"Sensuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... withered leaves, and he took account of the faint blue sheen beneath the beech trunks not far away. There was a vein of artistic feeling in him, and the elusive beauty of these things curiously appealed to him. He had seen the riotous, sensuous blaze of flowers kissed by Pacific breezes, and the burnished gold of wheat that rolled in mile-long waves; but it seemed to him that the wild things of the English North were, after all, more wonderful. They harmonized with the country's deep ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... they dwelt chiefly in forests, and there they revolved the everlasting problems of existence, creation, the soul, and God. The lively Greeks, for whom, with all their high intellectual endowments, a happy sensuous existence was nearly all in all, were amazed at the numbers in northern India who appeared weary of the world and indifferent to life itself. By and for these recluses were gradually composed the ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... atmosphere of thought. Their faces are thoughtful, minds intellectual. They live in their ideas, their conceptions of truth, their tastes, and esthetic nature. Some people, again, live in their animal nature, in the lusts of the flesh and eye, the coarse, low atmosphere of a sensuous life, or something worse. Some, again, live in a world of duty. The predominating feature of their life is conscience, and it carries with it a certain shadowy fear that takes away the simple freedom and gladness of life, but there is a rectitude, and uprightness, a strictness of purpose, ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... Paganism emblemed chiefly the Operations of Nature; the destinies, efforts, combinations, vicissitudes of things and men in this world; Christianism emblemed the Law of Human Duty, the Moral Law of Man. One was for the sensuous nature: a rude helpless utterance of the first Thought of men,—the chief recognized virtue, Courage, Superiority to Fear. The other was not for the sensuous nature, but for the moral. What a progress is here, if in ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... their sweetness only in a Christian atmosphere. What is characteristic in them is the strange suggestion of a deliberate choice between Christ and a rival lover. That religion, monastic religion at any rate, has its sensuous side, a dangerously sensuous side, has been often seen: it is the experience of Rousseau as well as of the Christian mystics. The Christianity of the Middle Age made way among a people whose loss ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... able to attain to a scientific establishing of his Christianity, or to any sense of the specific aim of its development. He felt himself to be separated from Kant by an impassable gulf. All the sharp antinomies among which Kant moved, contrasts of that which is sensuous with that which is reasonable, of experience with pure conception, of substance and form in thought, of nature and freedom, of inclination and duty, seemed to Herder grossly exaggerated, if not absolutely false. Sometimes Herder speaks as if the end of life were simply the happiness ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... there comes a lull in the discussion, until Plotinus. The Poetics were generally little studied, and the admirable statement of the problem generally neglected by later writers. Antique psychology knew the fancy or imagination, as preserving or reproducing sensuous impressions, or as an intermediary between the concepts and feeling: its autonomous productive activity was not yet understood. In the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus is said to have been the first to make clear the difference between mimetic and ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... that emerge from nothing, and commencing in a point, it is during them that consciousness, memory—all the faculties grow, and the experience of sense is so novel, crowded, and astounding. It is this beginning at a point, and expanding to the immense disk of our present range of sensuous experience, that gives to them so prodigious an illusory perspective, and makes us in childhood, measuring futurity by them, form so wild and exaggerated an estimate of the duration of human life. But, I beg ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the moment he only stared. Jacqueline peeped through the lashes curtaining her eyes. She wanted to see his face, and she saw one of bold lines. The chin was a hard right angle. The mouth was a cruel line between heavily sensuous lips. The nose was a splendid line, and a very assertive and insolent nose altogether. The forehead was rugged, with a free curving sweep. Here there would have been a certain nobility, only its slope was just a hint too low. The skin ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... although younger than myself, can recollect how miserable, how unquiet and uncertain our lives have always been ever since our childhood." Poor, vain, passionate and proud, torn between the selfish impulses of an exactingly sensuous and imaginative nature, and the rigid sense of duty of a heroic and generous mind, Ugo Foscolo was one of the earliest and most genuine victims of that sickness of disappointed hope and betrayed enthusiasm, of that Weltschmerz of which personal misfortunes seemed as but the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... curve of sweet, proud lips. I knew that I should be thinking of my papers, my future; but a quick perversity made me dwell for a long trotting time in a dream of feminine excellence, in a dream of feminine beauty which was both ascetic and deeply sensuous. I know hardly how to say that two eyes, a vision of lips, a conception of a figure, should properly move me as I bounced along the road with Jem Bottles. But it is certain that it came upon me. The eyes of the daughter of the great Earl of Westport ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... They change the object of their love frequently, since their principal aim consists in ensuring that the voluptuous feeling of their adoration shall be constantly titillated. To preserve in themselves this sensuous condition, they talk unceasingly, and in the most elegant terms, on the subject of the love which they feel, not only for its immediate object, but also for objects upon which it does not touch at all. This ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... consciously used to subserve that higher life. His ultimate standard of value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political relations, is referred, is—not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous, sentimental, or aesthetic, but—the measure in which may thereby be trained up that higher life of humanity. Art is to him God's minister, not when she is simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... size, with lines of harmony that give them a unique seal of beauty, with an undulating movement of their bodies, a coordination of every muscle and nerve, a richness of aspect in color and form, that is more sensuous, more attractive, than any feminine graces I have ever gazed on. They have the forwardness of boys, the boldness of huntresses, yet the softness and magnetism of the most virginal of their white sisters. One thinks of them as of old in soft draperies of beautiful cream-colored ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... themselves into the peaceful country, where their rajah, like many another, had been free to carry on a happy lawless existence, cutting throats, selling slaves, committing acts of piracy, and indulging in every vile and sensuous custom, was one not to be lost. Rajah Gantang wanted no peace, or order, or prosperity in the land where he could seize on the wretched people, and make them pay him in gold, tin, rice, poultry, fruit, or any precious commodity, for the right to pass down the river, which he, and a few more ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... We were standing apart, and I had dropped my voice. "But come and talk to me awhile. I cannot stand those babies," and I indicated with a sweep of my fan the graceful, richly-dressed caballeros whose soft drooping eyes and sensuous mouths were more promising of compliments than conversation. "Neither Alvarado nor Castro is here. Thou too wouldst have gone in a moment had ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... cannot be a day on the islands without hearing wonderful stories about awa; and its use is defended by some who are strongly opposed to the use as well as abuse of intoxicants. People who like "The Earl and the Doctor" delight themselves in the strongly sensuous element which pervades Polynesian life, delight themselves too, in contemplating the preparation and results of the awa beverage; but both are to me extremely disgusting, and I cannot believe that a drink, which stupifies ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... something utterly beyond our power. Nay, even when we try to represent to ourselves the psychical activity of any single soul by itself as continuing without the aid of the physical machinery of sensation, we get into unmanageable difficulties. A great part of the contents of our minds consists of sensuous (chiefly visual) images, and though we may imagine reflection to go on without further images supplied by vision or hearing, touch or taste or smell, yet we cannot well see how fresh experiences could be gained in such a ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... eyes and ears intent to see and hear a Western Hakim's medical examination. As I looked upon their well-developed forms, their brown skins, rich with the blood and sun of the East, and their unintelligent, sensuous faces, I thought that if it were possible to marry the Oriental care of woman's organization to the Western liberty and culture of her brain, there would be a new birth and loftier type of womanly ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... luminous crucifix upon the High Altar. The warmth and darkness brought out the scent of the many women gathered together; the atmosphere was charged with human emotion so that Mark sitting in his corner could fancy that he was lost in the sensuous glooms behind some Mater Addolorata of the seventeenth century. He longed to be back in Chatsea. He was dismayed at the prospect of one day perhaps having to cope with this quality of devotion. He shuddered at the thought, and for the first time ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... Mrs. Stuart, his shaggy gray head and keen lined face attracting considerable attention in their neighbourhood. He was in his most expansive mood; the combativeness of an hour before had disappeared, and the ardent susceptible temperament of the man was absorbed in admiration, in the mere sensuous artist's delight in a stirring and beautiful series of impressions. When the white dress disappeared through the doorway of the ballroom, he followed it with a sigh of regret, and during the scene which followed between the Prince and his intended bride, he hardly ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... restive. He had been describing to Langham his acquaintance with the Dissenting minister of the place—a strong coarse-grained fellow of sensuous excitable temperament, famous for his noisy 'conversion meetings,' and for a gymnastic dexterity in the quoting and combining of texts, unrivalled in Robert's experience. Some remark on the Dissenter's logic, made, perhaps, a little too much in the tone of the Churchman ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... experience she has witnessed in the case of a friend, another maiden, and Prometheus tells her that what she had seen was death. What death meant Prometheus explains in the following passage, charged with the sensuous mysticism which was one of the elements of Goethe's own experiences when he ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... however, that whatever else music may be, it is essentially and primarily a sensuous experience. The one who enjoys music must feel its sensuous charm, and the artist who furnishes that which is enjoyed addresses himself primarily to our auditory mechanism. Executing music is hearing ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... must have experienced that the constraint he imposed upon himself had generated, as was said of Racine, "a plenitude of soul." He might infer that were the compression carried still further, the reaction of the spirit might be still increased. Poetry he had said long before should be "simple, sensuous, impassioned" (Tractate of Education). Nothing enhances passion like simplicity. So in Paradise Regained Milton has carried simplicity of dress to the verge of nakedness. It is probably the most unadorned poem extant in any language. He has ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... odes to an unknown god, sensuous lyrics of love, apostrophes and addresses to every human passion. But no poet, to my knowledge, has risen to the heights of the maternal instinct. Some contemporary clap-trap about sentimentalism will perhaps decry and ridicule the demand for an apotheosis of it. There are some who deny its ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... arteries. My reason told me that it was but a little respite, and yet, carelessly as we talk of its value, every hour of existence now seemed an inestimable thing. Never have I known such a thrill of sensuous joy as came with that freshet of life. The weight fell away from my lungs, the band loosened from my brow, a sweet feeling of peace and gentle, languid comfort stole over me. I lay watching Summerlee revive under the same remedy, and finally Lord John took his turn. He sprang to his ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... holiness, and the other is man as he is, without the life-giving influence of the Spirit of God. In Paul's thought the idea of the flesh always included the idea of sin, and the desires of the flesh were to him not merely rebellious, sensuous passion, but the sinful desires of godless human nature, however refined, and as some would say, 'spiritual' these might be. We do not need to inquire more minutely as to the meaning of the Apostle's terms, but may safely take them as, on the one hand, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the theatre Coralie was already on the stage. She was singing a song; she had a very fine voice; her delivery and air, empty of real feeling, were full nevertheless of a sensuous attraction. My brother-in-law laid his elbows on the front of the box and stared down at her; I sat a little back, and, after watching the scene for a few moments, began to look at the house. Immediately opposite me I saw Varvilliers with a party of ladies and men; he bowed and smiled as ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... confirmation. No words could have told so clearly the sensuous delight that stilled her tongue. There was joy in her soft breathing, in the gently spreading nostrils, in the half- closed eyes. She was experiencing the unspeakable thrill that comes but once in ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... furnished as a sitting room, but some of its appointments were obviously importations. Its keynote was orientalism, not of that sensuous yet grossly masculine character which surrounds the wealthy Eastern esthete but quite markedly feminine. There were an extraordinary number of cushions, and many bowls and vases containing hyacinths. What other strange appointments ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... manly or continuous exertion, and sinks its votary into a state of careless inactivity and selfish enjoyment of vice." Professor L. H. Gause writes: "The intellect becomes duller and duller, until at last it is painful to make any intellectual effort, and we sink into a sensuous or sensual animal. Any one who would retain a clear mind, sound lungs, undisturbed heart, or healthy stomach, must not smoke or chew the poisonous plant." It is commonly known that in a number of American and ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... room, looking upon the garden, furnished with a singular mingling of her own inherited formal tastes and the more sensuous coloring and abandon of her new life. There were a great many rugs and hangings scattered in disorder around the room, and apparently purposeless, except for color; there was a bamboo lounge as large as a divan, with two or three cushions disposed on it, ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... speaking, they were its pictures. And it may be that such an art never has a future of change before it, save the change of death, which has now certainly come over that Eastern art; while the more impatient, more aspiring, less sensuous art which belongs to Western civilisation may bear many a change and not die utterly; nay, may feed on its intellect alone for a season, and enduring the martyrdom of a grim time of ugliness, may live ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... blowing at the embers with her mouth. Lancelot looked on in dull apathy, but as the fire rekindled and the little flames leapt up and made Mary Ann's flushed face the one spot of colour and warmth in the cold dark room, Lancelot's torpidity vanished suddenly. The sensuous fascination seized him afresh, and ere he was aware of it he was lifting the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... of the trinity, which frequently occurs in the form of a triangle (three points united by three straight lines), is shown how the divided and sensuous nature is led by the higher power of the number 3 to a harmony of powers and to a new unity. The symbol of reason attaining victory over matter becomes visible. A representation of trinity is possible by means of the conventional cross. We can see ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... charm of the sensuous world dwells in us, is an emanation from ourselves; it is we who diffuse it, each person for himself according to his power, and we have it back again in the measure of our out-giving. But I did not comprehend early enough the deep meaning of this ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... surprise are the essence of the successful "spectacle." Just as the scarlet dervish whirl was at its height the character of the music changed, slackened, softened, died from the angrily sensuous into an ethereal delicacy. The stage filled with clouds that faded in golden light, and a huge and glittering stairway rose towards the painted sky. On either side of it hung in the blue ether guardian angels with outstretched wings, and between their attentive ranks stood ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... consist in the mastery over the sensuous and sensual impulses; but Love requires INNOCENCE. Let the lover ask his heart whether he could endure that his mistress should have 'struggled' with a sensual impulse for another, though she overcame it from a sense of duty to him? Women are LESS offended with men, from the vicious habits ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... out of the rules of Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus, Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus. To which poetry would be made subsequent, or, indeed, rather precedent, as being less subtile and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate. I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not but have hit on before among the rudiments of grammar; but that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castelvetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... summed up for us, not less absolutely, in 'Walter Besant.' And yet, if the surnames of these two opposite Walters had been changed at birth, what difference would have been made? 'Walter Besant' would have signified a prose style sensuous in its severity, an exquisitely patient scholarship, an exquisitely sympathetic way of criticism. 'Walter Pater' would have signified no style, but an unslakable thirst for information, and a bustling human sympathy, and power of carrying ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... wonder, with the French cynic, of what use women over forty are in the world. She objects to Dr. Fordyce's eulogium of female purity and his Rousseau-inspired appeals to women to make themselves all that is desirable in men's eyes, expressed in "lover-like phrases of pumped-up passion." The sensuous piety of his Sermons, suggestive of the erotic religious poems of the East, were particularly offensive to her. She next regrets that Dr. Gregory, at such a solemn moment as that of giving last words of advice to his daughters, should have added the weight of his authority to the doctrine of dissimulation; ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... not been possessed in any equal degree by any territory of like extent in the Old World or the New. The abundance of the land and of the waters adequately supplied every material want, ministered liberally to every sensuous enjoyment. Gold and silver, indeed, were not found in the profusion which has proved so baneful to the industry of lands richer in veins of the precious metals; but mines and river beds yielded them in the spare measure most favorable ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... in disreputable slippers, settled herself to an hour of ease. She had the negro's love of the white child, and a sensuous appreciation of the pleasant twilight, the bedtime song, ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... at it, but the boughs held back the beams so that I could feel the sun's presence pleasantly. They shaded the sun, yet let me know that it was there. There came to me a delicate, but at the same time a deep, strong, and sensuous enjoyment of the beautiful green earth, the beautiful sky and sun; I felt them, they gave me inexpressible delight, as if they embraced and poured out their love upon me. It was I who loved them, for my heart was broader than the earth; it is broader now ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... dreamer,—the student of mystic things, was subtly conscious of that almost personal—almost feminine appeal of Te-gat-ha. Strong in its beauty as in its battles—it yet retained a sensuous atmosphere that was as the mingling of rose bloom and wild plum blossom, of crushed mint grown in the shadows of the moist places, and clinging feathery clematis, binding by its tendrils ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... frequent play upon words, the unworthy tricks of speech, the painful sacrifice to rhyme which occasionally mar his verse, I believe Petrarch was sincere. If he was only a pretence and a sham, then all the amatory poetry that has been written since his time, intellectual or analytic, passionate or sensuous, is a pretence and a sham. Petrarch's utterance must needs have been founded on truth, else never could it have stood the test of five centuries, and never would it have assimilated itself, as it has done, with the poetic speech of an entire race. I know of hardly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Now in Dr. Chalmers, the great ingredient was the {ho thymos} as indicating vis animae et vitae,—and in close fellowship with it, and ready for its service, was a large, capacious {ho nous}, and an energetic, sensuous, rapid {to pneuma}. Hence his energy, his contagious enthusiasm—this it was which gave the peculiar character to his religion, to his politics, to his personnel; everything he did was done heartily—if he desired heavenly blessings ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... a tale of a mystery connected with an old clock. The lover, an American man of means, is startled out of his sensuous, inactive life in Venice by his lady-love's scorn for his indolence. She begs of him to perform any task that will prove his persistence and worth. With the charm of Venice as a background, one follows the adventures of the lover endeavoring ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... from the steeples, the shouting of the populace, the blare of trumpets and roll of drums, the lines of churchmen and officials in their grandest dresses, of citizens of every age,—the indescribable human murmur—altogether it was a scene whose sensuous splendor obliterated for a time the capacity of impressionable ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... characteristic of mystical literature that the great contemplatives, in their effort to convey to us the nature of their communion with the supersensuous, are inevitably driven to employ some form of sensuous imagery: coarse and inaccurate as they know such imagery to be, even at the best. Our normal human consciousness is so completely committed to dependence on the senses, that the fruits of intuition itself are ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... force and delicacy of conception, a fine sense of harmony, and a power and decision of expression which neither overloads nor falls short of the thought. In tone it is half way between Shelley and Keats, neither so ideal as the one nor so sensuous as the other. Keat's Endymion is so thick with fancies, and verbal daintinesses, and sweet sensations, that with all its wonderful affluence of beautiful things it lacks unity of impression. The mind of the poet is so possessed by his subject ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... quivered under the intensity of the feelings aroused: "Ah! Oh! Oh! How delicious that was, it thrills me all over, Percy, do that again with your tongue all the way up." Once more the electricity of my tongue sent vibrations of a new and sensuous pleasure through every nerve and vein of her body. She seemed beside herself, exclaiming: "Let me bite you, and kiss you, my darling. Ah, you have all your clothes still on! I want to feel your soft flesh as well as your touches, it would double ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... is important to consider well this gradation of punishment (which, starting with sensuous physical pain, passes through the external teleology of temporary isolation up to the idealism of the sense of honor), both in relation to the different ages at which they are appropriate and to the training ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... with the world which the natural sciences have created for us! However concrete the materials with which they started, the goal of these sciences is theories, eventually mathematical formulations of laws of change. Treating the individual, sensuous, changing objects as mere unsubstantial appearances (phenomena), scientific investigation becomes a search for the universal laws which rule the timeless changes of events. Out of this colorful world of the senses, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... air, a fairy bridge provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Shelley's magnetism. $What remains of permanent value in Coleridge's poetry—such work as "Christabel", the "Ancient Mariner", or "Kubla Khan"—is a product of pure artistic fancy, tempered by the author's mysticism. Keats, true and sacred poet as he was, loved Nature with a somewhat sensuous devotion. She was for him a mistress rather than a Diotima; nor did he share the prophetic fire which burns in Shelley's verse, quite apart from the direct enunciation of his favourite tenets. In none of Shelley's greatest ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... to the full enjoyment of this dream. Already he seemed to have overcome every obstacle, and to be reveling in the subdued but sensuous joys of the Adriatic queen. Sometimes he had fled in spirit to the sweet seclusion of the cloistral life at San Lazaro. Byron did it before him;—the plump, the soft-voiced, mild-visaged little Arminians will tell you all about that, and take immense pleasure ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... leader's leaders in the exploration of some of the charms of Venus. Edmund was no less delighted than we had been with the place, and yielding to its somnolent influences we were soon stretched side by side on the spreading roots of a giant tree, and sleeping the sleep of sensuous languor. ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... artist, even at his lowest level, is more than an imitator of imitations.[6] Abridgment, selection, combination, are the necessary instruments of his craft; and by their aid he introduces harmony and order into the confused multiplicity of sensuous images. He substitutes for the primary outward aspect of things a new view, in which thought already finds a resting place. Just as strong emotion tends to make all known existence the setting of a single form; just as intense meditation sees ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... wardrobe room and dressing room. He passed the short, broad stairway that led to her empty window-seat divan in what she called her Juliet Tower, and thrilled at sight of an orderly disarray of filmy, pretty, lacy woman's things that he knew she had spread out for her own sensuous delight of contemplation. He fetched up for a moment at a drawing easel, his reiterant cry checked on his lips, and threw a laugh of recognition and appreciation at the sketch, just outlined, of an awkward, big-boned, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... been turned out of that world into a grey and dusty place, he had kept that one thing, to link him with loveliness and light. Peter was a materialist: he loved things, their shapes and colours, with a passion that blinded him to the beauty of the colourless, the formless, the super-sensuous. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... subjects so awfully repugnant to the wishes and the wants of our sensuous nature? This question has often been asked, and seldom satisfactorily answered. Some have said that the pleasure of such representations arises from the comparison we make between the calmness and tranquillity of our own situation, and the storms and perplexities to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... under the shining sickle; while in the narrow lanes you met great wagons drawn by broad-chested cart-horses, carrying home the rich golden store. To any one who has been, during the hot summer months, pent up in London, there is in the first taste of rustic life a kind of sensuous rapture scarcely to be described. George Talboys felt this, and in this he experienced the nearest approach to enjoyment that he had ever known ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... into a room, dark as black velvet, weighted with the indescribable, musty odors of an Oriental abode, and possessed of an almost sensuous gloom, a mystic dreariness, a largeness ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... the wine was old, and oh! the rest was sweet! Nothing fills one with so exquisite a weariness as a day spent in good resolutions and great thoughts. There is something perilously sensuous in the relaxation of one's muscles, both of mind and body, after ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... started to play again, a sensuous, creamy melody which was making the most of its brief reign as Broadway's leading song-hit, overfamiliar to her from a ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... keen eye for artistic effects. She loved painting, although her taste was sensuous and voluptuous—character is shown in the choice of pictures as much as in that of books ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... marking the birth of an appetite and of an enjoyment. Then he forgot where he was, fell into brown study and in thought even harked back to that vague confidential announcement imparted to him one evening in the dining room of a restaurant. Impelled by a sort of sensuous curiosity, he had always wanted an introduction into the Muffats' circle, and now that his friend was in Mexico through all eternity, who could tell what might happen? "We shall see," he thought. It was a folly, doubtless, ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... debauchery resemble vertigo, for one feels a sort of terror mingled with sensuous delight, as if peering downward from some giddy—height. While shameful, secret dissipation ruins the noblest of men, in the frank and open defiance of conventionality there is something that compels respect even in the most depraved. He who goes at nightfall, ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... years ago were the centres of attraction for the over-wrought miner, the aimless wanderer, the creature of impulse, the child of passion. They were decorated with an eye to brilliant colours, to gorgeous effect, to all that appeals to the sensuous element in our nature. They were the best built and most richly furnished houses in the San Francisco of that period. The walls were adorned with costly paintings, and the furniture was in keeping with this lavish outlay. In each gambling house was ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... internal appearance being sufficiently in accordance with the proprieties of ecclesiastical architecture to satisfy all but the over-fastidious, and yet not so ornamental as to lead the mind to dwell rather on the earthly and sensuous than on the heavenly and spiritual. Behind the church was the rectory, a quaint old building, with pointed gables, deep bay- windows, and black beams of oak exposed to view. It had been added to, here and there, as modern wants and improvements had made expansion necessary. ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... spiritual illumination, this Inertia, in a measure, must be overcome. If you could watch the secret life of the great workers of the world, especially those who have survived the sensuous periods of their lives, you would find them in an almost incessant activity; that their sleep is brief and light, though a pure relaxation; that they do not eat heartily more than once a day; that they reach at times a great calm, ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... perversion of the character of an aristocrat through the "poison of chivalry," the story may be enjoyed for its own sake. We can read it, if we so desire, purely for the excitement of the plot, and quietly ignore the underlying theories, just as it is possible to enjoy Spenser's sensuous imagery without troubling about his allegorical meaning. The secret of Godwin's power seems to be that he himself was so completely fascinated by the intricate structure of his story that he succeeds in absorbing the attention ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... locality, the Limbus of scholastic theology, the Hades of the ancients, and, strictly speaking, a locality only in a relative sense. It has neither a definite area, nor boundary, but exists within subjective space, i.e., is beyond our sensuous perceptions. Still it exists, and it is there that the astral eidolons of all the beings that have lived, animals included, await their second death. For the animals it comes with the disintegration and the entire fading out of their astral particles ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... don't mean one can't reside—for a great many people manage that; but one can't live aesthetically—I may almost venture to say, sensuously. This is why I have always been so much drawn to the French, who are so aesthetic, so sensuous. I am so sorry that Theophile Gautier has passed away; I should have liked so much to go and see him, and tell him all that I owe him. He was living when I was here before; but, you know, at that time I was travelling with the Johnsons, who are not aesthetic, and who used to make me feel rather ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... their steel-blue irises, lurking under deep-arched and projecting brows, was a penetrating quality which veiled the mind within. The nose was straight and shapely, the mouth large, the lips full and sensuous, although the powerful projecting chin diminished somewhat the true effect of the lower one. His complexion was sallow. The frame of his body was in general small and fine, particularly his hands and feet; ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... pressed leaves seem to fill every pore of one's body, the sounds of falling water make a soothing hush, while the spaces between the grand spires afford noble openings through which to gaze dreamily into the starry sky. Even in the matter of sensuous ease, any combination of cloth, steel springs, and feathers seems vulgar ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... of the captains of the famous Ali-Basha. There were streaks of red in her heavy black tresses, her skin was of a soft pearliness that seemed translucent, her eyes were large, of a golden-brown, agleam with sombre fires, her lips were full and sensuous. She was tall and of a shape that in Europe would have been accounted perfect, which is to say that she was a thought too slender for Oriental taste; she moved along beside her lord with a sinuous, languorous grace, gently stirring ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... conductor and Millicent; some agonised with jealousy, like Florence Gardner and a few of the chorus; one maternally in tumultuous distress of spirit; and the great naive mass yielding with rapture to a sensuous spell. ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... same of music and other harmonics which may come to us through the sense of hearing. But the sense of taste and was given us to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome foods, and cannot be used for merely sensuous gratification, without debasing and making of it a gross thing. An education which demands special enjoyment or pleasure through the sense of taste, is wholly artificial; it is coming down to the animal plane, or below it rather; for the instinct of the brute creation teaches it ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... of the girl's eyes; in the droop of her lip there was something sensuous, and the conviction that the young man's words ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... its glories are not of that kind at all which can ever stream in forms of beauty on the eye, or pour in melody upon the enraptured ear—not such joys as genius in its most gifted hour (here called "the heart of man") can invent or imagine: it is something which these sensuous organs of ours never can appreciate—bliss of another kind altogether, revealed to the spirit of man by the Spirit of God—joys such as spirit alone ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... very respectable Bushman, whose name seems a little hard to pronounce), once saw the wind-person at Haarfontein. Savages, then, are persuaded that night, sky, cloud, fire, and so forth, are only the schein, or sensuous appearance, of things that, in essence, are men or animals. A good example is the bringing of Night to Vanua Lava, by Qat, the 'culture-hero' of Melanesia. At first it was always day, and people tired of it. Qat heard that Night was at the Torres Islands, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... had little or no significance—a man's tolerant, sometimes laughing monosyllables; and silly, cuddling, unquotable nothings from his companion. It was the ardor in her tones—the sort of completion of sensuous happiness—and the strange kinship between her and the woman he had known—these, that brought to Bedient a sudden madness of hunger to hear such words ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... those days, but, alas—it is not so now. Of course the main preciousness of this piece lies in its color; it is that old sensuous, pervading, ramifying, interpolating, transboreal blue which is the despair of modern art. The little sketch which I have made of this gem cannot and does not do it justice, since I have been obliged to leave out the color. But I've got the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ever known seemed so breathtakingly beautiful. Her skin had been caressed by a lifetime's freedom in the sun; her long, dark hair had the sheen of polished ebony; and in the firm, healthy curves of her body he saw the sensuous grace of a Venus ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... energies, or, if his mind is still true to its purpose, gives him an enormous advantage in the race for fame. Kennedy had often been seduced by whim and pleasure from his studies, but his mind was an incisive one, capable of long and concentrated efforts which ended in sharp reactions of sensuous languor. His handsome face, with its high, white forehead, its aggressive nose, and its somewhat loose and sensuous mouth, was a fair index of the compromise between strength and weakness in ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was a tender, sympathetic sensibility; which, if it sometimes overmastered him, made him the master of others. The commonest things in his hands took the motion and color of living things. It was not the mere sensuous magnetism of powerful physical nature; but it excited the higher intellectual sympathies, which in turn awoke and captivated the reasoning and reflective organs, that found themselves delightfully conducted along a natural and logical course, that led them unconsciously to inevitable conclusions ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... frequently mystic and musical; it never deals with the realities and responsibilities of life, but in a witchery of words winds and meanders through the realms of reverie and dream. It may be sweet and sensuous; it is rarely narrative or simple; ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... characteristic of the ancient Romans; and we are not astonished, therefore, to find them borrowing music from Etruria, Greece, and Egypt; originating nothing, and (although the study was pursued by the emperors) never finding any thing higher in its practice than a sensuous gratification. ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... sensuous long dark lashes hung above her dreamy eyes, Like twin clouds of stormy portent balanced over limpid deeps; Like the wings of birds of passage seen against the hazy skies; Like the petal o'er the pollen of the flow'ret ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... the Roman ladies, though strenuously opposed by Cato (Livy 34, 1; Tacitus, Annales, 3, 33). The increase of wealth among the Romans, the spoils wrung from their victims as a portion of the price of defeat, the contact of the legions with the softer, more civilized, more sensuous races of Greece and Asia Minor, laid the foundations upon which the social evil was to rise above the city of the seven hills, and finally crush her. In the character of the Roman there was but little ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... deriving individual things from atoms, he mainly considered the qualities of warm and cold; the soul he considered as derived from fire atoms; and he did not consider mind as anything peculiar, or as a power distinct from the soul or sensuous perception; but he considered knowledge derived from reason to ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... any fires other than those of jealousy or anger. Her meagre nature was truly depicted in her meagre face. Nature is ofttimes a great lair and a cruel jester, giving to the cold and vapid woman the face and form of a sensuous siren, and concealing a heart of volcanic fires, or the soul of a Phryne, under the exterior of a spinster. But the old dame had been wholly frank in forming Miss Lawrence. The thin, flat chest and narrow shoulders, the angular elbows and ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... described the goddess as having a smile somewhat proud and disdainful; yet the eyes, moist and kindly, glowed with tenderness and passion, and the graceful lines of the shoulders, the voluptuous curves of the thighs, are full of sensuous feeling. The goddess, as represented in coins, stood beside a vase, over which her drapery is falling, while with her right hand she shields herself modestly. The head of Aphrodite in the British Museum, with its pure brows, its delicate, voluptuous lips, and sweet, soft skin, is, perhaps, the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... his Tone-Poems, upon Liszt and Berlioz, he has a very definite musical personality. He has amplified, intensified the Liszt-Wagner music, adding to its stature, also exaggerating it on the purely sensuous side. That he can do what no other composer has done is proved by the score of his latest opera Ariadne at Naxos, given for the first time in Stuttgart. Here, with only thirty-six in the orchestra, a grand ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... question is pertinent, for the love of woman, the love of neighbor, the love of country, the love of God, have made the positive side of most religions, the burden of their teachings. The priests of Cotytto and Venus, Astarte and Melitta, spoke but a more sensuous version of the sermon of the aged apostle to the Ephesians,—shortest and best of all sermons—"Little children, love ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... romantic fiction is usually composed in prose has made some critics dissatisfied with what to them seems to be an unsatisfactory criterion. On the one hand Wackernagel, who believes that the function of poetry is to convey ideas in concrete and sensuous images and the function of prose to inform the intellect, asserts that prose drama and didactic poetry are inartistic.[5] He thus advocates that present practise be abandoned in favor of the custom of the Greeks. On the other ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... sounds, the odors, enveloped my senses and filled me with delighted, languorous content. It was very comforting, and I sat down on a log in the edge of a little opening, all pink and fragrant with wild roses, to enjoy the sensuous delight of it all and so take revenge upon the great stone Preachers waiting for me ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... successful an achievement of restoration and translation is difficult. Yet it may be admitted once and for all that Toschi has not unfrequently enfeebled his original. Under his touch Correggio loses somewhat of his sensuous audacity, his dithyrambic ecstasy, and approaches the ordinary standard of prettiness and graceful beauty. The Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo, for instance, has the strong calm splendour of a goddess: the same Diana in Toschi's engraving seems about to smile with ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... a moment in the shadow of the arbor-vitae, breathing the sensuous perfumed air and listening to the distant music of the falls, her heart quivering in pity for the anguish of which she had been a witness. Again the spectral cry of the whippoorwill rang near-by, and she noted for the first time the curious cluck with which the bird punctuated ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... ("Verupacarao") was a weak and unworthy sovereign, in whose days large tracts of land were lost to the Muhammadans, including Goa, Chaul, and Dabhol; and this statement, at least, is historically accurate. Virupaksha was despotic, cruel, and sensuous, "caring for nothing but women and to fuddle himself with drink," so that the whole country was roused to indignation and rebellion. Eventually he was murdered by his eldest son, who in his turn was slain by his brother "Padearao," in whom the nation merely found repeated the crimes and ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. Every generation makes the discovery, that its divine vigor ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... The man then becomes destitute of heat, of breath, of beauty, and of consciousness. Deserted by Brahman (for Jiva is Brahman), the person is said to be dead. By those ducts through which he perceives all sensuous objects, the bearer of the body no longer perceives them. It is the eternal Jiva who creates in the body in those very duets the life-breaths that are generated by food. The elements gathered together become in certain parts firmly united. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the drama. So, also, Dr. Chrysander contends, was the Hebrew himself. Not only had he no predilection for plastic creation, his life was not dramatic in the sense illustrated in Greek tragedy. He lived a care-free, sensuous existence, and either fell under righteous condemnation for his transgressions or walked in the way prescribed of the Lord and found rest at last in Abraham's bosom. His life was simple; so were his strivings, his longings, his hopes. Yet when it came to the defence or celebration of his ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... cocoanuts grew down to the mellow-sounding surf. The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue fires, in the light of which danced the hula dancers to the barbaric love- calls of the singers, who chanted to tinkling ukuleles and rumbling tom- toms. It was a sensuous, tropic night. In the background a volcano crater was silhouetted against the stars. Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon, and the Southern Cross ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... subconsciously, he receives a suggestion from their connotation. Now, an utterance has the quality of style when these two appeals of language—the denotative and the connotative, the definite and the indefinite, the intellectual and the sensuous—are so cooerdinated as to produce upon the reader or the listener an effect which is, not dual, but indissolubly single. And an utterance is devoid of the quality of style when, although it conveys a meaning to the intellect through the ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... is especially prominent in the stocks in which there has been an infusion of Slavic elements. In Upper Germany, accordingly, a sharp line is to be drawn between the Bavaro-Austrian and the Alemannic group. In Austria the capacity for sensuous enjoyment and a certain indolence are combined with a tendency toward sanguine but short-lived enthusiasms. A soft, southern air blows about the heights of Styria as well as over Vienna and its environs, and in the works of the writers of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... around the Court were always vying with each other to see who should most successfully flatter the King, or, in the King's absence, the Royal Prince. It was intellectually a very stupid Court. Its pleasures were vulgar, its revels coarse, its whole atmosphere heavy and sensuous. Frederick was said, however, to have given some evidence of a more cultivated taste than might have been expected of a Hanoverian Crown Prince. He was said to have some appreciation of letters and music. When he settled ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London's golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king. Wins his spurs—God forbid! In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the battle's van and won their spurs by cleaving men from pate to chine. ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... orange silk gave all the light, so that the corners were full of deep and somnolent shadows. The hostess, moving about in a dark-figured gown of loose chiffon, seemed to accentuate the already sensuous atmosphere. For a while they were all four together, tasting the sandwiches that waited on the tea table—then Gloria found herself alone with Captain Collins on the fireside lounge; Rachael and Captain Wolf had withdrawn to the other side of the room, where ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... language, "Iphigenie en Aulide," produced at Paris in 1774. In this work classical severity was scrupulously observed, and the opera is full of telling points of dramatic musical coloration. In "Armide," 1777, he endeavored to show that he was equally at home in richly conceived sensuous music, and succeeded so well that the famous controversy was precipitated with the Italian composer, Piccini, who had just arrived in Paris, preparatory to bringing out his opera of "Roland." Volumes were written in ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... addicted to theatrical performances; they will probably find their secondary interests—the cardinal one will of course be the work in hand—in a not too imaginative prose literature, in travel and journeys and in the less sensuous aspects of music. They will probably take a considerable interest in public affairs. Their menage, which will consist of father, mother, and children, will, I think, in ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... and sensuous abandon he laughed. Then leaping forward he seized her and crushed her to him with her arms pinioned in his and her body ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... conscience, the recognition of duty and responsibility, the feelings of reverence, remorse, and moral indignation,—all these could be traced, they thought, to an origin in experience, to an origin which in the last resort was sensuous, that is, due to the perceptions of the senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... pass that as the young girl was reposing, her head supported on her elbow, and listening to a delightful harmony, the chamber door suddenly opened, and from the darkness of her own room she beheld a suite of apartments brilliantly illuminated, and sensuous with perfumes; beautiful youths and girls, half clad, such as she had seen in the pictures of Guido and Raffaelle, moved to and fro in these apartments, seeming full of joy and happiness: these were the ministers to the pleasures of Francesco, who, rich as a king, ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... think of these things, and to realize that we were in more or less danger; though the shores are as silent as the grave, the sea sleeps like a mill-pond, and the sun sinks to rest with great dignity and precision, nightly bathing the lonely North in sensuous splendor. ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... in the softness of the night The vagrant will-o'-wisps do greet the sight; Where fragrance baffling permeates the breeze That gently flouts the grasses and the trees; Where every flying thing doth seem to be Instinct with sweetly sensuous melody; Where hills and dales assume their warmest phase, With here and there a scarf of opal haze To soften their luxuriant attire; Where one can almost hear the elfin choir Across the meadow-land, down in the wood, In songs of gladness—there are all things good. ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... the birds chant the joy of living, the sunlight and the moonlight fall upon the sparkling waters, and the liquid starlight drips through the glistening leaves. But the Priest of Pan is forgotten, and all that old interpretation and adoration of Nature, sensuous, passionate, full of mingled cruelty and ecstasy, has melted like a mist from her face, and left her serene and pure ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... return to society. Society is your element. You know it by heart; you have shone there, and there you would shine again. On reappearing, you would see yourself instantly surrounded by those delicate and (pardon the expression) sensuous minds who applauded with such delight your agreeable stories, your brilliant and solid conversation. Those pleasant, idle hours were lost to us when you left us, and I shall always remember them. At the Court, where etiquette selects our words, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the sensuous stars, and manifold, Clear sunbeams burst upon the front of night; Ten thousand swords of azure and of gold Give darkness to the dark and welcome light; Across the night of ages strike the gleams, And leading on the gilded host appears An old man writing in a book of dreams, ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... or desert chief, whose douar lay far south, in the neighbourhood of El-Aghouat. He was respected by the French authorities and esteemed by the Governor of Algiers. Known to be ambitious, he was anxious to stand well with the ruling power, and among the dissipated, sensuous young Arabs of his class and generation, he was looked upon as an example and a shining light. The only fault found in him by his own people was that he inclined to be too modern, too French in his political opinions; ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... cleverness; but, without an implanted purpose and a higher object than mere pleasure, it will bring with it no solid advantage. In such cases knowledge produces but a passing impression; a sensation, but no more; it is, in fact, the merest epicurism of intelligence— sensuous, but certainly not intellectual. Thus the best qualities of many minds, those which are evoked by vigorous effort and independent action, sleep a deep sleep, and are often never called to life, except by the rough awakening of sudden calamity or suffering, which, in such cases, comes as a ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... forest-clad hills possessed a something that drew the mind open to their largeness and grandeur. Earth is always beautiful—always. Without colour, or leaf, or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without anything sensuous, without advantage or gilding of summer—the power is ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever there, and will satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively longs for the beautiful; the means ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... And into this sensuous strife strode Temple Myrmidons—religious cops sworn to obey orders without question or hesitation—with a pickup order for ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... performance of such tasks. And apparently our Creator thought so at the beginning, when in contriving machinery for us he dispensed with the hindering factor of a central office operator. For applied to our previous example of a flash of light, the incoming message corresponds to the sensuous report of the flash, the outgoing message to the closure of the eye, and the unfortunate central office girl has disappeared. The afferent nerve reports directly to the efferent, without passing the message through consciousness. A fortune awaits him who will contrive a similar improvement for ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... Inspiration or Insanity. But in the former case too, as in common Madness, it is Fantasy that superadds itself to sight; on the so petty domain of the Actual plants its Archimedes-lever, whereby to move at will the infinite Spiritual. Fantasy I might call the true Heaven-gate and Hell-gate of man: his sensuous life is but the small temporary stage (Zeitbuehne), whereon thick-streaming influences from both these far yet near regions meet visibly, and act tragedy and melodrama. Sense can support herself handsomely, in most countries, for some eighteenpence a day; but for Fantasy planets ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... about fifty years of age, below the medium height, heavily built, and dressed in black, with a waistcoat buttoned to the collar like a priest's. His hair was iron-gray, his eyes brown, and the pupils of them widened and contracted when he spoke. He had a clean-shaven face of ivory paleness, a sensuous mouth and chin, and when he looked at Katrine she understood his power, for it seemed to her as though he could see backward to her past and forward to all of ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... sensuous education is the same that conducts the whole Life of Reason, namely, impulse checked by experiment, and experiment judged again by impulse. What teaches the child to distinguish the nurse's breast from sundry blank or disquieting ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... worshipper of intellect, it was intellectually that he mastered and developed them. Like Sidonia he moves among them not to feel with them but to understand and learn from them. Such sympathy as he had was either purely sensuous, as for youth and beauty and all kinds of comeliness; or purely intellectual, as for intelligence, artificiality, servility, meanness. And as his essence was satirical, as he was naturally irreverent and contemptuous, it follows that ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... repentance; of salvation from sin by faith in a Divine Christ. When Christianity came to the throne with Constantine, when ultimately masses of people were baptized on compulsion, Christianity took on the pomp and paraphernalia of heathenism, so as to make appeal to the sensuous element in heathen nature; in a word, Christianity became as much or more heathen than Christian, and this mongrel of Christianity and heathenism is Roman Catholicism. Root, stem, and branch, it is hostile ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... and the soft miracle of white lace blended with the artistically painted walls and roof. The aroma of delicate food, the tinkle of crystal, the low murmur of happy voices, the thrill of sudden laughter, and the delicious accompaniment of soft, sensuous music completed the charm of the room. To eat in such surroundings was as far beyond the famous flower-crowned feasts of Rome and Greece as the east is from the west. It was impossible to resist its influence. From the point of the senses, the soul was drinking life ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr |
