashionable assembly of young people display in America, are universally and justly condemned by sober thought as falling only a few grades behind actual immodesty. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... Fezzan, and the city of Mourzuk, have become too much vitiated by contact with The Coast and the Turks for affording fair specimens of Saharan tribes. Let us then compare what has been said to those hideous scenes of crime, of immodesty, and drunkenness, which abound in the great cities of Europe—the ever-present, ever-during stigma on our boasted civilization!—and ask the paradoxical question, What do we gain by European and Christian civilization? We have Chambers of Legislature, infallible ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... their sanctification and exemplarity. And to give these his endeavors their due force, he lived an exact model of what he inculcated to others: but his zeal exasperated the tepid part of that order, and raised a storm against himself. The immodesty {241} of women in their dress in that gay capital excited in him sentiments of the most just abhorrence and indignation. Some young ladies seemed to have forgot that clothing is the covering of ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Filipino is a jacket cut low, the decolette feature being obscured to some extent by pulling out one shoulder and covering the other, taking the chances of the lines that mark the concealment and disclosure of breast and back. There is no expression of immodesty. The woman of the Philippines is sad as she is swarthy, and her melancholy eyes are almost always introspective, or glancing far away, and revising the disappointed dreams of long ago. Profounder grief than is read in the faces ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... distinctly as the lightest wet drapery of the studio. Her dress, in short, achieved in its pure simplicity all at which the artistic skill of matrons, milliners, and maidens aims in a Parisian ball costume, without a shadow of that suggestive immodesty from which ball costumes are seldom wholly free. Exactly reversing Terrestrial practice, a Martial wife reserves for strictest domestic privacy that undressed full-dress, that frank revelation of her beauty, which the matrons of London, Paris, or New York think exclusively ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... over her gory trophy, Carmen saw but the frantic struggles of a diseased soul, portrayed as the skilled surgeon lays bare the malignant growth that is eating the quivering tissues of a human frame. The immodesty of dress, the sensual suggestiveness of the dance, the brutal flouting of every element of refinement and delicacy, blazoned in frenzied tone and movement the bloody orgy and dance of death which goes on incessantly upon the stage of human life, and ends in the mad whirl ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... they may without immodesty put forth for themselves something more than the claim of being re-translators of a translation: the present edition is, so far as they were able to make it so, an adaptation, correction, and extension of the work of the great German scholar to whose loving appreciation of the Anglo-Saxon ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... shyness of youth, all the bashfulness of man with maiden were gone. Under the weight of that thought, that dreadful thought, he had grown old in a few minutes. His tone was hard, his manner pitiless. "You never loved him!" he repeated, the very immodesty of her excuse confirming his fears. "And I ask you, what is it? What is it that is between you and him? What is it that gives him ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... see how unworthily thou him? But, woe is me, I now comprehend what has made thee give so little heed to what thou owest to thyself; it must have been some freedom of mine, for I will not call it immodesty, as it did not proceed from any deliberate intention, but from some heedlessness such as women are guilty of through inadvertence when they think they have no occasion for reserve. But tell me, traitor, when did I by word or sign give ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... freshness of knowledge won from the recent study of all his works, might be better fitted to appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the notion, when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played, of an author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of its immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who invited the author to do it on the ground ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... What is forbidden by the sixth Commandment? A. The sixth commandment forbids all unchaste freedom with another's wife or husband; also all immodesty with ourselves or others in looks, dress, words, ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 2 (of 4) • Anonymous
... fashionable women that they objected to the woman's rights movement because of the publicity of a convention, the immodesty of speaking from a platform, and the trial of seeing one's name in the papers. Several ladies made such remarks to me one day, as a bevy of us were sitting together in one of the fashionable hotels in Newport. We were holding a convention there at that time, and some of them had been present ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... was, at least, an honest fashion, and men who married could not well complain that they had been deceived by concealment. But that tells nothing against the modesty of our grandmothers. What is modest in dress depends entirely on what is customary; and there is an immodesty that hides, as well as one that exposes. Unconsciousness is modesty's triple shelter against shame. See here, the dissolute Marguerite of Navarre, visible only at head and hands; the former from the chin upwards, the latter from the knuckles downwards; and here, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... some sacred, heroic form. If a man could paint the woman he loves a thousand times as the Stella Marts to put courage into the sailors on board a thousand ships, so much the more honor to her. Isn't that better than painting a piece of staring immodesty and calling it by a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... to it whatever, for he bombarded Altisidora with all kinds of impertinent questions as to what was going on in Hell when she was there. Of course Altisidora denied having any intimate knowledge of this place, for in spite of her immodesty she had only got as far as ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... In one point they resemble the Latin comic poets; they are not deficient in indecency. This was, indeed, their general tone. The comedies of Pietro Aretino are merely remarkable for their shameless immodesty. It almost seems as if these writers, deeming the spirit of refined love inconsistent with the essence of Comedy, had exhausted the very lees of the sensual ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... the part she had recently played in Mercia, where she had not disdained to practise all her fascinating arts on many persons she despised in order to bind them to her cause, and had thereby given cause to her monkish enemy to charge her with immodesty. It was with something like hatred too that she regarded her own child when he would come crying to her, begging her to take him to his beloved brother; carried away with sudden rage, she would strike and thrust him violently from her, then order her women to take him away ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... that section of the British public in which puritanism is even yet deeply ingrained, with the dreary consequence that beauty, whether of person or in art, is suspect. To admit its existence trenches on immodesty; to speak of it openly is to ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... Hebrew accomplishments, he tells us, with his native immodesty, that he acquired marvelous proficiency in learning, and was famous for his great memory and understanding. When he was fourteen years of age, he continues, such was his fame that the high priests and principal ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces, what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In what dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that marvellous hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond the common lot of women. I knew that I was living more ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... this character, Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "An immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... not astonishing that the church itself did little to remove the barbarism prevailing among the common people, for, in point of fact, buffoonery, immodesty, and cruelty had intruded into the very ceremonial of religion. Never were there more disgusting exhibitions of the low state of the public morals than when the occurrence of pestilence, drought, or some other signal visitation of the displeasure of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... singers. One sees occasionally in shop windows, and, it may be, in human habitations, a species of abominable clock that has no kind of casing to conceal the works; it suggests the image of a prima ballerina. With the perfectly modest immodesty of the little boy cited in discussion by Laurence Sterne, she delights in exhibiting the works; more truthfully than a once famous conjuror, she insists upon showing us "how it is done"; and that really is quite the last thing a person ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... am sure, without immodesty, say was thorough and complete. On the 7th of May I presented my report. The facts which I found were such that only one conclusion was possible—the line was not in good condition; was not and had not been efficiently worked, maintained or developed. ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... world. The "barrows" and "gals-gals" have undoubtedly been tombs; and as for the "men-hirs," people went so far as to pretend that they had a form which led to the deduction that a certain cult reigned throughout lower Brittany. O chaste immodesty of science, you respect nothing, ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... many years ago, one of the conditions being the prohibition of clothes above the waist, both for men and women. The latter are noted for their beauty, and excel as singers and dancers, but they suffer under the stigma of immodesty for the ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... in the second part of this play, where Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her profession, a simple picture of honor and shame, contrasted without violence, and expressed without immodesty; which is worth all the strong lines against the harlot's profession, with which both parts of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... Further, among the fruits of the Spirit, the first place is given to charity, joy, and peace: to which, fornication, uncleanness, and immodesty, which are the first of the works of the flesh, are not opposed. Therefore the fruits of the Spirit are not contrary to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... have always been notorious for their immodesty; and notwithstanding the past labours of English missionaries, the island continues to be the Polynesian Paphos. The moral standard of the population has not been raised since they came under the shadow of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... immediately two girls very showily dressed. The elder could not be more than eleven years of age and the other seven, and both exhibited so much immodesty that more could not ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... least hesitation in the world, or the least immodesty, she half protruded the foot which still retained its slipper. As I removed this latter, through some gay impulse, whose nature I did not pause to analyze, I half mechanically thrust it into the side pocket ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... the Scarecrow, pleasantly. "My complexion had become a bit grey and faded, you know, and the paint had peeled off one end of my mouth, so I couldn't talk quite straight. Now I feel like myself again, and I may say without immodesty that my body is stuffed with the loveliest oat-straw in all Oz." He pushed against his chest. ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... "He had the immodesty to compare himself with Shakespeare." Nothing necessarily immodest in that. Comparison with may be for observing a difference; comparison ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... boyhood, ere he became so hideously bald, the ready servant of the vilest vices; in youth a stage dancer limp and nerveless enough in all conscience, but, they tell me, clumsy and inartistic in his very effeminacy. Except for his immodesty he is said not to have possessed a single quality ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... ill ingredient to preserve and exalt the dignity of human nature, without which it is apt to degenerate into everything that is sordid, vicious, and low. If there were no other use in the conversation of ladies, it is sufficient that it would lay a restraint upon those odious topics of immodesty and indecencies, into which the rudeness of our northern genius is so apt to fall. And, therefore, it is observable in those sprightly gentlemen about the town, who are so very dexterous at entertaining a vizard mask in the park or the ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... passages beneath the theatre, Hugh led the way, while with greater poignancy than ever before the young playwright sensed the vulgarity, the immodesty, and the dirt of the world behind and below the scenes. It was all familiar enough to him, for he had several friends among the actors, but the thought of one so sovereign as Helen in the midst of a region so squalid ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... great reserve in his presence. And truly, under the new circumstances, how were we to arrange for our lodgings in Reggio? Henriette could not, of course, share the bed of the captain any more, and she could not have slept with me as long as he was with us, without being guilty of great immodesty. We should all three have laughed at that compulsory reserve which we would have felt to be ridiculous, but we should, for all that, have submitted to it. Love is the little impudent god, the enemy of bashfulness, although he may ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... impurity; uncleanness &c. (filth) 653; immodesty; grossness &c. adj.; indelicacy, indecency; impudicity[obs3]; obscenity, ribaldry, Fescennine, smut, bawdry[obs3], double entente, equivoque[Fr]. concupiscence, lust, carnality, flesh, salacity; pruriency, lechery, lasciviency[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... "Consistent with modesty," "sicut decet verecundiam sexus;" nothing can beat that bare-faced hypocrisy. So when afterwards the sex shortened their petticoats, other Simon Pures start up and put them in the stocks for immodesty. Poor women! Here was a wrong, Eusebius. Long or short, they were equally immodest. Immodest, indeed! Nature has clad them with modesty and temperance—their natural habit—other garment is conventional. I admire what Oelian ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... the Japanese to the exposure of the unclothed body is an interesting fact. In the West such indifference is rightly considered immodest. In Japan, however, immodesty consists entirely in the intention of the heart and does not arise from the accident of the moment or the need of the occasion. With a fellow missionary, I went some years since to some famous hot springs at the foot of Mount Ase, the smoking crater of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... tempered by dislike. Their books often repelled him, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way things should be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read Madame Gervaisais, and he spoke of Cherie (for all its 'immodesty') as an admirable thing, and a model for ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... other ceremonies replete with abominable licentiousness, and repulsive to common decency. These were often suppressed by public enactment, but were as often re-established by the votaries of lewdness and immodesty, and such as found in these festivals a pretext and opportunity for the commission of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... sufficient strength to restrain any incipient desire, and prudence enough to avoid temptation. My condition encouraged introspection. I was almost constantly probing my own mind, and by mere strength of will, which I had long cultivated until—I suppose there is no immodesty in saying it—I could govern myself, I drew back from every obstacle which my judgment pronounced insurmountable. The Doctor had been of the greatest help to me in this development of the will, and especially in that phase ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... and her temple was the fireside of the city, in which burned always the sacred fire, watched by the vestal virgins. In this worship, and its associations, we find the best side of Roman manners,—the love of home, the respect for family life, the hatred of impurity and immodesty. She was also called "the mother," and qualified as Mater Stata, that is, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... the Play-House came thither, to wait upon Her late Majesty of Sacred Memory, who did me that honour only for my benefit; and who was of so nice a Temper, relating to Modesty, that if so much as a hint had been given her by those had seen it before, of such a thing as Immodesty, she had never came, much less had been diverted, as she was, when she did come; but this I take as striking at her through my sides; and I think, to use his own words, is above the Correction of ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... people commonly call inspiration. She continued to admire herself in the canvas, just as she did some mornings in the great mirror in the bedroom. She praised the various parts of her beauty with frank immodesty. Dazzled by the beauty of her body she did not notice the face, that seemed unimportant, lost in soft veils. When her eyes fell on it she ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... moment enters the caustic, generous Witmore, belabouring the profanity, the scurrility, the immodesty, the stupidity of the age with one hand, the while he pays his friend's rent with the other; and who, incidentally, is requested by that irascible genius to kick a worthy publisher down the stairs, on the latter's refusal to give fifty shillings "no, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... is anything my girls have done to forfeit respect and admiration," asserted Uncle John, stoutly. "To accuse them of boldness or immodesty is absurd. They have merely gone to work in a business-like manner and used their wits and common-sense in educating the voters. Really, my dears, I'm more proud of you today than I've ever been ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... me. I love you still, sire; it is a crime of high treason, I know, that a poor girl like myself should love her sovereign and should presume to tell him so. Punish me for my audacity, despise me for my shameless immodesty; but do not ever say, do not ever think, that I have jested with or deceived you. I belong to a family whose loyalty has been proved, sire; and ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... curative mission. So it is with the novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the honest simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... neck, without garland or fillet or so much as a brass pin; her green dress, though it was low in the neck, was tightly drawn over her bust; for what were glorious to be shown in a great lady, in her had been an immodesty. When she lifted her skirt out of the gutter you could see some inches of bare leg. Her hands were brown with work, though her neck was like warm marble in the sun. Eh, she knew herself through and through just a low-born wench; and "O Gesu Re!" her heart cried within her, "why ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... the two sexes, each engaged daily upon essential duties, stand on a surprising equality the one to the other. And where the men are so well aware of the women's experienced outlook, and the women so well aware of the men's, the affectation of ignorance might almost be construed as a form of immodesty, or at any rate as an imprudence. It would, indeed, be too absurd to pretend that these wives and mothers, who have to face every trial of life and death for themselves, do not know the things which obviously they cannot help knowing; too ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... was above all things a chaste-minded man, modest as a nun. To the immodesty rampant about him he was in the habit of closing his eyes and his ears, until the flagrancy or the noise of it grew to proportions to which he might remain neither ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... be confused with self-conceit; for it implies no immodesty or egotism. Even if the faithful study of one's self reveals a high order of natural gifts, it is not needful to imitate the son of the Emerald Isle who always lifted his hat and made an obsequious bow when he spoke of himself ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... relation of this incident is purposely varied from the copy. It is but justice to the Otabeitans to apprize the reader, that in the account of the missionary voyage, published in 1799, and hereafter to be noticed, this conduct as to immodesty is in no small degree explained, and they are acknowledged even to excel in some parts, of delicacy of sentiment and behaviour. The testimony of that account, it may be remarked, is deserving the more credit, because ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... you were hiding from me! This secret has not killed you all. Oh! I shall not live under its shame so long as you have. Chateau of Beaurepaire—nest of treason, ingratitude, and immodesty—I loathe you as much as once I loved you. I will go and hide my head, and ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... character is precluded; but the narrator may delineate the leading actor directly, through descriptive and expository comment. In stories where the hero is an extraordinary person, and could not without immodesty descant upon his own unusual capabilities, it is of obvious advantage to represent him from the point of view of an admiring friend. Thus when Poe invented the detective story, he wisely decided to exhibit the extraordinary analytic power of Dupin through a narrative ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... side with the physical development until it comes to man, then there is a long, unexplained gulf. Somewhere man acquired an asset which sets him immeasurably apart from the other animals—his imagination. Out of it he created for himself a conscience, and clothes, and immodesty, and a hereafter, and a soul. I wonder where he got that asset. It almost makes one agree with Alfred Russel Wallace that the world and the universe were created just for his benefit, that he is the chief love and delight of God. Wallace ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Broadway instead of down, it was not long before Jim met Allan Roscoe and Guy, whom he immediately recognized. Not being troubled with immodesty, he at once walked up to Mr. Roscoe and ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... Tahiti have always been notorious for their immodesty, and the island, notwithstanding the labours of zealous missionaries, continues to be the Polynesian Paphos. The French protectorate from which it suffers has not raised the moral standard ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... is a wanton eye, or an eye that doth secretly affect itself with such objects as are tickling of the heart with the thoughts of immodesty and uncleanness. Isaiah calls this a wanton eye: and Peter an eye full of adultery, that cannot cease from sin (2 Peter 2:14; Isa 3:16). This is that also which Christ calleth an evil eye, and John the lust of the flesh, and of the eyes, and doth defile those who are ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "an immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle history, ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... and ingenuous as she was, the girl had, at first, drawn near to her cousin, simply and naturally, obeying the law of attraction that draws the young toward the young. She had met his friendly advances with the immodesty of innocence, artless effrontery, the liberties taught by life in the country, the happy folly of a nature abounding in high spirits, and with all sorts of ignorant hardihood, unblushing ingenuousness and rustic coquetry, against which her cousin's vanity was without ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... woman or girl, as also did the breast.[1] The body became taboo, and at present, when women are commencing to dress so that the legs are shown, the arms are bare, and the back and shoulders visible, the cry of immodesty, immorality and social demoralization is raised, as if real morality rested in ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... touch the finest strings of the human heart, and bound by his sacred profession to devote those powers to the service of religion and virtue, he every where discovers a studious solicitude to excite indecent ideas. We turn away our eyes with disgust from open immodesty: but even this is less mischievous than that more measured style, which excites impure images, without shocking us by the grossnesses of the language. Never was delicate sensibility proved to be more distinct from plain practical benevolence, than in the writings of the author to whom ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... sakes, treated them with liberal generosity, but refused to reap any personal benefit from their wealth, managed their patrimonies with disinterested zeal, and spent her own money to bear the expenses of their political career. She rose superior to the foibles and vices of her time. Immodesty, the plague-spot of her age, had never infected her pure life. Gems and pearls had little charms for her. She was never ashamed of her children, as though their presence betrayed her own advancing age. ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... procession—was jealously shy over it, as a thing it would be profanation to show to any but loving eyes. To utter herself in song to any but the right persons, except indeed it was for some further and higher end justifying the sacrifice, appeared to her a kind of immodesty, a taking of her heart from its case, and holding it out at arm's length. He was astonished and yet more delighted. He was in the presence of a power! But all he knew of power was in society-relations. It was not a spirit of might he recognized, for the opening ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... collectivism is plainly noticeable in certain races of primitive folks which are yet in existence, notably the autochthons of the Aleutian Islands. Huddled together in their communal kachims, naked, without any thought of immodesty, men, women, and children share the same fire and eat from the same pot. They recognize no immorality in the fact of the father cohabiting with his daughter—one of them naively remarking to Langsdorf, who reproached him for having committed ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... way to their men, the Rodiya women are the most beautiful in all Ceylon. Their scantiness of raiment, it is pleaded in their behalf, is due in no sense to immodesty. Rodiya girls wander the country as dancers and jugglers, and their erect figures, elastic step, and regalness of carriage, would be envied by the proudest woman promenading Vanity Fair; some of them have faces so perfect in a classic way that a sculptor ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... God's truth and recommendation, as it were, to gratify and shield my own selfishness and—" here her voice sank, and her lips quivered, and grew dry, but she waited, and struggled, and finally went on—"and immodesty. I don't know why I should tell you this—except that I've told you every thing else, and this may save you from some of the wrong the rest has done you. But the most of it must remain irreparable." A long sigh quivered up from Sophie's heart, and quivered down again, like a pebble ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... first, and I had little difficulty in following the story by the pantomime alone. Female characters were represented by men, Chinese law forbidding women to act on the stage. Certain parts of the play were open to objections on account of immodesty, but when no ladies are present I presume a Chinese audience is not fastidious. The comedy was followed by something serious, of which I was unable to learn the name. I supposed it represented the superiority of the deities over the living ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... parishioner from being buried in the ground, by giving it such warrant with the world as would be derived from a name already widely known by several printed discourses, (all of which I maybe permitted without immodesty to state have been deemed worthy of preservation in the Library of Harvard College by my esteemed friend Mr. Sibley,) it seemed becoming that I should not only testify to the genuineness of the following production, but call attention to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... him that in Pamela he produced an essay in vulgarity—of sentiment and morality alike—which has never been surpassed. In these days it is hardly less difficult to understand the popularity of this masterpiece of specious immodesty than to speak or think of it with patience. That it was once thought moral is as wonderful as that it was once found readable. What is more easily apprehended is the contempt of Henry Fielding—is the justice of that ridicule ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... Open you name it! There is but one definition for it. Immodesty! In a young girl that is deadlier than impiety. It is the wild blood of her father," ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... around the water, in a measured cadence that by some unfathomable witchery of her devising conveyed a thought of maidenhood and modesty. It dawned on Tess, who watched her spell-bound, that there was not one immodest thought in all Yasmini's throng of moods, but only a scorn of all immodesty and its pretensions. And whether that was art, or sheer expression of the truth within her rather than a recognition of the truth without, Tess never quite determined; for it is easier to judge spoken word and unexpected deed ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... even whilst descending the stairs she all but stopped and begged to be excused. The thought of stealing into Redgrave's bachelor home, even with Mrs. Strangeways, startled and offended her self-respect; it seemed an immodesty. She had never been invited to the bungalow; though Mrs. Carnaby had received and accepted such an invitation for an afternoon in the summer, when Mrs. Strangeways did the honours. Redgrave was now scrupulously respectful; he would not presume so far on their revived acquaintance as to ask her ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... shades of things,' I rejoined. 'Decencies and violations—there is no need for such heavy artillery! I can perfectly imagine that without the least immodesty she should have said to Jasper on the balcony, in fact if not in words—"I'm in dreadful spirits, but if you come I shall feel better, and that will ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... furnace of foul-reeking smoke, Let not the jealous Day behold that face Which underneath thy black all-hiding cloak Immodesty lies martyr'd with disgrace! Keep still possession of thy gloomy place, That all the faults which in thy reign are made May likewise be ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... boy and girl should be carefully trained to look with disgust on everything that is indecent in word or action. Let them be taught a sense of shame in doing shameful things, and teach them that modesty is honorable, and that immodesty is indecent and dishonorable. Careful training at the proper age may save many a boy ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... to send or to mitigate destructive storms—claims which, sad to say, brought him to the stocks, but did not interfere with the regular payment of tribute to him by the villagers. He was also a medicine man and master of ceremonies in certain "scandalous orgies, where immodesty shows herself ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... character. They would have given the world to prevent my remaining there an hour. When I arrived they sent me immediately two girls very showily dressed; the eldest could not be more than eleven years of age and the other seven, and both exhibited so much immodesty, that more could not be expected from public women; they carried concealed about them a magic powder; when they came I gave them some articles to dress themselves out with, and directly sent them back to the shore.[409-4] I saw here, built on ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... incisive, or brilliant minds. Quite the contrary. The basic test of a successful colonist was endurance—the endurance of hardship, privation, the stoic indifference to conditions of discomfort, monotony, pain, uncleanliness, immodesty—conditions which would send a more imaginative or sensitive temperament into a downward-spiraling syndrome of failure. They were the kind of men and women who, on Earth in an earlier time, had been able to endure the harshness ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... There may be schisms in the new school with regard to details, but on the whole it is a united one. The members are unanimous in their fearless optimism. One and all they preach the same hopeful doctrine, that the attainment of a high standard of immodesty by woman will in time make morality ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... reproof, since your least approbation will always give me pleasure, infinitely superior to the loudest applauses of a theatre. For whatever has passed your judgment may, I think, without any imputation of immodesty, refer want of success to want of judgment in an audience. I shall do myself the honour of waiting upon your Ladyship at Twickenham to ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... whole sensibility. If extreme modesty is one of the conditions on which the reality of marriage is based, as we have tried to prove [See Conjugal Catechism, Meditation IV.], it is evident that immodesty will destroy it. But this position, which would require long deductions for the acceptance of the physiologist, women generally apply, as it were, mechanically; for society, which exaggerates everything for the benefit of the exterior man, develops this sentiment ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... symbolic, is not suggestive of refined ideas; but it is necessary to take into consideration the character both of performers and witnesses, which is not distinguished in any way by delicacy. According to their standard of morality and taste, the rites of the Endowment are devoid of immodesty. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... was young thar warn't nothin' in the way of meanness that a good woman wouldn't put up with. They'd shut thar eyes to Hagars, white or black, rather than lose the respect of men by seemin' to be aware of any immodesty." ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... drawn herself up to her full height as she said this; and she looked splendid and fearful at the same time, in her matchless beauty, diffusing energy and immodesty around her, and shaking her head defiantly, till the waves of golden hair ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... natural that the over-draping of our bodies, the supposed symbol of our modesty, but in reality an evidence of our lust, should form part of his thesis. But M. Anatole France has already pointed out brilliantly in "Penguin Island" how immodesty originated in ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... this, that the benevolent atheist stands alone upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard, trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral strength. A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs like a precipice above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs beneath his feet. He has not really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one to whom he can give himself. He is still a masterless man. ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... and straightforward paths. Are you fond of seeing contests or trials for victory? You shall see these also, and such as are not trivial, but important. You may see, in our christian example, chastity overcoming immodesty. You may see faithfulness giving a death-wound to perfidy. You may see mercy getting the better of cruelty. You may see modesty and delicacy of sentiment overcoming impurity and impudence. These are the contests in which it becomes ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... him and his disciples like leaving out the salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the {548} divisions in Leaves of Grass, particularly that entitled Children of Adam, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness. Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are divine; and that matter is as divine as spirit. The effort to get every thing into his poetry, to speak ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and girls, particularly the latter, are only educated to please, to manage their persons, and regulate their exterior behaviour; and their minds are corrupted at a very early age, by the worldly and pious cautions they receive, to guard them against immodesty. I speak of past times. The very confessions which mere children are obliged to make, and the questions asked by the holy men I assert these facts on good authority, were sufficient to impress a sexual character; and the education of society was a school of coquetry ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... unfortunate of New York City, was a society leader, and was passing through her library to her carriage one evening, her little son said: "Mama, you are not going out on the street looking that way, are you? Why, you are scarcely dressed at all." The mother realizing as never before, the immodesty of her attire, returned to her room, changed her apparel to what met the approval of her boy, and has never since worn ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... subjects; an unbridled desire to publish family secrets, also to quarrel, to strike, to take revenge, to do evil, to steal, to tell lies, to deceive, to blaspheme; carelessness about the children, intemperance, luxury, excessive prodigality, drunkenness, uncleanness, immodesty, application to magic and witchcraft, impiety, with several other causes. By legitimate causes we do not here mean judicial causes, but such as are legitimate in regard to the other married partner; separation from the house also is seldom ordained ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... that of a boy as of a girl. The expression of the head is gentle, yet saucy. It is, in fact, across thirty centuries of time, a portrait of one of those graceful little maidens of Elephantine, who, without immodesty or embarrassment, walk unclothed in sight of strangers. Three little wooden men in the Gizeh Museum are probably contemporaries of the Turin figure. They wear full dress, as, indeed, they should, for one was a king's favourite named ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... with its sublime immodesty, that aspiration seemed to Felix infinitely touching. What less could youth want in the very heart of Spring? And, watching her face put up to the night, her parted lips, and the moon-gleam fingering her white throat, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... lady's visit ill!" Upspoke the steward free; "We lack sufficient partners still, So, prithee let her be!" They seized and whirled her 'mid the maze, And Jenny felt as in the days Of her immodesty. ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... responsibility upon children. Are not children normally uncritical and imitative or passive? they say. And if we teach them to judge and criticise freely, are they not very likely to develop priggishness that will result in immodesty and disrespect for others? "Memory," says John Henry Newman, "is one of the first developed of the mental faculties; a boy's business, when he goes to school, is to learn, that is, to store up things in his memory. For some years his intellect is little more than an instrument ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... from the veiled and beruffled displays, that left one confounded as to what manner of creature dwelt therein, to the other extreme of mere gaudily ornamented nudity. I smiled as I recalled the world-old argument on the relative modesty of much or little clothing, for here immodesty was competing side by side in both ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... "Your immodesty," said he, "falls in nothing short of the extraordinary frame of mind that you appear to be developing in connection with other matters. We shall have you beating a drum and screeching the Ca ira in the streets of Paris presently, like Mademoiselle ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... woman, he married Servilia, sister to Cato. This also proved an unfortunate match, for she only wanted one of all Clodia's vices, the criminality she was accused of with her brothers. Out of reverence to Cato, he for a while connived at her impurity and immodesty, but at length dismissed her. When the senate expected great things from him, hoping to find in him a check to the usurpations of Pompey, and that with the greatness of his station and credit he would come forward as the champion of the nobility, he retired ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the thing divided is not to be reckoned among its parts. But lust is reckoned together with the aforesaid: for it is written (Gal. 5:19): "The works of the flesh are manifest, which are fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, lust [Douay: 'luxury']." Therefore it seems that fornication is unfittingly reckoned a ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... (which, by the way, are one and all announced with the same "modesty of assertion" as what goes before,) would appear to be this.—Natural science has lately woke up from her long slumber of well nigh sixty ages; and with that immodesty for which youth and inexperience have ever been proverbial, she is impatient to measure her crude theories against the sure revelation of GOD'S Word. Where the two differ, she assumes that of course the inspired Oracles are wrong, and her own wild ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... shou'd shew me the most Respect, and make me the greatest Professions of friendship. They not only offer'd me their Purses, but even their Wives and Daughters, whom they often left with me and whose Immodesty has often put me to the Blush. Nay, a Boutofallalian, a Title answering to our Duke, told me, if I continued this Shyness, and would not do him the Honour to pass now and then an Hour with his Lady, he shou'd not take me for his Friend; and leaving her with ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... almost nothing he would not say: no fact, no story, from his curious half-medical reading, he would not find some plausible pretext to tell. Man's kinship to the animal, the material, and all the proofs of it:—he would never blush at them! In truth, he led the way to the immodesty of French literature; and had his defence, a sort of defence, ready. "I know very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings, who have not more to quarrel with in the licence of their ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... been heard and settled: masters had brought up their quarrels with the workmen, merchants had wrangled over sharp practice in their business, girls had been summoned to receive a lecture from the elders of the parish on the flightiness and immodesty of their behaviour. No parish had ever such a palladium of its dignity. And you can easily conceive the derision and contempt with which the mighty "boise" was treated by the boys of the rival and neighbouring parish of St. Godard, who ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... generation; that a scene such as this was no incentive to true religion; that the Holy Mother of God could hardly be edified by the performance, seeing that the players were almost nude, and that certain of the gestures verged on indelicacy and even immodesty. Every year he complained in like fashion: Ah, what would the Madonna ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... experience will ever replace it; but there are fortunate people who seem never to grow old in this sense. It is always to be borne in mind that most of these patients are over-sensitive, refined, and educated women, for whom the clumsiness, or want of neatness, or bad manners, or immodesty of a nurse may be a sore and steadily-increasing trial. To be more or less isolated for two months in a room, with one constant attendant, however good, is hard enough for any one to endure; and certain quite small faults or defects in a nurse may make her a serious ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... however, the carriage, which at that hour usually brought the father and mother home, was only occupied that evening by the son and daughter, Hyacinthe and Camille. Returning from the Princess de Harn's matinee, they were chatting freely, with that calm immodesty by which they sought to astonish one another. Hyacinthe, influenced by his perverted ideas, was attacking women, whilst Camille openly counselled him to respond to the Princess's advances. However, she was visibly irritated and feverish that evening, and, suddenly ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... best thing he said against the use of color in marble was to the effect that the whiteness removed the object represented into a sort of spiritual region, and so gave chaste permission to those nudities which would otherwise suggest immodesty. I have myself felt the truth of this in a certain sense of shame as I looked at Gibson's ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spoken to her, And loosed in words of sudden fire the wrath And smoulder'd wrong that burnt him all within; But evermore it seem'd an easier thing At once without remorse to strike her dead, Than to cry "Halt," and to her own bright face Accuse her of the least immodesty: And thus tongue-tied, it made him wroth the more That she could speak whom his own ear had heard Call herself false: and suffering thus he made Minutes an age: but in scarce longer time Than at Caerleon the full-tided Usk, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... scourged and scarified The unwilling slaves of fashion and discomfort A quarter of a century since! She sat, A spectral, scraggy, beet-nosed, ankle-less, Obtrusive-panted, splay-foot, slattern-shape, Of grim Medusa-faced Immodesty, Caged cumbrously in a stiff, swaying, swollen, Shin-scarifying, hose-revealing frame Of wide-meshed metal, like a monster mousetrap— Hideous, indecent, awkward! Oh, I knew her— This loathly revenant, revisiting The glimpses of the moon. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... see her sweetheart again. Now when the good man shall observe his wife so lightly given, "to be so free and familiar with every gallant, her immodesty and wantonness," (as [6100]Camerarius notes) it must needs yield matter of suspicion to him, when she still pranks up herself beyond her means and fortunes, makes impertinent journeys, unnecessary visitations, stays out so long, with such and such companions, so frequently goes to plays, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the accounts of later writers, but the probable cause of the false imputations in reference to Sappho seems to be that the refined Athenians were incapable of appreciating the frank simplicity with which she poured forth her feelings, and therefore they confounded them with unblushing immodesty. While the men of Athens were distinguished for their perfection in every branch of art, none of their women emerged from the obscurity of domestic life. "That woman is the best," says Pericles, "of whom the least is said among men, whether for good or for evil." But the Aeolians ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... conditions. It is for her to say who shall be present and who absent, and woman, to whom a spotless name is everything, has the right, which even savage tribes recognize, to shield herself from the faintest imputation of immodesty by compelling her suitor to comply with the established custom and etiquette which are her safeguards. The daughter of a poor laborer would demand all this as a matter of course, and shall the beautiful Zell Allen, who has had scores of admirers, have all this reversed ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... dwelt upon it, imagining what I would say, and how escape surveillance long enough to make my plea for assistance. Today, as I write, it seems strange that I should ever have dared such a project, yet at the time not a thought of its immodesty ever assailed me. To my mind Rene de Artigny was no stranger; as a memory he had lived, and been portion of my life for three lonely years. To appeal to him now, to trust him, appeared the most natural thing in the world. ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... Kano, at first, was unable to speak. He grew slowly the hue of death. His brief words, when at last they came, were in convulsive spasms of sound. "Go to your rooms,—both. Are you mad, indeed,—this immodesty, this disrespect to me. Mata was right,—a Tengu, a barbarian. Go, go, ere I rise ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... of wealth manifested itself in every form of senseless luxury. Of refinement there was little; pleasures were coarse, indulgence was beastly. "Preachers, economists, and satirists," says Dr. Lindsay, "denounce the luxury and immodesty of the dress both of men and women, the gluttony and the drinking habits of the rich burghers and of the nobility of Germany. We learn from Hans von Schweinichen that noblemen prided themselves on having men among their retainers who could ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... you, whose judgment much better can discern the faults than I can excuse them; and whose good nature, like that of a lover, will find out those hidden beauties (if there are any such) which it would be great immodesty for me to discover. I think I don't speak improperly when I call you a lover of poetry; for it is very well known she has been a very kind mistress to you: she has not denied you the last favour, and she has been fruitful to ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... gems she wore was the deep, ardent glory of her eyes, dark as night and luminous as stars; more delicate than the filmy robes that draped her was the pure, pearl-like whiteness of her neck, which was just sufficiently displayed to be graceful without suggesting immodesty. ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... was so as regards his bare chest, arms and waist, and to convince us that he had nothing hidden in his dhotie he showed us one bare leg at a time, avoiding barely any immodesty. Concealing our blushes, we felt satisfied that his dhotie was the only worldly possession that he had with him at the moment. He picked up his chanter and continued to circle round and round our orderly, gradually closing into him. Suddenly he ran towards the outstretched hands ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... does not mean to charge the girl with immodesty (after the style "Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance!") but to show how powerfully Fate and Fortune wrought upon her. Hence also she so readily allowed the King's son ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... explanations are, and the less they are biassed by the subtleties of the philosophical critics, the more likely they are to be in unison with the intentions of the author. Take, for instance, the well-established fact that immodesty of expression, the recollection derived, it may often be, accidentally and unwillingly from oral sources during the previous life, is one of the numerous phases of insanity; and not only are the song-fragments chanted by Ophelia, but even ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... this occasion, was very elaborate, in which the females as well as the men took an active part. Two girls, of remarkably graceful form, and whose symmetric limbs were but slightly veiled, were brought, evidently without any intentional immodesty, into such affectionate contact with M. Chevalier, ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... the moral feeling in the two races respectively, but the feeling is the same. The feelings which prompt a Native woman to condemn barrenness in other women is the same as that which makes the average European lady look upon immodesty as a sign of immorality. The difference is objective, not subjective; it is in the outlook but not in the inner sense. That immorality is rife amongst Natives no one who knows them well will deny, but neither can putanism amongst the whites be denied. Before the white ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... of Modesty, then, being this recognition of place, her second is the recognition of law, and delight in it, for the sake of law itself, whether her part be to assert it, or obey. For as it belongs to all immodesty to defy or deny law, and assert privilege and license, according to its own pleasure (it being therefore rightly called "insolent," that is, "custom-breaking," violating some usual and appointed order to attain for itself greater forwardness or power), so it is the habit of all ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... to political criticism on literature was himself criminal, and has wreaked his own party feelings on the Papist Dryden, and the Tory Prior; Dryden he calls, in the most unguarded language, "a monster of immodesty and impurity of all sorts." There had been a literary quarrel between Dryden and Burnet respecting a translation of Varillas' "History of Heresies;" Burnet had ruined the credit of the papistical author while Dryden was busied on the translation; and as Burnet says, "he has wreaked ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... herself cheap after the manner of a garrison hack, the terms being nearly equivalent. There was no pretence of impossible innocence among the elder girls, but neither was there any impropriety of language or immodesty of conduct. Certain subjects were avoided, and if a girl made any allusion to them by chance, she was promptly silenced; if she recurred to them persistently, she was set down at once as a dockyard girl and an outsider. The consequence ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... around. I must have seen you on the beach at that very time— one of the kiddies that swam like fishes. Why, merciful me, the women here were all riding cross-saddle, and that was long before the rest of the social female world outgrew its immodesty and came around to sitting simultaneously on both sides of a horse. I learned to swim on the beach here at that time myself. You and I may even have tried body-surfing on the same waves, or I may have splashed a handful of water ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London |
