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Sensual   Listen
adjective
Sensual  adj.  
1.
Pertaining to, consisting in, or affecting, the sense, or bodily organs of perception; relating to, or concerning, the body, in distinction from the spirit. "Pleasing and sensual rites and ceremonies." "Far as creation's ample range extends, The scale of sensual, mental powers ascends."
2.
Hence, not spiritual or intellectual; carnal; fleshly; pertaining to, or consisting in, the gratification of the senses, or the indulgence of appetites; wordly. "These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit." "The greatest part of men are such as prefer... that good which is sensual before whatsoever is most divine."
3.
Devoted to the pleasures of sense and appetite; luxurious; voluptuous; lewd; libidinous. "No small part of virtue consists in abstaining from that wherein sensual men place their felicity."
4.
Pertaining or peculiar to the philosophical doctrine of sensualism.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sensual" Quotes from Famous Books



... she was interrupted in these painful meditations by the sound of the key turning in the lock; and a moment afterwards Mr. Tickels entered the room, and advanced towards her. On observing her improved appearance, a smile of intense satisfaction overspread his bloated face and sensual features—and his eyes rested admiringly upon her form, which, though not ripened, was beginning to assume a voluptuous fullness that betokened approaching womanhood. Taking her hand, he drew her to a sofa and seated her by his side. How tumultuously her heart beat with apprehension and fear!—and ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson

... that this kind of entertainment [opera] being so entirely sensual, it had no possibility of getting the better of our reason but by its novelty; and that novelty could never be supported but by an annual change of the best voices, which, like the finest flowers, bloom ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with Him Who, we know, loves us. Now, true love and lasting friendship require certain dispositions: those of our Lord, we know, are absolutely perfect; ours, vicious, sensual, and thankless; and you cannot therefore, bring yourselves to love Him as He loves you, because you have not the disposition to do so; and if you do not love Him, yet, seeing how much it concerns you to have His friendship, and how great is ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila

... the novels save to say that they, more than any writing of his, reveal his inherent dramatic power. By dramatic power I mean not his power of situation and evolution of dramatic technique, but his power to change his point of view with the character he is creating A sensual exquisite himself whose predominant thought is of woman, and of woman from a standpoint closely akin to an epicure's toward an ideal meal, Mr. Moore can identify himself with people in whom there ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... sat a man of about three-and-forty,—dark-eyed, sallow, with short, prominent features, a massive conformation of jaw, and thick, sensual, but resolute lips; this man was the Prince di —. His form, above the middle height, and rather inclined to corpulence, was clad in a loose dressing-robe of rich brocade. On a table before him lay an old-fashioned sword and hat, a mask, dice and dice-box, a portfolio, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... the same class of people of any other country," he says, and with these favorable comments we reach the legation and send up my letter. After waiting what we both consider an unnecessarily long time in the vestibule, a full-faced, sensual-looking, or, in other words, well-to-do Persian-looking individual, in the full costume of a Persian nobleman, comes out, bearing my letter unopened in his hand. Bestowing upon us a barely perceptible nod, he walks straight on past, jumps into a ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... I was a woman-hater. Most of the good or bad fortune I experienced originated in love. I was not by nature inconstant, and was incapable of deceit even in amours. In the very ardour of youth I always shunned mere sensual pleasures. I loved for more exalted reasons, and for such sought to be beloved again. Love and friendship were with me always united; and these I was capable of inciting, maintaining, and deserving. The most difficult of access, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck

... its proper end. But what may heighten the elegant may degrade the sublime. There is a simplicity, and I may add, severity, in the great manner, which is, I am afraid, almost incompatible with this comparatively sensual style. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds

... expressions adapted to every description of person, insomuch that strangers who have once tasted of their charms, remain in a state of fascination, and become so enchanted by their meretricious arts, that they can never divest themselves of the impression. Thus intoxicated with sensual pleasures, when they return to their homes they report that they have been in Kinsai, or the celestial city, and pant for the time when they may be enabled to revisit paradise.' Of the respectable ladies, wives of the master craftsmen ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... smiling, cheerful-voiced, neighborly throng. There were many young girls among them, and their graceful, bared heads gave to the orchestra chairs a brilliant and charmingly intimate effect. The roue, the puffed and beefy man of sensual type, was absent. The middle-aged, bespangled, gluttonous woman was absent. The faces were all refined and gracious—an audience selected by a common interest from among the millions who dwell within an hour's ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... disciples to 'love their enemies,' He did not mean them to hate their friends. True love must needs be true concern for the true welfare of the beloved. How can that be sin? It is not love which will help man to sin! that love cometh of Sathanas, and is 'earthly, sensual, devilish.' But the love which would fain keep man from sin,—this is God's love to man, and man cannot err in bestowing it ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt

... women—to sound them carefully before they give them their confidence. Beauty is shallow—only skin deep; fleeting—only for a few years' reign; dangerous—tempting to vanity and lightness of mind; deceitful—dazzling often to bewilder; weak—reigning only to ruin; gross—leading often to sensual pleasure. And yet we say it need not be so. Beauty is lovely and ought to be innocently possessed. It has charms which ought to be used for good purposes. It is a delightful gift, which ought to be received with gratitude and worn with grace and meekness. It should always minister ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... from this time, that my curiosity about the female form strengthened, but there was nothing sensual in it. I was fond of kissing, for my mother remarked it; when a female cousin, or any female kissed me, I would throw my arms round them, and keep on kissing. My aunts used to laugh, my mother corrected me, and told me it was rude. I used to say to the ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... him of his dead mother, and drawing him towards her, presses upon his lips the first kiss of love. The touch of defilement wakens him to a sense of human frailty. The wounded Amfortas's cry becomes plain to him. He starts to his feet, throbbing with compassion for a world of sin. No thought of sensual pleasure moves him. He puts Kundry from him, and her endearments move him but to pity and horror. Kundry in her discomfiture cries to Klingsor. He appears on the castle steps, brandishing the sacred spear. He hurls it at Parsifal, but it ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... his good deportment, his works in meekness of wisdom. (14)But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, do not glory, and lie against the truth. (15)This wisdom is not one that comes down from above, but earthly, sensual[3:16], devilish. (16)For where there is emulation and strife, there is confusion and every evil work. (17)But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, forbearing, easily persuaded, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. (18)And the fruit ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various

... little country colleges nine days hence.... My whole philosophy—which is very real—teaches acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to be done, what room for a poet—for any spiritualist—in this great, intelligent, sensual, and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering tongue." It may be remembered that Mr. Matthew Arnold quoted the expression about America, which sounded more harshly as pronounced in a public lecture than as read in ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... kaia-ooh! with its exquisite perfume (suggestive of the Californian Poppy), the veemuawees (a small hard fruit suggestive of the oak apple), and the perennial "Pooh!" (merely suggestive) all combined to enwrap the infant Ah! Ah! in a somnolent cocoon of sensual languidness, from which in after life she was hard put to it to escape. To say that her dazzling beauty completely hypnotised any native for miles round into instant submission—would perhaps be exaggerating; but if one is to judge from the accounts of contemporary chroniclers ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... while a cynical smile curled his sensual lips; "we are to say to as many silly flies as possible, 'come, walk into my parlor;' and if we cannot induce them to come ourselves, we are to employ some of our imps to accomplish that purpose; and, when we get them there, we are not to let them ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter

... subsistence. The king, steeped in pollution, a fanatic and a hypocrite, exhibited himself to his subjects bareheaded, barefooted, and half naked, scourging himself with a whip, reciting his prayers, and preparing the way, by the most ostentatious penances, to plunge anew into every degrading sensual indulgence. He was thoroughly despised by his subjects, and many were anxious to exchange him for the reckless and impetuous, but ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... point of great importance for clear thinking on this subject. The conflict we have spoken of is that described by St. Paul as between the flesh and the spirit. Now the flesh is not equivalent to the body. The works of the flesh are by no means necessarily sensual sins; they include strife and envy. The flesh, the animal within us, is not to be ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz

... manner. But then came the difference. His eyes, dark brown and quick-shifting, were dissolute. They protruded very slightly, and his eyelids hung over them in a way that was half hate. His mouth, too, was sensual. His whole manner was of cowed defiance, as if he were ready to knock anybody down who disapproved of him—perhaps because he ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... had been counted and declared, he might peaceably secede to any of the allied cities of Italy, or Greece, or Asia.[40] His fame and fortunes were preserved, at least to his children, by this civil death; and he might still be happy in every rational and sensual enjoyment, if a mind accustomed to the ambitious tumult of Rome could support the uniformity and silence of Rhodes or Athens. A bolder effort was required to escape from the tyranny of the Caesars; but this effort was rendered familiar by the maxims of the Stoics, the example ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... using the preterimperfect shook instead of the participle shaken"—Churchill's Gram., p. 259. "Her employment is drawing maps."—Alger's Gram., p. 65. "Going to the play, according to his notion, is leading a sensual life, and exposing ones self to the strongest temptations. This is begging the question, and therefor requires no answer."—Formey's Belles-Lettres, p. 217. "It is overvaluing ourselves to reduce every thing to the narrow measure of our capacities."—Murray's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... in May; welcomed; favorite; to one's taste, to one's mind, to one's liking; satisfactory &c. (good) 648. refreshing; comfortable; cordial; genial; glad, gladsome; sweet, delectable, nice, dainty; delicate, delicious; dulcet; luscious &c. 396; palatable &c. 394; luxurious, voluptuous; sensual &c. 377. [of people] attractive &c. 615; inviting, prepossessing, engaging; winning, winsome; taking, fascinating, captivating, killing; seducing, seductive; heart-robbing, alluring, enticing; appetizing &c. (exciting) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... right of the Intendant sat his bosom friend, the Sieur Cadet, a large, sensual man, with twinkling gray eyes, thick nose, and full red lips. His broad face, flushed with wine, glowed like the harvest moon rising above the horizon. Cadet had, it was said, been a butcher in Quebec. He was now, for the misfortune of his country, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... and lips, and during the last few days remaining to him, his Madonna obtained Florette's joyous expression, while the sensual, alluring charm, that had been peculiar to the mouth of the musician's daughter, soon hovered around ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... debauchery; and he was not unmindful of it when he had the wherewithal to compensate them. Like most of those wayward inebriates who followed the sea as a calling, he was a perfect sailor; and even his capricious sensual habits did not prevent him being sought to rejoin vessels he had ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman

... who gave the usual dance de ventre to a lively Italian air on the organ. Then, at last, she rose from her chair and approached the footlights. The organ ceased playing, only the Indian music continued: wild sensual music, imitating at ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross

... does the modern city. This period is difficult everywhere, but it seems at times as if a great city almost deliberately increased its perils. The newly awakened senses are appealed to by all that is gaudy and sensual, by the flippant street music, the highly colored theater posters, the trashy love stories, the feathered hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in the pawn-shop windows. This fundamental ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams

... depopulated, and fields deluged with blood. Such are the results of desire, when not directed to objects worthy of a moral being, and not kept under the rigid control of conscience, and the immutable laws of moral rectitude. When, in any of these forms, a sensual or selfish propensity is allowed to pass the due boundary which is fixed for it by reason and the moral principle, the mental harmony is destroyed, and even the judgment itself comes to be impaired and distorted in that highest of all ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie

... originally from one pair. The pagan believes in the existence of a Supreme Being, though, his idea of that Being's benignity and consideration relates solely to an earthly oversight of him, and a concern for his daily wants. His conception of future bliss is almost wholly sensual, and wrapped up with the notion of an unrestrained indulgence of animal appetite, and a whole-souled abandonment to feasting and dancing. His supreme view of happiness is that he shall be, assigned happy hunting-grounds, ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie

... up the valuable possession of an unspotted character, and a conscience void of offence. I offered him all the enjoyment he could reap from an unreserved intercourse of souls, abstracted from any sensual consideration. He eagerly embraced the platonic proposal, because he had sagacity enough to foresee the issue of such chimerical contracts, and knew me too well to think he could accomplish his purpose without seeming to acquiesce ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... calve in a rook's nest. As he went to and fro Nicodemus muttered: there is much to be said for this revision of his words. Jesus wishes to reach the imagination of the poor that know not swords. And he spoke for a long time of the indolence of the rich, of their gross pleasures and sensual indulgences. But we must give them swords, he added under his breath, as if he were speaking for himself alone and did not wish Joseph to hear, and then, awaking from his reverie, he turned to his host: tell me more of this remarkable ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... a barren sham, you wake foul dreams of sensual life, And Atys with his blood-stained knife were better than ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde

... leave early, as I know how particular you are about certain things." Nor is there anything in the artist's works of this next period—which we may roughly date from 1530 to 1550, that betrays a more serious devotion to the sensual side of life than can be accounted for by the demands of the high and mighty patrons that Aretine was soon to find for him. As an artist he looked upon woman as a beautiful creature, as a man he most probably never troubled about her, or was troubled by her. ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... that the emperor found a curious ally in Prussia. The death of Frederick the Great in 1786 had called to the throne of that country a distinctly inferior sort of potentate, Frederick William II (1786-1797), who combined with a nature at once sensual and pleasure-loving a remarkable religious zeal. He neglected the splendid military machine which Frederick William I and Frederick the Great had constructed with infinite patience and thoroughness. He lavished great wealth upon ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... is one continued round of licentious pleasures and sensual gratifications; or the gloomy enthusiast, who detests the cheerful amusements he can never enjoy, and envies the healthy feelings he can never know, and who would put down the one and suppress the other, until he made the minds of his fellow-beings as besotted and distorted as his ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens

... at great expense, by temple authorities, are most elaborately carved, and are used for the conveyance of the gods through the village streets upon festival occasions. There is hardly one of these cars, in South India at any rate, which is not disfigured by grossly sensual carvings such as ought to bring blushing shame to any decent and self-respecting community. They are open to the public gaze, and children of the village play under their shadow, and gaze daily upon their vile and disgusting sights. The government would ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... world in general, the good and bad, almost without exception, equally are agreed that were religion out of the case, the happiness of the present life would consist in a manner wholly in riches, honours, sensual gratifications; insomuch that one scarce hears a reflection made upon prudence, life, conduct, but upon this supposition. Yet, on the contrary, that persons in the greatest affluence of fortune ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler

... duties; having acquired in a suitable way the whole science of arms, having won wealth by pursuing the methods prescribed for the military caste, you have celebrated all the time-honoured sacrificial rites. You take no delight in sensual pleasures; you do not act, O lord of men, from motives of enjoyment, nor do you swerve from virtue from greed of riches; it is for this, you have been named the Virtuous King, O son of Pritha! Having won kingdoms and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... proof. The second is derived from the three kinds of pleasure, which answer to the three elements of the soul—reason, passion, desire; under which last is comprehended avarice as well as sensual appetite, while passion includes ambition, party-feeling, love of reputation. Reason, again, is solely directed to the attainment of truth, and careless of money and reputation. In accordance with ...
— The Republic • Plato

... go on indefinitely discussing the various features of the face and discovering that only a vague relationship to character existed. The thick, moist lower lip is the sensual lip, say the physiognomists, but there are saints with sensual lips and chaste thoughts. Squinty eyes may indicate a shifty character, but more often they indicate conjunctivitis or some defect of the optical apparatus. A square jaw indicates determination and courage, ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... beings, thrice sacred pleasure, what have they sung who have celebrated thy praise? They have called thee transitory, O thou who dost create! And they have said that thy passing beams have illumined their fugitive life. Words that are as feeble as the dying breath! Words of a sensual brute who is astonished that he should live for an hour, and who mistakes the rays of the eternal lamp for the spark which is ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... of July was celebrated at Gager's. People came from fifty miles round. Patriotism? No! but love of human fellowship. The celebrated Pierre Bottineau and the other Canadians and half-breeds were there, mellowed with drink, singing the sensual and almost lewd French rowing songs their fathers had sung on the St. Lawrence. "Whisky Jim," the retired stage driver, and Hans Brinkerhoff and the other German settlers, with two or three Yankees, completed the slender ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... were also the souls of beings who had inhabited some more favored region of the universe, also sent here for punishment; and that each was compelled to enter and inhabit a human body, for the lifetime of that body; and to suffer by partaking of all of its wretched, sensual, and degrading vicissitudes; and that whenever the soul is sufficiently punished, the body dies and ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle

... incapable, from the benignity of his nature, of envy, hatred, or revenge, a life of "ignoble ease and indolent repose" seemed to be that which nature and fortune had combined to prepare before him. To men of ordinary mold this condition would have led to a life of luxurious apathy and sensual indulgence. Such was the life into which, from the operation of the same causes, Louis XV. had sunk, with his household and court, while Lafayette was rising to manhood surrounded by the contamination of their example. Had his natural endowments been even of the higher and nobler order of such ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... that be in the world, and so cold and heartless for those that be in heaven. Satan is here a mighty artist, and can show us all earthly things in a multiplying glass; but when we look up to things above, we see them as through sackcloth of hair;[22] but take thou heed, be not ruled by thy sensual appetite that can only savour fleshly things, neither be thou ruled by carnal reason, which always darkeneth the things of heaven. But go to the Word, and as that says, so judge thou. That tells ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... were but the blind instruments of divine vengeance. They knew not what they did. The inward impulse of gigantic energy and brutal cupidity urged them forward; ambition, love of destruction, sensual appetite, frenzied them, and made them both more and less than men. They pushed eastward, westward, southward; they confronted promptly and joyfully every peril, every obstacle which lay in their course. They smote ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... said Darrell, slowly, "I have studied that man, I have heard him talk. He has no conception of life beyond the sensual, the animal; he is a brute, a beast, in thought and act. He is no more fit to marry your daughter, or even to associate with ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... scent of the wood, evolved by the hot sun, stole up to my nostrils, as if I had been an idol in its niche. Many trees mingled their fragrance into a thousand-fold odor. Possibly there was a sensual influence in the broad light of noon that lay beneath me. It may have been the cause, in part, that I suddenly found myself possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world. Our especial scheme of reform, which, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... a graceful and cunning psychologist of sensual passion. His great work—all that we have from him except some lyric poems—is the love-intoxicated romance of Tristan and Isold, which he began early in the 13th century and did not live to complete. For this his principal source was ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas

... shattered him. For also he was a child of Paradise, and in the struggle between two natures he could not support himself erect. That dreadful conflict it was which supplanted his footing. Had he been gross, fleshly, sensual, being so framed for voluptuous enjoyment, he would have sunk away silently (as millions sink) through carnal wrecks into carnal ruin. He would have been mentioned oftentimes with a sigh of regret as that youthful author who had enriched the literature of his country with two exquisite poems, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... seed of enlightened Frederick; Benedictines erasing the masterpieces of classical literature to make way for their own litanies and lurries, or selling pieces of the parchment for charms; a laity devoted by superstition to saints and by sorcery to the devil; a clergy sunk in sensual sloth or fevered with demoniac zeal—these still ruled the intellectual destinies of Europe. Therefore the first anticipations of the Renaissance were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... 'Hamlet' as an opera by Gasparini, called 'Ambleto', with an overture that had four movements ending in a jig. But as was Gasparini so was Handel in the ears of Addison and Steele. They recognized in music only the sensual pleasure that it gave, and the words set to music for the opera, whatever the composer, were then, as they have since been, almost without exception, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... resist. And the Prince appears to have done this partly in the hope that it might prove a seed of truth and grace in Falstaff, and start him in a better course of life. But the effect upon him is quite the reverse. Honour is nothing to him but as it may help him in the matter of sensual and heart-steeling self-indulgence. And the surreptitious fame thus acquired, instead of working in him for good, merely serves to procure him larger means and larger license for pampering his gross animal selfishness. His thoughts dwell not at all on the Prince's act ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... Lady Bellaston,—all are to the full as real. Lady Bellaston especially, deserves more than a word. Like Lady Booby in Joseph Andrews, she is not a pleasant character; but the picture of the fashionable demirep, cynical, sensual, and imperious, has never been drawn more vigorously, or more completely—even by Balzac. Lastly, there is the adorable Sophia herself, whose pardon should be asked for naming her in such close proximity to her frailer sister. Byron calls her (perhaps with ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... presently she crossed her arms and leaned back. There was no denying that Clem was handsome; at sixteen she had all her charms in apparent maturity, and they were of the coarsely magnificent order. Her forehead was low and of great width; her nose was well shapen, and had large sensual apertures; her cruel lips may be seen on certain fine antique busts; the neck that supported her heavy head was splendidly rounded. In laughing, she became a model for an artist, an embodiment of fierce life independent of morality. Her health was probably less sound than it seemed to be; ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing

... tall nettles, agitated by the gusts from the mountain hollows, were beating in their faces, for enthusiasm is never scoffed at by the noble simple-minded, genuine Welsh, whatever treatment it may receive from the coarse-hearted, sensual, selfish Saxon. ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... and brothers would never venture to speak in their presence. It is really frightful to think of the interest which we have ourselves heard such readers express in criminals like Paul Ferroll, and in sensual ruffians like Mr. Rochester: and there is much in the writings of "George Eliot" which, on like grounds, we feel ourselves bound most earnestly to condemn. Let all honour be paid to those who in our time have laboured to search out and to make known such evils of our social condition ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... CHANDLER. Gentlemen, it will be conceded that the progress of civilization, all that lifts humanity above a groveling, sensual, depraved state, is marked by the position, intelligence, and culture of women. Perhaps you think that American women have no rightful claim to present; but American women and mothers do claim that they should have the power to protect their children, not only at the hearthstone, ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.

... a long, slender, sallow-white face, between sleek bands of black hair; black eyes, dulled as if by a subtle film, like breath on a black looking-glass; a beautiful slender mouth, pressed tight, holding back the secret of its sensual charm. ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair

... the New Year by going to bed, and that's a good beginning for drones. Sleep is sure to play a great part in the New Year, and the glass likewise. Do you know what dwells in the glass?" asked Ole. "I will tell you—there dwell in the glass, first, health, and then pleasure, then the most complete sensual delight: and misfortune and the bitterest woe dwell in the glass also. Now suppose we count the glasses—of course I count the different degrees in the glasses for ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... rapacity, this man has made self-indulgence the constant companion of his toil; while the other has centered all his pleasures in gain, this Englishman, with the same object in view, but obedient to national usages, has fancied he has been alleviating his labours by sensual enjoyments. In what will their ends differ? From the eyes of the American the veil will be torn aside when it is too late, perhaps, and the object of his earthly pursuit will be made the instrument of his punishment, as he sees himself compelled to quit it ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... the view Kasatsky held of women, and that was how he regarded his fiancee. He was particularly in love that day, but did not experience any sensual desire for her. On the contrary he regarded her with tender adoration ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy

... not counselling you, laddie, to plunge into a course of sensual debauchery. But a wee bit gossip ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... to the genesiac the sensual place which cannot be refused to it, and let us leave to posterity the assignment ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin

... lewd girl; it only shows the prurient ideas girls must have when my birching affects them in such a sensual manner. Fie for shame, Mademoiselle Rosalie, what have you done?" exclaimed Madame, as she sank into a chair and seemed ready to faint herself, whilst the humidity of her eyes seemed the very counterpart to that sensuous ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous

... we aspire, we pray, And we think that we mount the air on wings, Beyond the recall of sensual things, While our feet still cling to ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... benefits of this earth, employs the knowledge which he there receives, in leading him to judge of the intention of things, as well as of the means by which they are brought about; and he alone is thus made to enjoy, in contemplation as well as sensual pleasure, all the good that may be observed in the constitution of this world; he, therefore, should be made the first ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... you imagine your last letter offended me? I only disagreed with you on one point. The little man's disdain of the sensual pleasure of a Turkish bath had, I must own, my approval. Before answering his epistle I got up my courage to write to Mr. Williams, through whose hands or those of Mr. Smith I knew the Indian letter had come, and beg him to give me an impartial judgment ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter

... "This seems to me the best thing," strong opposition has been aroused, shown even in antiquity by the sharp protest of Plato and Lucian. Still this Phaeacian enjoyment is innocent enough; not ascetic is the trait, yet not sensual; to-day good people usually eat and drink without the song of bard or other spiritual entertainment accompanying ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... monkish inquisitors, on viewing which, one feels inclined to suspect that the artist has outdone and exaggerated nature. The expression of the cold, glassy, grey eye, and thin, pale, compressed lips, was one of unrelenting cruelty; while the coarsely moulded chin and jaw gave a sensual character to the lower part of the face. The scar of a sabre-cut extended from the centre of the forehead nearly to the upper lip, partly dividing the nose, and giving a hideously distorted and unnatural appearance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... those sold by the "Pardoner," and of legends like those related to Chaucer's Pilgrims by the "Prioress" (one of the numerous repetitions of a cruel calumny against the Jews), and by the "Second Nun" (the supra-sensual story of Saint Cecilia). Hence, on the other hand, the greedy hunger for the marvels of astrology and alchemy, notwithstanding the growing scepticism even of members of a class represented ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward

... he'll have to be a dab at drunken drivel, And he'll have to be a daisy at sick gush, To turn on the taps of swagger and of snivel, Raise the row-de-dow heel-chorus and hot flush. He must know the taste of sensual young masher, As well as that of aitch-omitting snob; And then—well, I'll admit he is a dasher, Who, as Laureate (of the Halls) is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various

... without clocks, but when we adopted mechanical methods of progression we became unnatural and mechanical people, whizzing restlessly and recklessly from here to yonder, for no purpose save the mere sensual pleasure of movement, and we are at this date simply debauched by travel and have shortened the world to less than one-tenth of its actual size as well as destroying our abilities ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... ancient Grecian statues, formed with the rest of her face a perfect oval. Her nose, delicately curved, was slightly aquiline; the enamel of her teeth glistened when the light fell upon them; and her vermeil mouth voluptuously sensual, seemed to call for sweet kisses, and the gay smiles and delectations of dainty and delicious pleasure. It is impossible to behold or to conceive a carriage of the head freer, more noble, or more elegant than ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... whom he was already seated, but speaking that sweet language which the ladies so well understand, that has neither stops, commas, accents, letters, figures, characters, notes, nor images. The fat bishop, sensual and careful enough of the sleek, ecclesiastical garment of skin for which he was indebted to his late mother, allowed himself to be plentifully served with hippocras by the delicate hand of Madame, and it was just at his first hiccough that the sound ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac

... more saddening and revolting than is offered by men sunk in ignorance of everything but what other men have written; seemingly devoid of moral belief or guidance; but with the sense of beauty so keen, and the power of expression so cultivated, that their sensual caterwauling may be almost mistaken for the ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... is with the fact that the social constitution of the home almost invariably shapes the fundamental social conceptions for life, just as its average temperament shapes manners and bearing and its moral tone begets moral predisposition. If the average sensual man of our civilization is noisy and undignified in his bearing, disposed to insult and despise those he believes to be his social inferiors, competitive and disobliging to his equals; abject, servile, and dishonest to those he regards as his betters; if his wife is a silly, shallow, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... statement smote upon the heart of the young man, and made him silent and thoughtful. He felt that, but for his neglect of duty—but for his abandonment of himself to sensual and besotting pleasures, this suffering, this self-devotion ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur

... who exercises great power, to say nothing of the firmness, precision, and force of will required in governing men. Credulous, timorous, impressionable, and at the same time obstinate, gluttonous, and sensual, this erudite, overgrown boy had become in the imperial palace a kind of plaything for everybody, especially for his slaves, who, knowing his defects and his weaknesses, did with him ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero

... were called the Western Lands were his favourite haunt. England, where the Saxons were losing their old dash and daring, and settling down into a sluggish sensual race; Ireland, the flower of Celtic lands, in which a system of great age and undoubted civilization was then fast falling to pieces, afforded a tempting battlefield in the everlasting feuds between chief and chief; Scotland, ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous

... Engrossed with sensual joys, they have neglected guard; and, in the midst of their festivities, they are suddenly set upon from all sides; the sharp cracking of rifles, with the quick detonation of repeating pistols, soon silences their cacchinations, scattering ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... became a Chartist, a Communist, all that is commonly called wild and visionary. Ay! but being visionary is something. It shows a soul, a being not altogether sensual; a creature who looks forward for ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... earth-bound or promoted to the higher spiritual plane. Hence, one human being may be represented by a score of phantasms, and it is quite possible for a house to be haunted by many totally different phenomena of the same person. I know, for instance, of a house being subjected to the hauntings of a dog, a sensual-looking priest, the bloated shape of an indescribable something, and a ferocious-visaged sailor. It had had, prior to my investigation, only one tenant, a notorious rake and glutton; no priest or sailor ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... romance in his disposition; he feels himself to be the member of a brotherhood, and longs to be a distinguished and worthy one; he is anxious for all that is grand and right, and yearns for a little sympathy to support his determination and enliven his hopes. Some there may be so dull and sensual, so swallowed up in selfishness and conceit, so chill to every generous sentiment, and callous to every stirring impulse, that they experience none of this; their sole aim is, on the one hand to succeed, or on the other, to amuse ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar

... that sensual poets know nothing of. I think the sense of hearing as well as the sense of sight, has never been more greatly ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell

... a world of pressing men in arms, Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charms Each drowsy malady and coiling vice With dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price! No home is here for peace while evil breeds, While error governs, none; and must the seeds You sow, you that for long have reaped disdain, Lie barren at the doorway of the brain, Let stout ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... cloud and darkness, and in whose country are the gates leading to the regions of the dead." All is darkness, discontent, hunger; nothing is said of virtue, wisdom, beauty, happiness. Only bitter gloom! No wonder this heathen poet considered, with such views of a future life, sensual pleasures as the ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon

... from an early Letter on this subject, either "in happy ignorance and full oblivion, or in a state of quiet slumber, a sleep full of rosy dreams ". But on the other hand, if their earth-lives have been low and brutal, selfish and sensual, they will, like the suicides, be conscious to the fullest extent in this undesirable region; and they are liable to develop into terribly evil entities. Inflamed with all kinds of horrible appetites which they can no longer satisfy directly ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater

... become one of the earthly viceroys of God. And the chosen were few. Nor had Warner, consciously or not, been indifferent to the sacredness of his wardship. Never for a moment had it felt the blight of his wild and often gross and sordid life. He had been passionate but never sensual, romantic and primal, but never immoral. He had consoled thousands for the penance of living, and he had written much that would perish only with the English language. All this might be as nothing to ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton

... brutal temperaments have almost invariably a far better time of it in the world; yet both the exalted spirit and the brutal spirit are undeniable facts; the lofty, unselfish, pure spirit is as real and existent as the vile and sensual spirit. Are we all under a lamentable mistake in the matter? Is the heart of God more on the side of what is noble and pure and enthusiastic than it is on the side of what is base and vile; or is it only the enthusiasts who think so? If an enlightened nation is engaged in ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... Valois began to divide her existence between the most exaggerated devotional observances and the most sensual and degrading pleasures. Humbly kneeling before the altar, she would assist at several masses during the day; but at twilight she cast off every restraint, and careless of what was due, alike to her sex and to her rank, she plunged into the grossest dissipation; ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe

... them particularly—almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel—to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man—no man short of a sensual savage—will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look 'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes. However, what I was going to say is that when I was eighteen I ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... JOHN, a character in Shakespeare's "Henry IV." and the "Merry Wives of Windsor"; a boon companion of Henry, Prince of Wales; a cowardly braggart, of sensual habits ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... elastic touch, and towards the end he found himself rambling, and in a sort of abstraction, talking to them as if they were his fellows. He caught himself saying quite mystically that a spiritual plane (by which he meant his plane) always looked to those on the sensual or Dickens plane, not merely austere, but desolate. He said, quoting Bernard Shaw, that we could all go to heaven just as we can all go to a classical concert, but if we did it would bore us. Realizing that he was taking his flock far out of their depth, he ended somewhat hurriedly, and ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... Eudaimonism are, perhaps, peculiar to this essay, and may need some explanation. The Euthumist is one who assumes moral pleasure as a sufficient reason why virtue should be sought; the Eudaimonist believes we should be virtuous for the sake of affectional, intellectual, and sensual pleasure; if he means the pleasure of all mankind, he is a Public Eudaimonist; but if he means the pleasure of the individual, he is a Private Eudaimonist. Democritus is reckoned the first among Euthumists; and in England this school has been represented, among others, by Henry More and Cumberland, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... and comparing the Teufelsdrockhean Epopee only with those other modern works,—it is noticeable that Rabelais, Montaigne and Sterne have trusted for the currency of their writings, in a great degree, to the use of obscene and sensual stimulants. Rabelais, besides, was full of contemporary and personal satire; and seems to have been a champion in the great cause of his time,—as was Montaigne also,—that of the right of thought in all competent minds, unrestrained by any outward authority. Montaigne, moreover, contains more ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... man to you in a single word. Envy. In Monsieur Bixiou there is, unquestionably, the makings of a great artist; but in the economy of his existence the belly has annihilated the heart and the head, and he is now and forever under the dominion of sensual appetites; he is riveted to the condition of a caricaturist,—that is to say, to the condition of a man who from day to day discounts himself in petty products, regular galley-slave pot-boilers, which, to be sure, ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... dressed in his robes of scarlet and ermine. His face was strong and merciless, evil, crafty, and vindictive, with a sensual mouth, hooked nose of ruddy colour, and shaped like the beak of a bird of prey. The rest of the face was of a cadaverous colour. The eyes were of peculiar brilliance and with a terribly malignant expression. As he looked at them, Malcolmson grew cold, for he saw there the very counterpart ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker

... floor of grass to those Rafters of light and hanging cloths of stars, Is but the honour in God's mind for man, Wrought into glorious imagination. But women dwell in man; our temple is The honour of man's sensual ecstasy, Our safety the imagined sacredness Fashion'd about us, fashion'd of his pleasure. Beauty hath done this for us, and so made Woman a kind within the kind of man. Yea, there is more than this: a mighty need Hath man made of his woman in the world. ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie

... her emotional powers, which, as far as the past was concerned, had never suffered much diminution. But in the spring her desire for expression invariably increased. She was haunted by the ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite authors. She made them for herself on scraps of paper, and rolled them on her tongue when there seemed no occasion for such eloquence. She was upheld in these ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... of the most puerile kind. It is founded, apparently, on their conception of what a greedy boy, without pocket-money, feels when he stares at the tarts lying in a pastry-cook's window. To them it seems that the desire for great wealth means simply the desire for purely sensual self-indulgence—especially for the eating and drinking of expensive food and wine. Consequently, whenever they wish to caricature a capitalist they invariably represent him as a man with a huge, protuberant stomach. The folly ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... the base smiles wreathing so many false lips, he sees but the natural expression of kindness; when lips vow fidelity, he dreams of an affection based upon esteem, not upon a passing instinct, a sordid or sensual interest—he believes in a union of hearts. Breathing everywhere around him the high enthusiasm of his own truthful and loving soul, he knows nothing of those perfidious jealousies and bitter enmities which creep and twist in the shade, always hiding under some fair mask; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... his morbid pathology. He was of a pious nature, as was Dostoievsky; but he might have subscribed to the truth of Remy de Gourmont's epigram: "Religion est l'hopital de l'amour." Love, however, does not play a major role in his life or art, yet it permeates both, in a sultry, sensual manner. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... was then the practice in Germany, through translations of Rousseau, in the equivocal and refined acceptation which reconciled innocence with indecency, virtue with every disorder of the imagination and the heart. Ecstatic and sensual, devout and licentious, a prey to violent appetites, tormented by scruples, superstitious and debauched, believing in ghosts, with a tendency towards cabal, Frederick William had a taste for ethics and a feeling for religion. He spoke of them with respect, with awe, with emotion. In his case it was ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... Tajo was the handiwork of a sixteenth-century monk, a dweller in the rarefied atmosphere of mysticism. It only remained for a friar in the opposition camp to discover nearly three hundred years later a tendency in Luis de Leon to treat sensual themes in a sensual fashion.[272] To deal seriously with a belated judgement based on malignant ignorance would be a waste of time. It is the very irony of fate that the poem which has been the subject of severe censure should prove to be a translation ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

... and Bunbury—are indispensable. The last, a gentleman of family, fortune, and position, and equerry to the Duke of York, was, in truth, rather an amateur than an artist. Rowlandson was an able draughtsman, and something more; but his style and his tastes are essentially coarse and sensual, and his women are the overblown beauties of the Drury Lane and Covent Garden of his day. George Moutard Woodward, whose productions he sometimes honoured by etching, and whose distinguishing characteristics ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... are held as slaves by the petty kings and chiefs; and that, more especially, the women, under the prevailing system of polygamy, are doomed to out-doors' labor for the support of their indolent and sensual husbands. Hitherto the labor of the women has, in general, been comparatively light, as the preparation of food and clothing limited the extent of effort required of them; but now, the cotton mills of England must be supplied by them, and the hum of the spindles will sound ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... any," replied Giovanni, who had turned pale as the professor spoke; "nor, I think, is there any fragrance except in your worship's imagination. Odors, being a sort of element combined of the sensual and the spiritual, are apt to deceive us in this manner. The recollection of a perfume, the bare idea of it, may easily be mistaken for ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... revolutions may not be in store for our own times, I know not. The present civilization of the Christian world presents much to awaken doubt and apprehension. It stands in direct hostility to the great ideas of Christianity. It is selfish, mercenary, sensual. Such a civilization cannot, must not, endure for ever. How it is to be supplanted, I know not. I hope, however, that it is not doomed, like the old Roman civilization, to be quenched in blood. I trust that the works of ages are not to be laid low by violence, rapine, and the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... disturb the whole tenor of your being by agitations and distractions and petty cares, or if you defile it by sensual and fleshly lusts, and animal propensities gratified, and poor, miserable, worldly ambitions and longings filling up your souls, then God can no more be visible before your face than the blessed sun can mirror himself in a storm-tossed sea or in a muddy puddle. The heart ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... object could not contradict the charge, and because it supplied his old critical antagonists (if any remained) with an authority for their charge against him of Cockney ostentation and display. The most mean-spirited and trumpery twaddle in the paragraph was, that Keats was so far gone in sensual excitement as to put Cayenne pepper upon his tongue, when taking his claret! Poor fellow! he never purchased a bottle of claret, within my knowledge of him; and, from such observation as could not escape me, I am bound to assert that his domestic expenses never ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... that kept her from falling to the level of those who renounced him for the Arabian impostor. This was seen especially in the blessings that came to her through the institution of Christian marriage, while others groaned under the debasing influence of a sensual polygamy. The wretchedness this occasioned is a topic too large and too painful to dwell upon here. But the wide gulf that separated the two classes was clearly seen, when on her Sabbath the missionary could speak to the Nestorian of her Saviour ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary

... animal viewed as dull to all finer feeling; the beast is looked upon as a being of appetites. To call a man a brute is to imply that he is unfeeling and cruel; to call him a beast is to indicate that he is vilely sensual. We speak of the cruel father as a brute to his children; of the drunkard as making a beast of himself. So firmly are these figurative senses established that we now incline to avoid applying brute or beast to any creature, as ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... derive, naturally and instinctively, pleasure from the contemplation of certain material objects; for which no other reason can be given than that it is our instinct—the will of our Maker—we enjoy them "instinctively and necessarily, as we derive sensual pleasure from the scent of a rose." But we have instinctively aversion as well as desire; though he admits this, he seems to lose sight of it in the following—"And it would appear that we are intended by the Deity to be constantly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... flesh-devouring. With her is another comet, Typhaon; they beget the Chimra, that breathes resistless fire, fierce, huge, swift. And Typhaon, associated with both these, is the most dreadful monster of all, born of Hell and sensual sin, a serpent, a fierce dragon, many-headed, with dusky tongues and fire gleaming; sending forth dreadful and appalling noises, while mountains and fields rock with earthquakes; chaos has come; the earth, the sea boils; there is unceasing tumult and contention, and in the midst the monster, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... to money-making is rapidly becoming a national badge, and is in danger of eating out entirely what is of infinitely more value than wealth—a high national integrity and conscience—and of sinking the immaterial and intellectual in the material and sensual; in such circumstances as these, I say, and under such temptations and dangers, it is a sin, an unnatural crime, to squander what costs ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... membre de l'Institut, talking to the beautiful girl whom Owen had seen that morning! Owen smiled a little under his moustache, and, as there was plenty of time for meditation while waiting for Tahar to return from Ain Mahdy, he spent a great deal of time wondering if any sensual relations existed between Beclere and this girl. Beclere as a lover appeared to him anomalous and disparate—that is how Beclere would word it himself, but these pedants were very often serious sensualists. ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... only to be understood of Worldly Women, who act from Political Views, and at best from a Principle of Heathen Virtue. But the Women you speak of among the Christians, who, having vow'd a perpetual Virginity, debar themselves from sensual Pleasures, must be set on, and animated by a higher Principle than that of Honour. Those who can voluntarily make this Vow in good Humour and Prosperity, as well as Health and Vigour, and keep it with Strictness, tho' it is in their Power to break it, have, I own with you, a Task to perform, ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville

... remember the words spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, [1:18]that they said to you, That in the last time there shall be scoffers, walking in their own impious desires. [1:19]These are they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit. [1:20]But you, beloved, build yourselves up in your most holy faith, pray with the Holy Spirit. [1:21]Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life. [1:22]And reprove some, separatists, ...
— The New Testament • Various

... inexpressive, like words; but expression by itself cannot exist; so that to divide painting into color, form, and expression, is precisely as rational as to divide music into notes, words, and expression. Color may be pensive, severe, exciting, appalling, gay, glowing, or sensual; in all these modes it is expressive: form may be tender or abrupt, mean or majestic, attractive or overwhelming, discomfortable or delightsome; in all these modes, and many more, it is expressive; and if Lord Lindsay's analogy be in anywise applicable to either form or color, we should have ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... and confirm our opinions on this subject, we beg leave to ask, what is that play in which there is such a mass of virtue and simplicity, and such a number of amiable personages, opposed to such a mass of villany, subtlety, fraudful avarice, and sensual vice, as in Pizarro? Not one. The lofty moral sentiments of Rolla, his exquisite feelings and exalted notions as the patriot, the friend, the lover, are unequalled. He exists out of himself, and lives but for others: ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter

... to turn back, lest men should call him a craven and coward. Sensual visions of a greater luxury than this around him came to console him as the picture of the attic ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... ordinary measure of prosperity he could not be otherwise than a good man. He speaks himself of his own "virtue," sans phrase; and we tax him with no vanity in doing so. As a young man even at the universities, which at that time were barbarously sensual in Germany, he was (for so much we collect from his own Memoirs) eminently capable of self-restraint. He preserves a tone of gravity, of sincerity, of respect for female dignity, which we never find associated with the levity and recklessness of vice. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... not so much profaned, were it not misused in easy good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that worn old term might be applied, above all men, to "the Shirra." But perhaps we scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so rare, or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... could look like that must be sweet and pure and unspoiled. It had been that unfortunate dress last night that had reminded him unpleasantly of the scarlet woman and the awful night of the fire. If he ever got well enough acquainted he would ask her never to wear red again; it made her appear sensual; and even she, delicate and sweet as she was, could not afford to cast a thought like that into the minds of her beholders. It was then he ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... Sybaris the individual had his rights, which the public preserved for him, though he were wholly in a minority. There is an evident determination that a man shall live while he lives, and that, too, in no sensual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... it be—is, that he cannot and will not pretend to respect that which he knows to be unworthy of respect. He sees around him and above him, as well as below him, an average of men and things dishonest, sensual, ungodly, shallow, ridiculous by reason of their own lusts and passions, and he will not apply to the shams of dignity and worth, the words which were meant for their realities. After all, he does but say what every ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... doubtless retained many of his most primitive savage traits. Olmsted, an unprejudiced observer, describes him as on the average a very poor and a very bad creature, "clumsy, awkward, gross and elephantine in movement ... sly, sensual and shameless in expression and demeanor." "He seems to be but an imperfect man, incapable of taking care of himself in a civilized manner, and his presence in large numbers must be considered a dangerous circumstance to a civilized people."[340] ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... freeman and slave, crushed and welded together into one homogeneous mass, made just and merciful towards each other by the most wholesome of all teachings, a community of suffering; and if they had been, as I fear they were, a lazy and a sensual ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley

... all were in the grip of imperial forces whose ruthless purposes or lack of them made all men ridiculous, pathetic or magnificent, as you choose. He pitied ignorance and necessity, and despised vanity and cruelty for cruelty's sake, and the miserly hoarding of anything. He was liberal, material, sensual and yet spiritual; and although he never had more than a little money, out of the richness and fullness of his own temperament he seemed able to generate a kind of atmosphere and texture in his daily life which was rich and warm, splendid really in thought ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser

... miserable little lives. Consider what it will mean to have perhaps half the population of the world, in every generation, restrained from or tempted to evade reproduction! This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and sensual, is possible. On the principles that will probably animate the predominant classes of the new time, it will be permissible, and I have little or no doubt that in the future it will be planned ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... an all-rounder is an all-rounder, and that if one is careful to get an all-rounder one has done all that is necessary. But so thought not Macassar Jones. Some men wear collars of two plies of linen, some men of three; but Macassar Jones wore collars of four plies. Some men—some sensual, self- indulgent men—appear to think that the collar should be made for the neck; but Macassar Jones knew better. He, who never spared him self when the cause was good, he knew that the neck had been made for the collar—it was at any rate evident ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... the infinite, existing in the soul itself, cannot be satisfied by any earthly longing, sensual gratification, or external possession. Made 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever,' man is ruined and eternally miserable if he refuse to fulfil the destiny for which he was created. His misery springs from the root of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... self-reliant, the strong and brave of heart, faint and falter by the way, and she had cruelly denied them that precious nutriment; she had given them life, but had robbed them of all that makes life endurable. Life's duties unfulfilled, life's high and holy aims trampled under the foot of sensual indulgence, living to blight instead of to bless! O woman, wife, and mother, thy life when lived aright a crucifixion of the flesh, a sublime self-sacrifice—not for thee the pleasures of sense and time, not ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... he was not a good man, but he might also note that he was not content with being a bad one. There was little of the rigid pride and sinister hardness or the conceit often seen on the faces of men of the world who have spent years in spoiling their manhood; and the sensual phase of coarse ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe

... him exercising his supernatural gifts in the most puerile and useless fashion. It is impossible, therefore, to regard his ambition as a lust for knowledge in the usual meaning of that term, differentiating it from sensual experience. If Faustus is to be labelled according to his dominant trait, then let us describe him as the embodiment of sense-gratification. He is a sensualist from the moment that he takes up ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... monster look like a cruel idol surrounded by a sea of blood. The brilliant red of the heavens flamed in its stony eyes, and gave them a sentient look as of contemplated murder,—and the same radiance fitfully playing on the half-scornful, half-sensual lips caused them to smile with a seeming voluptuous mockery. Dr. Dean stood transfixed for a while at the strange splendor of the spectacle, and turning to his two silent ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... put the temptation from him. For it was a sensual temptation after all, surprising him in anguish and exhaustion and bribing with promise of repose. He craved after it, but set his teeth. "Yes, you are right, so far. The future has gone from me, and I have no hopes. But it seems I have to live, and ...
— Fort Amity • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... been a circumcision of such natures in the days of their youth; and they had been severed from the leaden weights, as I may call them, with which they are born into the world, which lead on to sensual pleasures, such as those of eating and drinking, and drag them down and turn the vision of their souls about the things that are below—if, I say, these natures had been released from these tendencies and turned ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various

... then he falls in love with a fair young girl as pure as falling snow of any stain in deed or in thought; he is engaged to marry her—or, I don't know, I haven't made up my mind on that point, perhaps it would be better if he did marry her. Well, the woman whom he has loved with a merely sensual passion comes back, and to revenge herself she tries to tempt the good girl to go wrong; she talks to her of men and pleasures; this is a good idea, I think, for I feel sure it is women far more than men who lead women astray. Then the first woman whom he has loved for her beauty merely, comes ...
— Spring Days • George Moore

... this infamous pander have been attributed those excesses that disgraced the manhood of the regent, and gave a licentious character to his whole course of government. His love of pleasure, quickened and indulged by those who should have restrained it, led him into all kinds of sensual indulgence. He had been taught to think lightly of the most serious duties and sacred ties; to turn virtue into a jest, and consider religion mere hypocrisy. He was a gay misanthrope, that had a sovereign but sportive contempt for mankind; believed that his most devoted ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... of Manly Beauty.—The Greek worship of the beautiful masculine form is something which the later world will never understand. In this worship there is too often a coarseness, a sensual dross, over which a veil is wisely cast. but the great fact of this worship remains: to the vast majority of Greeks "beauty" does not imply a delicate maid clad in snowy drapery; it implies a perfectly shaped, bronzed, and developed youth, ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... a hoyden. She despised crinolines, girls, Macassar oil, sewing, and deportment. She adored walking, fishing, boys, and climbing trees. She did outrageous things with a genuine innocence that made the most sensual of the boys careful not to take advantage of her in any bad way. That she climbed out of her bedroom window at night to go and meet some three of the boys from the Grammar School and with them test the wishing pool on the moor on Midsummer Eve was proof of all ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... that they who stand in most need of religious instruction are unconscious of the want, and therefore cannot reasonably be expected to make any sacrifices in order to supply it. Will the licentious, the sensual, and the depraved, take from the means of their gratifications and pursuits, to support a discipline that cannot advance without uprooting the trees that bear the fruit which they devour so greedily? Will they ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... are full of the same warm color that one always associates with Mr. Lawrence's best work, and the nervous complaining beauty of his style makes him the English compeer of Gabriele d'Annunzio. The warm lush fragrance of many European countrysides pervades these stories and a certain poignant sensual disillusionment is insistently stressed by the characters who flit through the shadowy foreground. It is the definitely realized and concrete sense of landscape that Mr. Lawrence has achieved which is his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... particularly is to be kept with the more solemn humiliation, because it may call to remembrance our sins and the sins of our forefathers, who have turned this Feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights; being contrary to the life which Christ himself led here upon earth, and to the spiritual life of Christ in our souls; for the sanctifying and saving whereof Christ was pleased both to take a human life, and to ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton

... Diurnal-maker pours out severe anathemas—and one with a note, that "dancing and drabbing are inseparable companions, and follow one another close at the heels." He assures his readers, that the malignants, or royalists, only fight like sensual beasts, to maintain their dancing and drabbing!—Such was the revolutionary tone here, and such the arts of faction everywhere. The matter was rather peculiar to our country, but the principle was the same as practised in France. Men of opposite characters, when acting for the ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... saw looking at him, from a distance of only a few feet, a white, luminous face, presumably that of a woman. But what a woman! What a devil!—what a match for the most lurid of any of Satan's male retainers. Yet she was not without beauty—beauty of the richest sensual order; beauty that, had it been flesh and blood, would have sent men mad. Her hair, jet black, wavy, and parted in the centre, was looped over her shell-like ears, which were set unusually low and far back on her head; her ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell

... fellow; for I don't believe that thick-lipped, sensual—looking fellow would take much notice of what you say ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... which men of every age and sect have more generally agreed to mention with contempt, than the gratifications of the palate; an entertainment so far removed from intellectual happiness, that scarcely the most shameless of the sensual herd have dared to defend it: yet even to this, the lowest of our delights, to this, though neither quick nor lasting, is health with all its activity and sprightliness daily sacrificed; and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... been the pleasures to which they were immoderately addicted. Like the slaves and serfs in other lands, whose position excluded them from more serious and ennobling occupations, they found a substitute in frivolous or sensual indulgence. Lazy, luxurious, and licentious, are the epithets bestowed on them by one of those who saw them at the Conquest, but whose pen was not too friendly to the Indian. *39 Yet the spirit of ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott

... would receive Him into your heart at Holy Communion, will you not make room for Him, by rooting out that affection He has pointed out to you as dangerous, that interest, that desire, that worldly, sensual attachment? ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.

... character of the emissaries of Rome when they are in the ascendency and are opposed; when in the minority, they are humble and meek, plausible and silver-tongued; and when there are none to oppose them, haughty, indolent, sensual, and self-indulgent. Such they have been in all ages and in every country, with the exception of the devoted Jesuit slaves, who have gone forth to carry their spurious ...
— Villegagnon - A Tale of the Huguenot Persecution • W.H.G. Kingston

... instance. If a man had been commanded to marry by God, being so formed as that no sensual delight accompanied, and refused to do so, unless this appetite and ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... breathe, and then lie down to sleep off the effects of their gluttony. Indeed their excessive voraciousness on such occasions produces, especially after long fasting, all the symptoms of drunkenness. They forget, under its sensual influence, all moderation, and abandon themselves to the most ...
— Journal of a Voyage from Okkak, on the Coast of Labrador, to Ungava Bay, Westward of Cape Chudleigh • Benjamin Kohlmeister and George Kmoch



Words linked to "Sensual" :   hot, sensuality, fleshly, sensualness, animal, physical, carnal



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