Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Epicurean   /ˌɛpəkjʊrˈiən/  /ˌɛpəkjˈʊriən/   Listen
Epicurean

noun
1.
A person devoted to refined sensuous enjoyment (especially good food and drink).  Synonyms: bon vivant, epicure, foodie, gastronome, gourmet.



Related search:



WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Epicurean" Quotes from Famous Books



... of a pack of playing-cards as many as there were letters in the name, I wrote one upon each, and then began to shuffle them, and at each shuffle to read them in the order they came, to see if any meaning came of it. Now, may all the Epicurean gods and goddesses confound this same chance, which, although I have spent a good deal of time over it, never showed me anything like sense, even from a distance. So I gave up my cards to the Epicurean eternity, to be carried away into infinity; and it is said they are still flying ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... in eating, drinking, sleeping, and repining. Mrs. MacDonald came in every day to see her, and always stayed and dined with her. Mrs. MacDonald rather liked the daily airing she got in her ride to and fro between the castle and the prison. She liked also the epicurean dinners that Faustina would buy and pay for, and thus she was a miracle of ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... frivolity, are, doubtless, a product in which the whole of Europe had a share; but the writer of the song 'De Phyllide et Flora' and the 'Aestuans Interius' can have been a northerner as little as the polished Epicurean observer to whom we owe 'Dum Diana vitrea sero lampas oritur.' Here, in truth, is a reproduction of the whole ancient view of life, which is all the more striking from the medieval form of the verse in which it ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... Ecclesiastes preaches in its earlier portions will never lead to such an end. It breeds disgust of life, as the examples of in all ages, and today, abundantly shows. Epicurean selfishness leads to weariness of all effort and work. If we are unwise enough to make either of these our guides in life, the only desirable end will be the utter cessation of being ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... of Ancilla, Mr. Murray remained without a titular mistress, but, fluttering about like a butterfly, he had, one after another, the prettiest girls in Venice. This good-natured Epicurean set out for Constantinople two years later, and was for twenty years the ambassador of the Court of St. James at the Sublime Porte. He returned to Venice in 1778 with the intention of ending his days there, far from affairs of state, but he died in the lazaretto ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... or "Les Huguenots," a beginning is made far back in the afternoon. Always the end arrives at ten, with perhaps a moment or two leeway in one direction or the other. And two minutes afterward, without further ceremony or delay, the truly epicurean auditor has his feet under the mahogany at the Hoftheatre Cafe across the platz, with a seidel of that incomparable brew tilted elegantly toward his face and his glad eyes smiling at Fraeulein ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

... recruits, and a good example of Murchard's somewhat morbid assertion that our old friend "liked 'em juicy." It was indeed a fact that Culwin, for all his mental dryness, specially tasted the lyric qualities in youth. As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the flowers of soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was not a disintegrating influence: on the contrary, it forced the young idea to robuster bloom. And in Phil Frenham he had a fine subject for experimentation. The boy was really intelligent, and the soundness of his nature ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

... was sumptuous. Fish shot in the river by one of our escort on the way, a bowl of ground maize cooked in oil, raw ham, eggs, bread, cheese and onions, the whole washed down in draughts of fiery spirits. Not a feast, I grant you, in an epicurean sense, but highly acceptable in Montenegro. We were waited upon by two women, who were always most careful to leave the room backwards. Our meal was very jolly, and at its conclusion we took corners in the room and slept. About three p.m. we started again for home, ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon

... their meal, with an epicurean delicacy, which rather belonged to the saloon of a palace, than the cabin in which it was displayed. Four dishes of silver, with covers of the same metal, smoked on the table; and three seats were placed for the company. Beside the lower end of the board, was a small side-table, to ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... shave their heads and bathe in the holy river, the cradle of Moses—the waters of which, sweetened with sugar, men carry all the way from Egypt to Mecca, and sell to the pilgrims. But Bombay, who is a philosopher of the Epicurean school, said, "We don't look on those things in the same fanciful manner that you do; we are contented with all the common-places of life, and look for nothing beyond the present. If things don't go well, it is God's will; ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... could get in that day "a dinner which, as a work of art, ranks with a picture by Huntington, a poem by Willis, or a statue by Powers," he meets such a musical critic as Richard Grant White, such an intellectual epicurean as N. P. Willis, such a lyric poet as Charles Fenno Hoffman. But it would be a warm day for Delmonico's when the observer in this epoch could chance upon so much genius at its tables, perhaps because genius among us has no longer the French or the money. Indeed, the author of 'New York in Slices' ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... portion in the world to come, as is said, "Thy people also shall be all righteous,"(412) etc. And these are they who have no portion in the world to come: he who says there is no resurrection of the dead in the law, and that there is no revealed law from heaven, and the Epicurean. R. Akiba said, "even he who reads in forbidden(413) books, and he who mutters over a wound"; and he said, "I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the Lord that healeth thee."(414) Aba Shaul said, "even to ...
— Hebrew Literature

... and manner, and the quietness with which he made himself at home on the subject of his little Epicurean comforts, amused the ladies, but particularly Miss Mannering, who immediately gave the counsellor a great deal of flattering attention; and more pretty things were said on both sides during the service of the tea-table than ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... broke loose from the moral restraints imposed by fear of consequences. Here again, they had their forerunners in those licentious speculators belonging to the Christian community at Corinth who maintained that 'there is no resurrection of the dead,' [120:1] and whose Epicurean lives were a logical consequence of their Epicurean doctrine. And here, too, the Pastoral Epistles supply a pertinent illustration. If we are at a loss to conceive how they could have extracted such a doctrine out of 'the oracles of the Lord,' the difficulty ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... at the windmill which belongs to the village elder. Once it belonged to Nachman Veribivker. Now it belongs to the village elder whose name is Opanas—a cunning Gentile with one ear-ring, who owns a "samovar." Opanas is a rich Epicurean. Along with the mill he has a store—the same store which once belonged to Nachman Veribivker. He took both the mill and the store from ...
— Jewish Children • Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich

... he looked for the lady; but she did not appear at the long table, where the shrill old ladies, the epicurean old bachelors, the noisy students, daily devoured and grumbled at the four or five courses which old Nanon developed out of her inner consciousness and a rather scantily furnished larder. He questioned Madame Magnotte after dinner, and was told that the lady was in the house, but ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... the most epicurean can find Food the envy of a king; Nowhere such trout in all the world And ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson

... would have expected erotic tints and Epicurean morality from the author of "The Conquest of Canaan," and of four volumes of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... which the dishes are conveyed to the latter with the utmost possible dispatch. The temper indeed of these happy diners should be ineffably serene, considering that they can never be ruffled by soups or fish coming to table one degree less hot than the most epicurean palate could desire. Luxury can go no farther, unless, which may be invented some day, a patent appetite and digesting apparatus were supplied, enabling host and guests to sit down every day to the feasts spread before them with ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... was more of an epicurean than a social success. Mrs. Halliday had made hot biscuit, and opened a jar of strawberry preserves, and sliced a cold chicken which she had originally intended for to-morrow's dinner; but, in spite ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... because he thought that the more practicable—What is bred in the bone, said he, will not come out with the skewer; and justified his alteration by asserting it must be plain enough to the fat-headed comprehensions of those epicurean persons who have the magpie-propensity of prying ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... strong-willed.' A tranquil child!" And she writes again, with deeper significance: "I too have learnt the subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it is a subtle philosophy, though it appears merely an epicurean doctrine: 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' I have gone through so many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to its full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu

... not only has he to be capable of judging and humouring the overstrung men and women of talent with whom he deals—those fragile, sensitive flowers from whom he extracts the honey wherewith to gratify the palate of a journalistically epicurean public—but he must also have a thorough knowledge of that public to enable him to direct those who work for him, for they, shut up in their studies and studios, may not realise that the man at the look-out has to ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... those whom he misleads—"Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Ariel cleaves the air, and executes his mission with the zeal of a winged messenger; Puck is borne along on his fairy errand like the light and glittering gossamer before the breeze. He is, indeed, a most Epicurean little gentleman, dealing in quaint devices, and faring in dainty delights. Prospero and his world of spirits are a set of moralists: but with Oberon and his fairies we are launched at once into the empire of the butterflies. How beautifully is this race of beings contrasted ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... contributes much to my own entertainment, and things which appear amusing to me do not appeal, when I point them out, to the risible faculties of another. Every individual, I suppose, like every civilisation, must have his own standard of humour. If I were a Roman (instead of an English) Epicurean, I should have died with laughter at the sight of a fat Christian martyr scudding round the arena while chased by a hungry lion. At present I should faint with horror. Indeed, I always feel tainted with savagery and enjoying a vicarious lust, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... the mingled Stoical and Epicurean. With him life is a trifle to be gracefully played with—a "froward child, to be humoured till it falls asleep, and all is over." His indifference is imputed to him as a crime; but it should not be forgotten that, if there be any fault at all in this indifference, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... Paul. It was "the philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics who encountered Paul." The leading tenets of both these sects were diametrically opposed to the doctrines of Christianity. The ruling spirit of each was alien from the spirit of Christ. The haughty pride of the Stoic, the Epicurean abandonment to pleasure, placed them in direct antagonism to him who proclaimed the crucified and risen Christ to ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... an Epicurean of the nobler sort; and he had this one great merit, that he succeeded so far as to be happy. "I love my fate to the core and rind," he wrote once; and even while he lay dying, here is what he dictated (for it seems he was already too feeble to control ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... applies, to the calm of philosophical retirement, the Epicurean tranquillity of the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden

... had been introduced, virtue had been represented more desirably, and hope for the continuance of our existence had been purified both from the false terrors of a dark superstition and from the equally false demands of an Epicurean sensuality. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... whole washed down with strange wines from the same sunny land. Florence's fondness for this sort of thing gave zest to a story Field told of his friend's experience in London, in the summer of 1890. The epicurean actor had made an excursion up the Thames with a select party of English clubmen. Two days later Florence was still abed at Morley's, and, as he said, contemplated staying there forever. Sir Morell Mackenzie was called to see him. After sounding his lungs, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... Legend" is full of the miracles they wrought. Your friend Horace left a less noble posterity, and I see one of his descendants in the person of that tavern poet, who at this moment is serving out wine in cups under the epicurean ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... successful monk, one must be either a Pharisee or an epicurean. The Pharisee takes an inventory of the works named in the Law of God, and sets out to perform these in an external, mechanical manner. He adds a few works of his own invention for good measure. Every work performed counts; it constitutes merit. On the basis of ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... of other minds: they never inquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done; but wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature; as Beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as Epicurean deities making remarks on the actions of men and the vicissitudes of life without interest and without emotion. Their courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their wish was only to say what they hoped had never ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... everything belonging to the fine arts. It had its philosophers, statesmen, orators, lawyers, priests, poets and painters. It had its high and low orders in society. But when Paul beheld the city his spirit was moved in him, for he saw that it was wholly given to idolatry. Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him and said: "He seemeth to be a setterforth of strange gods." They said this among themselves, because he preached unto them Jesus and the resurrection. But they did not ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... returned John. "She has a sylph-like, aesthetic appearance, but I give you my word she has the most epicurean eye. She hasn't left a prize berry in those fields. ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham

... butter in the blazer; saute in it some narrow strips of bread and spread them thickly with the mixture used for epicurean sandwiches. Press a pitted olive in the centre of each and serve ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill

... first time in an evil age, Wisdom hath been assailed by peril? Did I not often in days of old, before my servant Plato lived, wage stern warfare with the rashness of folly? In his lifetime, too, Socrates, his master, won with my aid the victory of an unjust death. And when, one after the other, the Epicurean herd, the Stoic, and the rest, each of them as far as in them lay, went about to seize the heritage he left, and were dragging me off protesting and resisting, as their booty, they tore in pieces the garment which I had woven with my own hands, and, clutching the torn pieces, ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius

... failing Boyton. He feels greatly invigorated by the plain breakfast. No Liebig mess, this time, taken to him by Dr. Benjamin Howard, Honorary Secretary of the New York Humane Society. This morning meal and the two other meals taken by Boyton during his arduous undertaking cannot be considered very epicurean. Each frugal repast consists of nothing more than half a pint of good strong tea, green with a dash of black, and a couple of beef sandwiches. The tea wakes him up directly. Inspirited by the cup that cheers, he is roused to fresh ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... night of my life," Collier Pratt declared, "and I intend to continue to come so long as le bon Dieu spares me my health and my epicurean taste. You know that I spoke of the food here before. The character of it has changed entirely. It's unmistakably French now, not to say Parisian. Outside of Paris or Vienna I have never tasted such soups, such sauce, such delicate and suggestive flavors. My entire existence has been ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... one of earth, the Chaldean, Serves folly in wisdom's disguise; And the sensual Epicurean, Though grosser, is hardly less wise; 'Twixt the former, half pedant, half pagan, And the latter, half sow and half sloth, We halt, choose Astarte or Dagon, Or sacrifice freely ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... a cousin visiting them—an English cousin, Polly Musgrave—from the luxury and comparative gaiety of her rich, childless aunt's house in York. Polly was a well-endowed orphan, had no near family ties, and had been educated in the worldly wisdom and epicurean philosophy of a fashionable girls' school. She had come to spend a few weeks, and get acquainted with her Scotch country cousins. Polly had not found her heart, but it was to the credit of her sense and good-nature that she made the ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... the seashore?" she said, turning her soft dark-blue eyes enquiringly on Reay, while gently checking with one hand the excited gambols of Charlie, who, as an epicurean dog, always gave himself up to the wildest enthusiasms at tea-time, owing to his partiality for a small saucer of cream which came to him at that hour—"I sometimes think he must expect to pick up a fortune down among ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... more easily designed than accomplished. Colonel Ormonde was an old soldier in every sense, and an old bachelor to boot, with an epicurean taste for good dinners and pretty women. He might sacrifice something for the first, but the latter were too plentiful and too come-at-able to be worth great cost. Still, it was generally believed he was matrimonially inclined, and Mrs. Fred thought she might have ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander

... savouriness of their cooking, the quality of their wines, the promptitude of their attendants, all are minutely criticized; and, if they study their own interest, they must neglect nothing to flatter the eyes and palate. In fact, how do they know that some of their epicurean guests may not have been of their own fraternity, and once figured in a great French ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... immediately at a loss, and knows not what to answer. A Copernican or Ptolemaic, who supports each his different system of astronomy, may hope to produce a conviction, which will remain constant and durable, with his audience. A Stoic or Epicurean displays principles, which may not be durable, but which have an effect on conduct and behaviour. But a Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al

... leave something to regret in the way of time misspent; but Goethe the man was no dawdler, no easy-going Epicurean. On the whole, he made the most of himself, and stands before the world a notable instance of a complete life. He would do the work which was given him to do. He would not die till the second part of "Faust" was brought to its predetermined close. By sheer force of will he lived till that work ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... he was singularly fond of indulging himself with marvelous recipes for dressing game, seasoning fish, or preserving in sugar the fragrant fruits of the tropics; at times, even the description of his epicurean tastes became contagious, when he would enlarge upon certain repasts after the manner of buccaneers, prepared in the depths of the forests or on the shore of the island. Between you and me, Father Griffen possessed, among others, ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue

... particularly aldermanic "bodies," be considered sufficiently vexatious; how doubly annoying then must it be to come so late as to find the meats more than half cold, and, perhaps, but little of them left even in that anti-epicurean state! Whoever has been unfortunate enough to miss a fine fat haunch either of venison or mutton, which, smoking on the board, even Dr. Kitchiner would have pronounced fit for an emperor, cannot but enter deeply and feelingly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various

... means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality.—He combatted the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity—to deny immortality was already a form of genuine salvation.—Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean—when Paul appeared ... Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of "the world," in the flesh and inspired by genius—the Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence.... What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil. But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own epicurean lips. Cook, cook! —where's that old Fleece? he cried at length, widening his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with his lance; cook, you cook! —sail this ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... swifter than the birds of passage, and swifter than the breezes that scatter clouds. It climbs the ship of the restless who long for the suns of Europe; it jumps up behind the horseman who scours the woods of Michigan; it throws its scowling glances on the attempt at present enjoyment; it scares the epicurean from his voluptuousness, and when the ascetic has finished his vow, it compels him once more to repeat the tale of ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... we are left with the poems—not an inconsiderable companion seeing that its stature is some seven hundred small quarto pages closely packed with verses in double columns. Part of this volume is, however, devoted to the "Epicurean," a not unremarkable example of ornate prose in many respects resembling the author's verse. Indeed, as close readers of Moore know, there exists an unfinished verse form of it which, in style and general character, is not unlike a more serious "Lalla ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... others, it often crushes the poor, it lets escape the rich, or, in a fit of mercy or carelessness, declines all means of recovering its just demands. Content with the eternity of its claims, it enjoys its Epicurean divinity with Epicurean languor. But it is proper that all sorts of accounts should be closed some time or other,—by payment, by composition, or by oblivion. Expedit reipublicae ut sit finis litium. Constantly taking along with me, that an extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... and when one exclaims in ecstasy over a wonderful flavor found in some dingy restaurant, let him not be surprised if he learn that the chef who concocted the dish boasts royal decoration for tickling the palate of some epicurean ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords

... a hundred times over. But what annoys me more than anything, my dear Moliere, is, that I fear we shall not have our Epicurean dresses." ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas

... comparison with those more ancient efforts of unenlightened reason. What modern system of Skepticism can rival that of Sextus Empiricus? What code of Pantheism, French or German, can be said to equal the mystic dreams of the Vedanta School? What godless theory of Natural Law can compete with the Epicurean philosophy, as illustrated in the poetry of Lucretius? The errors of these ancient systems have been revived even amidst the light of the nineteenth century, and prevail to an extent that may seem to justify the apprehension, frequently expressed on the Continent of late ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... reason Penn began to think better of the broth, and, to Toby's infinite satisfaction, he consented to eat a little. Toby soon had him bolstered up in bed, and held the salver before him, and looked a perfect picture of epicurean enjoyment, just from ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge

... must not give up their liberty to the state, and in reply to a question by Socrates he said that he did not desire to belong either to the governing or the governed class. Such an attitude, however, seems to have been dictated merely by an Epicurean attitude towards the life of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... hard, but then all came easier. After critical articles on the trend of modern literature, he published "The Reprobate," a bold dithyrambic on ancient Greek philosophy. The poetry that followed was clearly Epicurean and in complete contradiction to the altruistic tendencies of the neo-Christian period, which found an arch enemy in Nietzsche, whose philosophy evidently influenced Merezhkovsky. However, this evolution did not have a very favorable effect on his poetry; it bordered on an art the clarity of which ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... of the imaginary Epicurean in the eleventh section of the Inquiry, entitled Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State, is to invert the argument of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... is the Epicurean attitude towards the popular faith. Epicurus unreservedly acknowledged its foundation, i.e. the existence of anthropomorphic beings of a higher order than man. His gods had human shape but they were eternal and blessed. In the latter definition was included, according to the ethical ideal ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann

... a very hot day, and, feeling thirsty, I was glad to see a Sicilian peasant selling prickly pears, a most delicious tropical fruit. The man soon cut a few open for me, and I found them truly refreshing. To any one who has not yet tasted a prickly pear, there is yet an epicurean luxury in store. The fruit grows plentifully in the East, where you will frequently see an uncouth, impenetrable, cactus-like plant growing by the wayside hedge in a dry, rocky soil, its great succulent leaves bristling with long, ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... served out daily at our billets; our landladies do the cooking, and mine, an adept at the culinary art, can transform a basin of flour and a lump of raw beef into a dish that would make an epicurean mouth water. Even though food is badly cooked in the billet, it has a superior flavour, which is never given it in the boilers controlled by the company cook. Army stew has rather a notorious reputation, as witness the inspired words of a regimental poet—one ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill

... calls "the unblushing egotism" of Hobbes have really little in common with the sparkling rapier-strokes of La Rochefoucauld, except that both these moralists— who may conceivably have met and compared impressions in Paris— combined a resolute pessimism about the corruption of mankind with an epicurean pursuit of happiness. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... an hour after the day was over, and Emily Fox-Seton's admiring interest in all she said she found at once stimulating and soothing. Her Ladyship was an old woman who indulged and inspired herself with an Epicurean wisdom. Though she would not have stupid people about her, she did not ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... accumulation are limited because the farm must continue to be a small scale industry. It can be improved so as to afford adequate leisure. But farm life does not promise large enjoyment to those of an epicurean turn of mind. The ideal of the farm must be that of producing wealth so that the modest comforts of life may be insured. But the minister must exalt the appreciation of those things that may be obtained without lavish expenditure of money, such as local ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt

... him in this epicurean dictum, whereupon he sucks the cigar at intervals behind Mrs. L.S.'s back, during the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various

... Caldegard," said Randal, "how often and how strongly the remembrance of that incommunicable bliss cries out for an epicurean repetition of those early stages ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming

... all that was most fleeting and unsubstantial—in divertissement; in the pleasure of looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of the follies of mankind. Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to regard our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the tragic note comes in! What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of tears, as of rain in the wind! No comedian has been so kindly and human as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... views of life he partook of the character of the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of the word. In his personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian, taking as the exclusive test of right and wrong, the tendency of ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... born and well bred a type to be unpleasantly sensual; but his whole face, person, expression, and manner conveyed the idea of a pleasure-loving nature, habitually self-indulgent, and indulgent to others. He was my beau ideal of an Epicurean philosopher (supposing it possible that an Epicurean philosopher could have consented to be Prime Minister of England), and I confess to having read with unbounded astonishment the statement in the "Greville Memoirs," that this apparent prince of poco ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... don't know. God knows." The camels browse or crop herbage all the way along, daintily picking and choosing the herbage and shrubs which they like best. My chief occupation in riding is watching them browse, and observing the epicurean fancies of these reflective, sober-thinking brutes of The Desert. I observe also as a happy trait in the Arab, that nothing delights him more than watching his own faithful camel graze. The ordinary drivers sometimes allow ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... was, in his youth, the friend of Klopstock, and would tolerate nothing but religious poetry; but he suddenly turned to the opposite extreme, and began to write epicurean romances as vehicles of his new views of human life and happiness. Among his tales are "Agathon," "Musarion," and "Aristippus," which last is considered his best work. In all these writings his purpose was to represent pleasure or utility as ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... began to renew his former acquaintances. His meteorological observations were continued, he studied botany, and was an industrious reader of three or four languages. When nearly eighty, we find him writing elaborate disquisitions on grammar, astronomy, the Epicurean philosophy, and discussing style with Edward Everett. The coldness between him and John Adams passed away, and they used to write one another long letters, in which they criticized Plato and the Greek dramatists, speculated upon the end for which the sensations of grief were intended, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various

... "trap") was too pleasantly occupied in discussing the captain's port and claret, and laughing at his jokes, to induce us to give much time or attention to the ladies in the drawing-room. If some of my fair readers exclaim against this stoic (or rather epicurean) indifference, it may gratify their injured vanity to know, that in the sequel some of us paid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... premature nor an over-tardy arrival at his own house. The two malefactors who were, he felt absolutely certain, using his roof for their lustful assignation, had the night before them. They would avail themselves of it with that sybarite deliberateness which had characterized their epicurean guile and ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... cruel nor vindictive, he had gradually grown pitiless in all that conduced to self-aggrandizement or self-indulgence; incapable of a generosity that involved even slight sacrifice, a polished handsome epicurean, an experienced man of the world, putting aside all scruples in the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... procured from the Heralds' College his family arms, whose crest was stamped upon a quantity of plate he had brought with him to California. The plate, together with an exceptionally good cook, which he had also brought, and his own epicurean tastes, he utilized in the usual practical Californian fashion by starting a rather expensive half-club, half-restaurant in the lower part of the building—which he ruled somewhat autocratically, as became his crest. The restaurant ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte

... inner cold and outer dampness—and poured out a glassful of the stingingly cold water. The boy gulped down the contents of the glass in almost a single draught. Then he filled a second glass and, with epicurean delight, let the water trickle slowly and coolingly down his hot throat. Peter Grimm stood beside him, a gentle hand on the thin little shoulder. His thirst slaked, Willem glanced fearfully ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... not of aspiration, but of defiance; not of the Christian, not even of the Stoic, but rather of the Epicurean. It says—I cannot rise. I do not care to rise. I will be contentedly and valiantly that which I am; and face circumstances, though I cannot conquer them. But it is defiance under defeat. The mountain- peak does not grow, but only decays. Fretted by rains, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... there anything in heaven or earth that you don't look at from the outside, as if you were some kind of superior epicurean god?" ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... had drawn an audible breath. The Bishop of London somewhat wrinkled his shaggy brows, like a person in shrewd and epicurean amusement, while the Queen subscribed the parchment, with a ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... condition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean and arid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of things genuine reliability. Fifine at the Fair, like Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, is one of Browning's apologetic soliloquies—the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfully to justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwards actually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is given many noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently the poem ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... no exercise to his mind, and he felt most severely the want of Henry's agreeable conversation; he had no one to whom he could now talk of the water-cresses of Cyrus, or the black broth of the Spartans; he had no one with whom he could dispute concerning the Stoic or the Epicurean doctrines, the mercantile or the agricultural system. Many objections to the agricultural system, which had escaped him, occurred now to his mind; and his compassion for the worms, whom he was obliged to cut in pieces ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... operations not only by arms, but at the same time by national propagandism. His chief instrument for Athens was one Aristion, by birth an Attic slave, by profession formerly a teacher of the Epicurean philosophy, now a minion of Mithradates; an excellent master of persuasion, who by the brilliant career which he pursued at court knew how to dazzle the mob, and with due gravity to assure them that help was already on ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... must be suspended. They held that there was nothing that could be determined of specific nature, nothing that could be of certainty. Eventually the whole Greek philosophy went out in scepticism. The three schools, the sceptic, the Epicurean, and the stoic, though widely differing in many ways, agreed upon one thing, in basing their philosophy on subjectivity, on mind ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... had sought their respective rooms to recuperate their wearied energies by a loll, if not a siesta, that they might be in trim for the evening's enjoyment (Christmas lasted a whole week at Ridgeley) when four strapping field hands, barefooted, that their tramp might not break the epicurean slumbers, brought down from the desolate upper chamber a rough pine coffin, manufactured and screwed tight by the plantation carpenter, and after halting a minute in the back porch to pull on their boots, took their way across the lawn and fields to the servants' burial-place. This ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... wonder that he was in such a dickens of a bad temper! Well, he is of no value to us, except as a contribution to our larder, so we may as well be going. We will mark the spot where he lies, and send Mafuta and Jantje for one of his feet, which will furnish us with an epicurean dinner to- night. And now I suppose we may as well go and look for the wagon, for of course the giraffes cleared ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood

... continued Mr. Larkyns, "undismayed by the perils from which he was then happily preserved, has boldly come forward and declared himself a worshipper of Isis, in a way worthy of the ancient Egyptians, or of Tom Moore's Epicurean." ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... something in this glittering beauty, cold and cruel, that appealed to him. He always felt at home in such surroundings. Beneath his idealism and love of humanity there was still hidden somewhere the nerve of an Epicurean. ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... a tiger crouching for a spring. The king, who had devoted his life to creating the greatest army in Europe, never attempted to employ it, and left it a thunderbolt in the hands of his son. The crown prince was a musician and a versifier, with a taste for clever men, but also for cleverish men, an epicurean student, with much loose knowledge, literary rather than scientific, and an inaccurate acquaintance with French and Latin. To Bayle, Locke, Voltaire in his first manner, he owed an abundance of borrowed ideas, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... flowers! what sunset effects! what impressions to be obtained here! How delightful, too, to make friends with the young owners of this strange property—the strangest surely out of the 'Arabian Nights,' 'Vathek,' or 'The Epicurean!'—and get the farmhouse turned into quite an ideal hostelry! I saw in my mind's eye the dunghill replaced by a pretty flower-garden, a tablecloth spread for breakfast, the floors swept and scoured, carpets and armchairs in the best bedrooms, and even—my ambition ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... acquaintance with rare books only, which might be the curiosity of an epicurean, but with the right and appropriate book, amazes the reader. Like most things attributed to Abbot Joachim, the Vaticinia Pontificum is a volume not in common use, and decent people may be found who never saw a copy. Mr. Lea says: "I have met with ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... of morals, too, hygiene has penetrated, and has given individual rules of life. It is through hygiene that debauchery has become less common, that those epicurean feasts which were celebrated in ancient times are replaced to-day by hygienic meals, the value of which consists in the wise proportion between the needs of the body and the food which is prepared. Wine and alcohol are rejected by the rich more than by the poor. We eat in order to keep ourselves ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... himself to be required by people who could serve him; feared by such as could injure. Not that he went out of the way to secure his end, or risked the expense of a plot. He did the work as easily as he ate his daily bread. Adrian was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would have scourged out of his garden, certainly: an epicurean of our modern notions. To satisfy his appetites without rashly staking his character, was the wise youth's problem for life. He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... lively imagination, who were inclined toward strange doctrines. The dry and narrow author of the book of Esther never thought of the rest of the world except to despise it, and to wish it evil.[4] The disabused epicurean who wrote Ecclesiastes, thought so little of the future, that he considered it even useless to labor for his children; in the eyes of this egotistical celibate, the highest stroke of wisdom was to use his fortune for his own enjoyment.[5] But the great achievements of a people are generally ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... foot from the instep to the toe." Dennie was but 44 years of age when he died; Buckingham says he was "a premature victim to social indulgence." Those were the days of hard drinking and of high thinking. Nothing so frugal as a cup of Madeira and a cold capon's leg would satisfy Dennie's epicurean soul. He was a social creature, and those noctes ambrosianae of the Tuesday Club when Tom Moore, who celebrated the club in his eighth epistle, or some other lover of Anacreon was the guest, were often kept up until it was too late to go to bed. Wine songs and Martial-like epigrams of ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth

... his love of pleasure, in his habits of thought, in his sarcastic scepticism, you see the healthy, clever, well-disposed, tolerant, epicurean, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... answer; his role is asking, not answering. Nor when he gives an answer is it always certain whether it is to be taken in earnest. Was he a cynic? one would say so after reading The Cynic; was he an Epicurean? one would say so after reading the Alexander; was he a philosopher? one would say Yes at a certain point of the Hermotimus, No at another. He doubtless had his moods, and he was quite unhampered by desire for any consistency except consistent independence ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... rheumatism. In Sally's case, after convincing himself that she would never get on her legs again, he had eased it by carrying her to the nearest chemist's: the loving little thing had licked his hand with her last breath, but when the brightness faded out of her brown eyes, in his quality of Epicurean, Lawrence had not let himself grieve over her. Unluckily one could not pay a chemist to put Bernard Clowes out of his pain! "This is going to be deuced uncomfortable," was the reflection that crossed his mind in its naked selfishness. "I wish I had never ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... of my nativity and earliest youth! Is it for an end so cruel as this, that I have taken such care of myself upon the southern shores of this unworthy continent, feeding with a tasteful choice and epicurean delicacy amid the marine vegetation that adorns its milder latitudes, and plumping and beautifying myself into this admired shape, and all to gratify at last the cormorant appetite of this unfishlike animal, and decorate, with my remains and memory, a mere steam-boat breakfast! O Dickens! the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... thriving; the spendthrift noble was on his way to join the bankrupt trader, at a German settlement fifty miles distant from my house. This young man was unlike any German I ever met. He had all the exquisite levity by which the well-bred Frenchman gives to the doctrines of the Cynic the grace of the Epicurean. He owned himself to be good for nothing with an elegance of candour which not only disarmed censure, but seemed to challenge admiration; and, withal, the happy spendthrift was so inebriate with hope,—sure ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... we arrived at a kraal, we unsaddled our mules and sat down near it, indulging in Epicurean anticipations. Opposite us, by the door of a hut, was a group of men who observed our arrival, but did not advance or salute us. Impatient, I fired a pistol, when a gruff voice asked why we disturbed the camels that were being milked. "We have fallen upon the ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... court, and returned to his rooms to repose from so exhausting a session, and to prepare, by partaking of an epicurean repast, for the unpleasant duty that awaited him, viz., to be ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... have remained for our use.[48] He seems to have lived much with Atticus, who was occupied with similar studies, though with altogether different results. Atticus applied himself to the practices of the Epicurean school, and did in truth become "Epicuri de grege porcus." To enjoy life, to amass a fortune, to keep himself free from all turmoils of war or state, to make the best of the times, whether they were bad or good, without any attempt on his part to mend them—this was the philosophy of Titus ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... exhausted type arises. Preachers, prophets, seers and poets vigorously proclaim the futility of pleasure, and the happiness of service; inhibition comes into its own again and a Puritan cycle recommences. Stoic, epicurean; Roman republic, Roman empire; Puritan England, Restoration; Victorian days, early twentieth century; for to-day we are surging into an era of revolt against form, custom, tradition; in a ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... of Euripides; and that his pupils Aeschines and Demosthenes contended for the crown of patriotism in the presence of Aristotle, the master of Theophrastus, who taught at Athens with the founders of the Stoic and Epicurean sects. [144] The ingenuous youth of Attica enjoyed the benefits of their domestic education, which was communicated without envy to the rival cities. Two thousand disciples heard the lessons of Theophrastus; [145] the schools of rhetoric must ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... man and beast upon that seventh day which had been ordained us a universal blessing. (Hear, hear.) He quite enjoyed hearing of Mr. Landsborough and his men luxuriating on a breakfast of meat and pig-weed, followed, after a due interval, by an epicurean dinner of cold rice and jam. (A laugh.) The result of their explorations had been immense, for they had probably tripled, or even quadrupled, the extent of territory in Australia available for settlement, and added greatly to the resources of the country. The advantages ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough

... and in his epigrammatic turn he is akin to the great Latin poet. He was fond of experimenting in Latin lyrical forms, and wrote many madrigals and sonnets. They are full of vigorous thought and bright satire, of playful malice and epicurean joy in life, and have always won the admiration of his fellow-poets. As has been said, they show a fine taste, quite in advance of the age. Cervantes, his greater contemporary, acknowledged his power with cordial praise in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... his round fleshy Epicurean head to one side, and a moist sheen came into his small crafty eyes. He glanced at the place where a bright spot in the almost palpable darkness suggested the Frau Major's white dress, and began to tell what he thought, very ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko

... your breakfast foods you eat at break of day, Your crisp, delightful shavings and your stack of last year's hay, Your toasted flakes of rye and corn that fairly swim in cream, Or rave about a sawdust mash, an epicurean dream. But none of these appeals to me, though all of them I've tried— The breakfast that I liked the best ...
— Just Folks • Edgar A. Guest

... be patched up, or has been, by this time. Van Buren is a crafty but peace-loving fox! Something of an epicurean, too, in his high estate. What grim old Jackson left half healed, he will complete the cure of. Ah, Miss Harz, I had hoped to flesh my ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... sottish life than he. "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but [this man] Israel doth not know, [but this man] my people doth not consider." (Isa 1:3) The prayerless man is therefore of no religion, except he be an Atheist, or an Epicurean. Therefore the non-praying man is numbered among the heathens, and among those that know not God, and is appointed and designed by the sentence of the word to the fearful wrath of God. (Psa 79:6, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... composing his work, his impressions concerning the date and identity of his opponent became considerably modified." I then proceed to enumerate some of the reasons. In the earlier portion of his first book (i. 8), Origen has heard that his Celsus is the Epicurean of the reign of Hadrian and later, but a little further on (i. 68), he confesses his ignorance as to whether he is the same Celsus who wrote against magic, which Celsus the Epicurean actually did. In the fourth book (iv. 36) he expresses ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels

... the mind, but in a quiet, discriminating acceptance of whatever is beautiful, active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew older he added something more like a Stoic sense of 'duty' to the old, properly and severely Epicurean doctrine of 'pleasure.' Pleasure was never, for Pater, less than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and not merely all that is rarest in sensation; it was religious from the first, and had always to be served with a strict ritual. 'Only be sure ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... give an account of them, I shall present his character to the reader upon the authority of Anthony Wood, which is too singular to be passed over. This Marloe, we are told, presuming upon his own little wit, thought proper to practise the most epicurean indulgence, and openly profess'd atheism; he denied God, Our Saviour; he blasphemed the adorable Trinity, and, as it was reported, wrote several discourses against it, affirming Our Saviour to be a deceiver, the sacred scriptures to contain nothing but idle stories, and all religion ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber

... as well authenticated is it, that when my Lord Balmerino (that suffered on Tower Hill with the Earl of Kilmarnock) was coming back condemned to Death from his Trial before his Peers at Westminster, his Lordship being of a merry, Epicurean temper, and caring no more for Death than a Sailor does for a wet Shirt, stopped the coach at a Fruiterer's at Charing Cross, where he must needs ask Mr. Lieutenant's Attendant to buy him some Honey-Blobbs, which is the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... The classical reader will be reminded of Lucretius, iii. 979-1036. Smith, however, would not have relished this comparison. He devotes part of one sermon to a refutation of the Epicurean poet, in whom he sees a precursor of ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... never could feed without flowers, be said, and the Tenor ministered to this exaction with the rest. "He is dainty because he is delicate," the Tenor thought, always excusing him. "When he is older and stronger he will grow out of all these epicurean niceties of taste, I must make him dig, too, and fence, and row. He'll soon ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... identical people of the afternoon before, so marked is the peculiar character of the dance-mad individuality. To-day he varied his menu with a mild order of cocktails—for now he was not emulating the Epicurean record of the bibulous Grimsby. They observed with amusement the weird contortions, seldom graced by a vestige of rhythm or beauty, with which the intent dancers ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... Epicurean, in the ordinary sense of the term, he certainly is, but it is of the earlier type. Cyrenaic would be a juster epithet, the "carpe diem" doctrine of the poem is too gross and sensual to have commended itself to the real Epicurus. Intense fatalism, ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... some obscure expressions about what he calls "seminal principles" ([Greek: spermatikoi logoi]). He opposes them to the Epicurean atoms (vi. 24), and consequently his "seminal principles" are not material atoms which wander about at hazard, and combine nobody knows how. In one passage (iv. 21) he speaks of living principles, souls ([Greek: psychahi]) ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

... the other adorned by good health, good looks, and the best of tailors; ushered into the studio with his father and Mr. Smee as his aides-de-camp on his entry; and previously announced there with all the eloquence of honest Gandish. "I bet he's 'ad cake and wine," says one youthful student, of an epicurean and satirical turn. "I bet he might have it every day if he liked." In fact Gandish was always handing him sweetmeats of compliments and cordials of approbation. He had coat-sleeves with silk linings—he had studs in his shirt. How different was the texture ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... was tall, spare, dried up, but muscular; the lines in his pale face told a tale of vehement passions or of terrible sorrows; but his comrade's jolly countenance beamed with health, and would have done credit to an Epicurean. Both men were deeply sunburnt. Their high gaiters of brown leather carried souvenirs of every ditch and swamp that they ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac

... herself. She surrounded herself with books. Her taste was of the delicacy of point lace. She knew her Austin Dobson by heart. She read poems, essays, the ideas of the seminary at Marysville persisting in her mind. "Marius the Epicurean," "The Essays of Elia," "Sesame and Lilies," "The Stones of Venice," and the little toy magazines, full of the flaccid banalities of the "Minor Poets," were continually in ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... commit a crime for her sake. So far so good; the motive of the crime must be found in Australia. Whyte had spent nearly all his money in England, and, consequently, Musette and her lover arrived in Sydney with comparatively very little cash. However, with an Epicurean-like philosophy, they enjoyed themselves on what little they had, and then came to Melbourne, where they stayed at a second-rate hotel. Musette, I may tell you, had one special vice, a common one—drink. She loved champagne, and drank a good deal of it. Consequently, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... society is himself, Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tulip-beds,(38) clipping his apricots and pruning his essays,—the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where, in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies by the south wall with the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... says. Cornelius Celsus, in the manner of the Skeptics, has written a good many tracts, which are not without elegance and perspicuity. Plancus, among the Stoics, may be read with profit, for the sake of becoming acquainted with the things he discusses. Catius, an Epicurean, has some levity in his way, but in the main is not ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser

... high, an inch broad, black as Erebus, the letters shouted at him against an orange background. Every window of the second story contained a placard. On the first story, in the show window where Petrosini had been wont to ravish epicurean eyes by shad and red snapper, perch and trout, cunningly imbedded in ice blocks upon a marble slab—in that window, framed now in the hated orange and ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... learned disquisition on the whole subject in Dr. H. C. Lea's History of the Inquisition in Spain, 1907, vol. iii. book vi chap. vii.] Smollett must have enjoyed himself vastly in the market at Nice. He gives an elaborate and epicurean account of his commissariat during the successive seasons of his sojourn in the neighbourhood. He was not one of these who live solely "below the diaphragm"; but he understood food well and writes about it with a catholic gusto and relish (156-165). ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... an Epicurean philosopher, as appears from Virgil, Eclog. vi., where he sings the principles of that philosophy in his drink. He is meant for ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... see the atheistic Epicurean and the devout Buddhist meeting on a common ground. But the beauties of the "Dhammapada" can only be realized by a careful study of this charming work. We would point out, for instance, in the chapter on Flowers, what is a piece of golden ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various

... demand some good reason why he should not use all things lawfully his, and enjoy to the full every innocent pleasure, yet that demand was made solely in the interests of human freedom, never in that of self-indulgence. He seems to have been ascetic by nature—a Stoic, not an Epicurean, by the very make-up of his personality. The reader will see this more clearly as we pass on to the succeeding phases of Father Hecker's interior life. But we cannot leave the statement even here without explaining ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... with bare-pated and long-coated Mongols hawking venison and other products of their chase; comely Soochow harlots with reeking native scents rising from their hair; water-carriers and barbers from sturdy Shantung; cooks from epicurean Canton; bankers from Shansi—the whole Empire of China sending its best to its old-world barbaric capital, which has ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... letter of the pile without so much as grasping the meaning of them. From time to time he glanced up at Janet as she flitted about the room. By George, she was more desirable than he had ever dared to imagine! He felt temporarily balked, but hopeful. On his way to the mill he had dwelt with Epicurean indulgence on this sight of her, and he had not been disappointed. He had also thought that he might venture upon more than the mere feasting of his eyes, yet found an inspiring alleviation in the fact that she by no means absolutely ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... politics. When a young man joined a school, he committed himself to all its opinions, not only as to the end of life, which was the main point of division, but as to all questions on all subjects. The Stoic did not differ merely in his ethics from the Epicurean; he differed also in his theology and his physics and his metaphysics. Aristotle, as Shakespeare knew, thought young men "unfit to hear moral philosophy". And yet it was a question—or rather the question—of moral philosophy, the answer to which decided the young man's opinions on all other points. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock

... St. James's street, where the wine-merchant lived, Sir Philip Baddely picked up several young men of his acquaintance, who were all eager to witness a trial of taste, of epicurean taste, between the baronet and Clarence Hervey. Amongst his other accomplishments our hero piqued himself upon the exquisite accuracy of his organs of taste. He neither loved wine, nor was he fond of eating; but at fine dinners, with young men ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth

... and even to make the title hereditary. Madame was right in wishing to aggrandise her brother, but he declared that he valued his liberty above all things, and that he would not sacrifice it except for a person he really loved. He was a true Epicurean philosopher, and a man of great capacity, according to the report of those who knew him well, and judged him impartially. It was entirely at his option to have had the reversion of M. de St. Florentin's place, and the place of ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various

... narrow confinement, between optimistic horizons which would allow of stultification.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} And thus very gradually, I began to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian Greek, and also the Christian who in fact is only a kind of Epicurean, and who, with his belief that "faith saves," carries the principle of Hedonism as far as possible—far beyond all intellectual honesty.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} If I am ahead of all other psychologists in anything, it is in ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... fluids, that it is by no means proper to allow a child to eat all kinds of wholesome foods which a healthy adult stomach can consume with impunity, to say nothing of the rich, highly seasoned viands, sweetmeats, and epicurean dishes which seldom fail to form some part of the bill of fare. It is true that many children are endowed with so much constitutional vigor that they do live and seemingly thrive, notwithstanding dietetic errors; but the integrity of ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... about fifty years of age, or probably a little more. M. Bertin is a man of esprit, and of literary tastes, with the habits, feelings, and demeanor of a well-bred gentleman. Of an agreeable and facile commerce, the editor of the Debats is a man of elegant and Epicurean habits; but does not allow his luxurious tastes to interfere with the business of this nether world. According to M. Texier, he reads with his own proprietary and editorial eyes all the voluminous correspondence of the office on his return from ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... felicitous in spite of his great successes, he suggests at times a very different set of influences. But he had his jovial, full-feeding side, - the side that comes out in the "Contes Drolatiques," which are the romantic and epicurean chronicle of the old manors and abbeys of this region. And he was, moreover, the product of a soil into which a great deal of history had been trodden. Balzac was genuinely as well as affectedly monarchical, and he was saturated with, a sense of the past. Number 39 Rue Royale - of which ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... the work had the sanction of his authority. But no inference in favour of Lucretius's doctrine can justly be drawn from this circumstance. (70) Cicero, though already sufficiently acquainted with the principles of the Epicurean sect, might not be averse to the perusal of a production, which collected and enforced them in a nervous strain of poetry; especially as the work was likely to prove interesting to his friend Atticus, and would perhaps afford ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... its essence. For we must either believe all men or some men; but 88 to believe all is to undertake an impossibility, and to accept things that are in opposition to each other. If we believe some only, let someone tell us with whom to agree, for the Platonist would say with Plato, the Epicurean with Epicurus, and others would advise in a corresponding manner; and so as they disagree, with no one to decide, they bring us round again to the suspension of judgment. Furthermore, he who tells us to ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick

... commonplaceness, all the meanness, all the semi-animal poverty of their souls. Religion, together with the religious significance of life, sheds sunshine over such perpetually harassed men, and makes even their own aspect endurable to them, it operates upon them as the Epicurean philosophy usually operates upon sufferers of a higher order, in a refreshing and refining manner, almost TURNING suffering TO ACCOUNT, and in the end even hallowing and vindicating it. There is perhaps nothing so admirable in Christianity and Buddhism as their art of teaching even the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... Castillet. They are great, splendid establishments, with wide, overhung, awninged terraces, and potted plants and electric lights and gold and tinsel, and mixed drinks and ices and sorbets, and all the epicurean cold things which one may find in the best establishment in Paris. These cafes are side by side and opposite each other, and are as typical of the life of the town as is the Rambla typical of Barcelona, or the Cannebiere of Marseilles. ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... law of his higher nature, as his predominant end,—but not to the harm or oppression of his particular and private nature, but to its most felicitous conservation and advancement,—at large in its new Epicurean emancipations, rejoicing in its great fruition, happy in its untiring activities, triumphing over all impediments, celebrating in secret lyrics, its immortal triumphs over 'death and all oblivious enmity,' and finding, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... upon their fanciful theories, because they were not interested in the truth of them: when a man has nothing to lose, he may be in good humour with his opponent. Accordingly you see in Lucian, the Epicurean, who argues only negatively, keeps his temper; the Stoick, who has something positive to preserve, grows angry[34]. Being angry with one who controverts an opinion which you value, is a necessary consequence ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell

... Even the epicurean Tubby Hopkins voted dinner that day a great success, and Hiram, with becoming modesty, took his congratulations blushingly. In mid-afternoon, after seeing that the camp was in good working order, the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson

... He charmed your mind when he spoke, and, when not speaking, he charmed your heart. No passion of hatred or envy could have been expressed by this physiognomy; it would have been impossible for him not to be kind. Yet it was not a kindness of indifference or nonchalance, as in the epicurean face of a La Fontaine; it was a loving kindness, intelligent with regard to itself and others, which inspired gratitude and the outpouring of the heart, and defied a person not to love him. A gay childishness was the characteristic of this figure, a soul on holiday when he laid down his pen to forget ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... smiled at this Epicurean maxim. It was evident that the fever of independence was at its crisis ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... company of people around a table; it is not sufficient that the food before them be well prepared, well served, within reach and easy to digest, but it is important that it should be some choice dish or, better still, some dainty. The intellect is Epicurean; let us supply it with savory, delicate viands adapted to its taste; it will eat so much the more owing to its appetite being sharpened by sensuality. Two special condiments enter into the cuisine of this century, and, according to the hand that makes use of them, they ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... measured, he read as he might have read a novel, a smile of pleasure on his lips. But in none could he find exactly what he wanted. He had read somewhere that every man was born a Platonist, an Aristotelian, a Stoic, or an Epicurean; and the history of George Henry Lewes (besides telling you that philosophy was all moonshine) was there to show that the thought of each philosopher was inseparably connected with the man he was. When you knew that ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham

... would sin no more than would a scientist who would admit that, except by the "up and down" process, quartz has ever fallen from the sky—but Continuity: it is not excommunicated if part of or incorporated in a baptized meteorite—St. Catherine's of Mexico, I think. It's as epicurean a distinction as any ever made by theologians. Fassig lists a quartz pebble, found in a hailstone (Bibliography, part 2-355). "Up and down," of course. Another object of quartzite was reported to have fallen, in the autumn of 1880, at Schroon Lake, N.Y.—said ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... Epicurean rascal is this! My heart is ready to crack with impatience. Who says this is improvident jealousy? my wife hath sent to him; the hour is fixed; the match is made. Would any man have thought 260 this? See the hell of having a false woman! My bed shall be abused, my ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare

... fussily thunderous wings!" he said, half aloud. "I wonder if you think you're an aeroplane. Surely, they'd never train you to evolute in squadrons. You are an anarchist, you are, and an epicurean ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... Felix admitted. "They are sober; they are even severe. They are of a pensive cast; they take things hard. I think there is something the matter with them; they have some melancholy memory or some depressing expectation. It 's not the epicurean temperament. My uncle, Mr. Wentworth, is a tremendously high-toned old fellow; he looks as if he were undergoing martyrdom, not by fire, but by freezing. But we shall cheer them up; we shall do them good. They will take a good deal of stirring ...
— The Europeans • Henry James

... to talk of the life in the capital, the condition of the army and the Confederate States, furnishing a continual surprise to Prescott, who now saw that beneath the man's occasional frivolity and epicurean tastes lay a mind of wonderful penetration, possessing that precious quality generally known as insight. He revealed a minute knowledge of the Confederacy and its chieftains, both civil and military, but he never risked an opinion ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... reason, truth is that of which it can be proved that it is, that it exists, whether it console us or not. And reason is certainly not a consoling faculty. That terrible Latin poet Lucretius, whose apparent serenity and Epicurean ataraxia conceal so much despair, said that piety consists in the power to contemplate all things with a serene soul—pacata posse mente omnia tueri. And it was the same Lucretius who wrote that religion can ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... opulent house had fallen into, and of the unhappy son banished from his father's table. As for the General, I had never yet seen him in such good spirits. The table so well served, the appetizing dishes, and the wines which he had such a delicate manner of tasting—all this just suited his epicurean habits. Afterwards we drank coffee in the garden, and Rolf insisted upon our drinking a bowl of May wine; for he was most anxious to display his skill in the composition of this ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint

... pierce her heart she would yield. The question was whether she had a heart, and she was not altogether sure of this herself. On one thing, however, she was resolved—she would not give up her liberty, ease and epicurean life for the duties, obligations and probable sorrows of wifehood, unless she met a man who had the power to ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe

... and looking as though she enjoyed the fun. But to Mary there was something terrible in it all. She had been so desirous to be happy,—to be gay,—to amuse herself, and yet to be innocent. Her father's somewhat epicurean doctrines had filled her mind completely. And what had hitherto come of it? Her husband mistrusted her; and she at this moment certainly mistrusted him most grievously. Could she fail to mistrust him? And she, absolutely conscious of purity, had been so grievously suspected! As she looked round ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... belonging to barbarians. A mountaineer, not being quite so fastidious, scouts these ideas, considering them foolish prejudices of people who have never been forced by necessity to test the wisdom of their condemnation. Let the epicurean sages have their choice, eat horse flesh or starve, and, they confidently maintain, horse flesh would gradually grow to be considered a dainty, the rarer over beef, in ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... presented itself with an urgent and almost contemporaneous interest. In his conduct towards me, M. de Fontanes was not entirely actuated by some pages of mine he had read, or by a few friendly opinions he had heard expressed. This learned Epicurean, become powerful, and the intellectual favourite of the most potent Sovereign in Europe, loved literature for itself with a sincere and disinterested attachment. The truly beautiful touched him as sensibly as in the days of his early youth and poetical inspirations. What was still more extraordinary, ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot



Words linked to "Epicurean" :   sensualist, indulgent, hedonic, Epicurus



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com