"Erotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anecdote; two novels, En Rade (1887) and La-Bas (1891), both of which are interesting experiments, but neither of them an entire success; and a volume of art criticism, Certains (1890), notable for a single splendid essay, that on Felicien Rops, the etcher of the fantastically erotic. En Rade is a sort of deliberately exaggerated record—vision rather than record—of the disillusions of a country sojourn, as they affect the disordered nerves of a town nevrose. The narrative is punctuated by nightmares, marvellously woven ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... modern, have been the "mysteries" of the temple of love so brutally exposed. With all his genius in naming certain unmentionable matters, I don't believe in the virility of these pieces, scintillating with sexual images. They leave one cold despite their erotic vehemence; the abuse of the vocative is not persuasive, their raptures are largely rhetorical. This exaltation, this ecstasy, seen at its best in William Blake, is sexual ecstasy, but only when the mood is married to the mot lumiere is there authentic conflagration. Then ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... cold as virgin snow, how many a matron upon whose fairest fame not a breath of scandal has blown, how many a widow who proudly claims the title univira, must relieve their pent-up feelings by what may be called mental prostitution. So I would term the dear delights of sexual converse and that sub-erotic literature, the phthisical "French novel," whose sole merit is "suggestiveness," taking the place of Oriental morosa voluptas and of the unnatural practices—Tribadism and so forth, still rare, we believe, in England. How ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... serenading Me as the tremulous tide tracks the meandering moon; Climbing as Romeo clomb, peradventure by help of a flower-pot, Where in her balconied bower lay, inexpressibly coy, Juliet, not as the others, supinely, insanely erotic, Pallid and yellow of hue, very degenerate souls, Rioting round with the rapture of palpitant ichorous ardour, But an immaculate maid, 'one,' you may say, 'of the best'! His, I repeat, is the anguish—my ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... in a lighter and erotic vein. He had many admirers in his day who styled him the French Tibullus. His influence is perceptible in ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... very like those of the pork butcher in the next street, or the footman over the way, we are conscious of a feeling of disappointment almost amounting to a personal grievance. Mr. Carlyle and Algernon Swinburne satisfy us. They look as we feel graphic writers and erotic poets ought to look. Not so the literary females who affect the compartment labelled "For ladies only," in the reading room of the British Museum or on the Metropolitan Railway. They are mostly like one's maiden aunts, and savour far less of the ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... bard. (In stature, not in song!) Though passion-scarred, Porphyrogenitus at least he looks; Haughty as one who rivalry scarce brooks; Unreminiscent now of youthful rage, Almost "respectable," and well-nigh sage, Dame GRUNDY owns her once redoubted foe, Whose polished paganry's erotic flow, And red anarchic wrath 'gainst priests, and kings, The virtues, and most other "proper" things, Once drew her frown where now her smile's bestowed. Such is the power of timely palinode! Soft twanged his lyre and loud his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 22, 1892 • Various
... may become more and more fashionable. This is by no means impossible. Country life has no such rigors as the football field or the outing in the wilds. When as a people we have passed from the sensuous and erotic wave on the crest of which we seem at present to be carried along, we can with profit, intellectually, morally, socially, and physically, "go forth under the open sky and list to Nature's teachings." Everything except the present glare ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... was subdivided into four kinds, prophetic, initiatory, poetic, erotic, having four gods presiding over them; the first was the inspiration of Apollo, the second that of Dionysus, the third that of the Muses, the fourth that of Aphrodite and Eros. In the description of the last kind of madness, which was also said to be the best, we spoke of the ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... character of Bluebeard stands out in these passages—Bluebeard, morbid, erotic, megalophonous megalomaniac, with his grandiose ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Cultured members, on drinking it, were wont to say things about Locusta and Borgia. The commoner sort swore like hell at Freddy Parker. It made you feel squiffy after the sixth glass—argumentative, magisterial, maudlin, taciturn, erotic, sentimental, sea-sick, ecstatic, paralysed, lachrymose, hilarious, pugilistic—according to your temperament. Whatever your temperament it gave you a thundering head next morning, and a throat like Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace. It was known ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... come ye to the woodlands; and he that hath no money let him feast upon those things which are really rich and abiding." While we are making New Year resolves let us resolve to spend less time with shams, more with realities; less with dogma, more with sermons in stones; less with erotic novels and baneful journals, more with the books in the running brooks; listening less readily to gossip and malice, more willingly to the tongues in trees; spending more pleasureful hours with the music of bird and breeze, rippling ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... his works which are erotic in the true sense of the word I have given a sufficient account, and one with which I am convinced even the most captious will not find fault. [18] When necessity has obliged me to touch upon the subject ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... within the aura of his departed uncle. It was in this book-lined apartment that Sir Jacques had transacted the affairs of the ugly little church at Mid Hatton and the volumes burdening the leather-edged shelves were of a character meet for the eye of an elder. The smaller erotic collection in the locked bureau in the study presumably had companioned Sir ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... mythology, the nine sisters who presided over music, poetry, art, and science. They were Clio the muse of history, Euterpe of music, especially the flute, Thalia of comedy, Melpomene of tragedy, Terpsichore of dancing, Erato of erotic poetry, mistress of the lyre, Polyhymnia of sacred poetry, Urania of astronomy, Calliope ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... been composed during the lifetime of Socrates) appears altogether untrustworthy. And the statement of some critics, that the Phaedrus was Plato's earliest composition, is clearly nothing more than an inference (doubtful at best, and in my judgment erroneous) from its dithyrambic style and erotic subject. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... off his pince-nez and his eyes looked bewildered and malignant: "In the name of all who had been tortured, all who have exchanged the springtime beauty of the parks for the erotic atmosphere of boudoirs; all who in the soft luxury of their homes forgot, and have now lost their claim on Russia—I say you are supremely comfortable, and we envy you! One may work here, one may even ... marry ... You have never ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... hand, and a militant commercial movement on the other.... The eroticism which became so prevalent in the verse of many of the younger poets was minor because it was little more than a pose—not because it was erotic.... It was a passing mood which gave the poetry of the hour a hothouse fragrance; a perfume ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... for the physiologist as well as the theologian; and the "holy widow," as her biographers call her, becomes an example, and a lamentable one, of the tendency of the erotic principle to ally ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... misconstruction on the part of the latter, I shall do so, begging pardon of the learned. It means, "My life, I love you!" which sounds very prettily in all languages, and is as much in fashion in Greece at this day as, Juvenal tells us, the two first words were amongst the Roman ladies, whose erotic expressions were all Hellenised. [The reference is to the [Greek: Zoe/ kai Psyche] of Roman courtesans. Vide Juvenal, lib. ii., Sat. vi. line 195; ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... sometimes think of the two young men who, but yesterday, had rejoiced in such strength and vigor and charm of power and who were so good to look upon? She was a wife now, but to another sort of man. Even the feminine among writers of erotic novels have not yet revealed what the young moon thinks when she "holds the old moon in her arms." Anyhow, Hilltop was a defense and a great provider of food. He was a fine figure of ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... easy to answer him by ruling out modern poetry from the argument. There was more good poetry, neither complex, nor erotic, nor esoteric, written before our generation than even a maker of anthologies is likely to read. But I am not willing to dodge the issue so readily. There is modern poetry for every reader who is competent to read poetry at all. If there is ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... strew sugar on bottled spiders, or try to make mystical divinity out of the Song of Solomon, much less out of the erotic and bacchanalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined to defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and tears off his turban and throws it at the head of the meddling dervis, and throws his glass after the turban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... processions took their prescribed way; ablutions were performed; victims led up to the temple; votive offerings hung on the trees; festal dances, it may be, performed; while in the cloister which skirted the peribolus, dealers in shrines and images chaffered with their customers, erotic poets sang their lays, lovers whispered, fortune-tellers plied their trade, and a throng of pilgrims walked lazily along, or sat on the ground, breathing in the soft, moist air, feasting their eyes upon the beauty of upspringing ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... the preceding age was as a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance all the flowers of the field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own, which endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music and the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer. Nor ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... together, fuck [Vulg.]; sleep around, play the field. masturbate, jerk off [Coll.], jack off [Coll.], play with oneself. have the hots [Coll.]; become aroused, get hot; have an erection, get it up. come, climax, ejaculate. Adj. sexy, erotic, sexual, carnal, sensual. hot, horny, randy, rutting; passionate, lusty, hot-blooded, libidinous; up, in the mood. homosexual, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... ephemeral fiction, Exotic, erotic or smart, The vice of delirious diction, The latest excesses of Art— You flay in felicitous fashion, With dexterous choice of your tools, A scourge for unsavoury passion, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... Jesuit father who won distinction as a poet and also as an opponent of the witch-burning mania. His collection of lyric poems called Trutz-Nachtigall, or Match-Nightingale, is interesting for its singular blend of erotic imagery with sincere religious feeling. The poems indicate a genuine delight in certain aspects of nature. The selections follow Wolff's edition, in ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... purpose may very well be erroneous, since only experience can show what causes a discomfort to cease. When the experience needed is common and simple, as in the case of hunger, a mistake is not very probable. But in other cases—e.g. erotic desire in those who have had little or no experience of its satisfaction—mistakes are to be expected, and do in fact very often occur. The practice of inhibiting impulses, which is to a great extent necessary to civilized life, makes mistakes ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... down to the manufacture of mercantile fiction, had ideas of a nobler sort, which bore their fruit in a slender book of poems. In subject they are either erotic, mythologic, or descriptive of nature. So polished are they that the mind seems to slide over them: so faultless in form that the critics hailed them with highest praise, and as many as ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... act culminating in emission. It is the sexual excitement more than the emission which exhausts. As shown in another part of this work, thoughts of sexual intimacies, long continued, lead to the worst effects. To a man, whose imagination is filled with erotic fancies the emission comes as a merciful interruption to the burning, harassing and wearing excitement which so ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... walked along after leaving the house. "There were several 'complexes,' as they are called, there—the most interesting and important being the erotic, as usual. Now, take the lion in the dream, with his mane. That, I suspect, was Dr. Maudsley. If you are acquainted with him, you will recall his heavy, ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... country, but permission was refused and until his death in 774 he was a considerable personage at Court, receiving high rank and titles. The Chinese Tripitaka contains 108 translations[661] ascribed to him, mostly of a tantric character, though to the honour of China it must be said that the erotic mysticism of some Indian tantras never found favour there. Amogha is a considerable, though not auspicious, figure in the history of Chinese Buddhism, and, so far as such changes can be the work of one man, on him rests the responsibility of making it become ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... college, to enter the Middle Temple, in order to study law. With equal acuteness and adaptation to character, he dedicated the poems to the Prince of Wales, an anacreontic hero. As might be expected, with such a patron, the volume was a success. In 1801 he published another series of erotic poems, under the title The Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little. This gained for him, in Byron's line, the name of "the young Catullus of his day"; and, at the instance of Lord Moira, he was appointed poet-laureate, a post he filled ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... ago—a cry grown vain; this man's contempt for the Boers—nay, was it so much as a man, with a man's evil to answer for, that furnished him here; was it not rather that less guilty judge, the crowd?—this man's—nay, this boy's—erotic sickness, or his cruelty—charged with all these, Swinburne's poetry is primed; it explodes with thunder and fire. But such sharing is somewhat too familiar for dignity; such community of goods parodies the Franciscans. As one friar goes darned for another's rending, having ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... Leo, Photius, and Theophylact as calling Christ the bridegroom of souls.) In the West, we find it in Ambrose, less prominently in Augustine and Jerome. Dionysius seizes on the phrase of Ignatius, "My love has been crucified," to justify erotic imagery ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... memoirs of courtesans, alcove confessions, erotic obscenity, the scandal tucked away in pictures in a bookseller's shop window: that which is contained in the following pages is rigidly clean and pure. Do not expect the photograph of Pleasure decolletee: the following study is the ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... song of sixpence, a cupboard full of rye!'" he said. "Almost a goal! But not ONLY liquors, my little friend. Champagne—cases of it—caviar, canned grouse with truffles, lobster, cheeses, fine cigars, everything you could think of, erotic, exotic and narcotic. An orgy in cans and bottles, a bacchanalian revel: a cupboard full of indigestion, joy, forgetfulness and katzenjammer. Oh, my suffering palate, to have to leave it all without one ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... deception. To achieve that tone in its fulness it is necessary to take for one's own the praeterita (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped him—not to live but—to have lived; it is necessary to have lived much more than any man lives, and to make a common hoard of erotic remembrances ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... Prophets; wisdom alike equal to that of the Stoics and of the serious Epicureans as in Ecclesiastes and the Proverbs; everywhere marvellous imagination, always concise at least, if not restrained; lyrical sensuality which recalls the most perturbed creations of erotic Greeks and Latins, whilst surpassing them in beauty as in the Song of Songs; and throughout there is this grandeur, this simple majesty, this easy and natural sublimity which in the same degree is to be found only occasionally in Homer and ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... darkness there an irresistible grief assailed him. He wept as never before in all his life. And he tasted the bitter salt of his own tears. He wept for his mother, aged and bowed by trouble, bewildered, ready to give up the struggle—his little sister now forced into erotic girlhood, blind, wilful, bold, on the wrong path, doomed beyond his power or any earthly power—the men he had met, warped by the war, materialistic, lost in the maze of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, dead to chivalry and the honor of ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... know no phrase better fitted to describe his tone than that old favorite of the erotic novelists. It was vibrant with passion. It breathed bitterness. It sizzled with ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... christened it by his name; he was understood to be the "unknown friend," to whom a literary Polish countess had dedicated her "Letters against the restraint of the Marriage Tie;" a female German metaphysician, sixty years old, had fallen (Platonically) in love with him, and had taken to writing erotic romances in her old age. Such were some of the rumours that reached my father's ears on the subject of his ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... novelist, Christo Boteff (1847-1876), lyric poet, whose ode on the death of his friend Haji Dimitr, an insurgent leader, is one of the best in the language, and Petko Slaveikoff (died 1895), whose poems, patriotic, satirical and erotic, moulded the modern poetical language and exercised a great influence over the people. Gavril Krstovitch, formerly governor-general of eastern Rumelia, and Marin Drinoff, a Slavist of high repute, have written historical works. Stamboloff, the statesman, was the author of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... there are passages of a large historical understanding. Of all modern writers he is foremost Latin, in knowledge, in instinct for beauty and form, in love of tradition. Even in his erotic and mystical passages this vein of purest gold may be seen, this understanding of the potential greatness of the tradition into which he was born. What wonder, then, that the first fundamental passion of the mature man's soul should be his desire to proclaim once more the cause of Latin ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... to have been worked up into a novel; both letters and narrative are too good to be the unaided composition of Gildon himself, but possibly Mrs. Behn in her after life may have elaborated and told him these erotic episodes to conceal the squalor and misery of the real facts of her early Dutch mission. It is proved indeed in aim and circumstance to have ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... material about Verlaine's response to erotic appeals. His nervous organisation was so finely strung that, when he loved, he loved with his whole nature, with body, soul and spirit, in a sort of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... to imply—for their statements are not very explicit—that Saktism formed part if not of the teaching of the Buddha, at least of the medley of beliefs held by his disciples. But I see no proof that Saktist beliefs—that is to say erotic mysticism founded on the worship of goddesses—were prevalent in Magadha or Kosala before the Christian era. Although Siri, the goddess of luck, is mentioned in the Pitakas, the popular deities whom ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of law; for many of them have had children by their lawful wives during their episcopate. The author of the usage which obtains in Thessaly was Heliodorus, bishop of Tricca in that country, under whose name it is said that erotic books are extant, entitled Ethiopica, which he composed in his youth. The same custom prevails in Thessalonica and in ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... "The erotic motive is almost entirely absent from American poetry. Even our younger American poets are more profoundly interested in the why and wherefore of things than in the girdle of Helen or the gleaming limbs of 'the white implacable Aphrodite.'" ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... the ladies who had mislaid their fans blushed as they listened to the old gentleman, whose brilliant elocution won their indulgence for certain details which we have suppressed, as too erotic for the present age; nevertheless, we may believe that each lady complimented him in private; for some time afterwards he gave to each of them, as also to the masculine guests, a copy of this charming story, twenty-five copies of which ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... The slightly erotic excitement, which is apt to take hold upon the spirits at the end of a dinner graced by fair women and flowers, betrayed itself in the tone of the conversations, and the reminiscences of this bazaar, at which the ladies—urged on by a noble spirit of emulation in collecting the largest ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... Testament; but I seriously think that the loss of the first fourteen books would be a distinct gain to the world. For the rest, there is considerable literary and some ethical value in Job (which is not Jewish), in Ecclesiastes (which is Pagan), in the Song of Solomon (which is an erotic love song), and in parts of Isaiah, Proverbs, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Amos. But I don't think any of these books equal to Henry George's Progress and Poverty, or William Morris' News from Nowhere. Of course, I am not blaming Moses and the Prophets: ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... same time. These impulses are most likely to be effective when the subject is asleep, and particularly if he is lying upon his back. The result of the stimulus is to cause an erection, accompanied usually by an erotic dream, the whole phenomenon culminating in an emission of the contents of the seminal vesicles and followed, of course, by a relief of the pressure which was the cause of the condition. This phenomenon has been variously called ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... teach youthful maidens anything at all of Botany? Or Mathematics cause a thrill erotic in the heart? Will flirting give a lady brains—if she hasn't got any?— Or solve the esoteric problems hid in Ray's Third Part? You may lose yourself completely in pursuing Etiology, Or safely throw yourself away upon a Cubic Rule; But nowhere ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... who 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
... I knew more of the girl than Mr. Powell—if only her true name; and more of Captain Anthony—if only the fact that he was the son of a delicate erotic poet of a markedly refined and autocratic temperament. Yes, I knew their joint stories which Mr. Powell did not know. The chapter in it he was opening to me, the sea-chapter, with such new personages as the sentimental and apoplectic chief-mate ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... in his conception of the beauty of women. He betrays in his loss of serenity that he is less than heretofore impervious to the stings of an invading sensuality, which serves to make of his mythological and erotic scenes belonging to this late time a tribute to the glories of the flesh unennobled by the gilding touch of the purer flame. And the painter who, when Charles V. retired into his solitude, had suffered the feeble flame of his life to die slowly out, was to go ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... English, and privately printed, a body of verse from the Latin, and our aim was to follow it with literal and unexpurgated renderings of Catullus, Juvenal, and Ausonius, from the same tongue. Sir Richard laid great stress on the necessity of thoroughly annotating each translation from an erotic (and especially a paederastic) point of view, but subsequent circumstances caused ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... who was accompanied by a few of her female friends, danced with unusual grace, and her movements were remarkably free from erotic incitation. Holding a pair of gourds in which little stones rattled not unmusically, like castanets, she gyrated in the moonlight and pirouetted on her toes with such lightness and elegance that my curiosity ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... replied he, "are only worthy of my master Trediakofski,[45] and, indeed, remind me very much of his little erotic couplets." ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... London. I am sorry I must assure my female readers that very few of them had reference to Mary Flood Jones. He had, however, very carefully packed up the tress, and could bring that out for proper acts of erotic worship at seasons in which his mind might be less engaged with affairs of state than it was at present. Would he make a failure of this great matter which he had taken in hand? He could not but tell himself that the chances were twenty ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... and adds that one is almost inclined to suspect that what is now known as the Ionian key was formerly called the Phrygian, and vice versa. The fact is, however, that the names have not changed—it is the ear which has changed. If before Calvisius C-major was the erotic key, in the seventeenth century G-major was considered so; in the eighteenth, on the contrary, when love poetry jumps from the merry and playful over to the sentimental, the musical ear likewise altered accordingly, and even before the time of Werther and Siegwart the languishing, gently melancholy ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... Tom Moore published a collection of erotic anacreontics which are also typical in form; Moore speaks of the necessity of catching "the careless facility with which Anacreon appears to have trifled,'' as a reason why anacreontics are often tame and worthless. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... dip into politely erotic fiction seemed to canalize my poor little grass-grown mind into activity, and Diddums and I sat up until the wee sma' hours discoursing on life and letters. He started me off by somewhat pensively remarking that all women seem ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... they had been taught to respect churches. Nobody had ever warned them against a church as a place where frivolous women paraded in their best clothes; where stories of improper females like Potiphar's wife, and erotic poetry like the Song of Songs, were read aloud; where the sensuous and sentimental music of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Brahms was more popular than severe music by greater composers; where the prettiest sort of pretty pictures of pretty ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... first glance. When POPE was a child, he found in his mother's closet a small library of mystical devotion; but it was not suspected, till the fact was discovered, that the effusions of love and religion poured forth in his "Eloisa" were caught from the seraphic raptures of those erotic mystics, who to the last retained a place in his library among the classical bards of antiquity. The accidental perusal of Quintus Curtius first made BOYLE, to use his own words, "in love with other than pedantic books, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... class in China was enthusiastic over romanticized pictures of the struggle of the gentry in the third century. "The Tale of the Three Kingdoms" became the model for countless historical novels of its own and subsequent periods. Later, mainly in the sixteenth century, the sensational and erotic novel developed, most of all in Nanking. It has deeply influenced Japanese writers, but was mercilessly suppressed by the Chinese gentry which resented the frivolity of this wealthy and luxurious ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... been sent away to school for two reasons. One reason was Miss Farrel's, the other originated with her caretakers. Miss Farrel had a jealous dread of the girl's forming one of those erotic friendships, which are really diseased love-affairs, with another girl or a teacher, and the Wiltons' reason was a pecuniary one. Among the Wiltons' few assets was a distant female relative of pronounced accomplishments and educational attainments, who was even worse off ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... extremities; my heart would not beat like a side-drum; my blushes would not come perspiring through my whiskers. Her winking would altogether misfire. Why? Because her winking would be physiological and not erotic. If you ever learnt to love her, it would not be for any lovelight in her eye; it would never be the quick, fierce, hot, biting electric passion of the fleshly poets, it would be what a chemist might call the "eremacausis" kindled by habit. Mrs. Smith's tears are quite the poorest ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... delightful reading; but the accounts of the horrible macerations to which he subjected himself for many years shock our moral sense almost as much as our sensibilities; we do not now believe that God takes pleasure in sufferings inflicted in His honour. Moreover, the erotic symbolism of the visions is occasionally unpleasant: we are no longer in the company of such sane and healthy people as Eckhart and Tauler. The half-sensuous pleasure of ecstasy was evidently a temptation ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... variations in the structure and distribution of the sensory corpuscles—i.e. the real organs of the sexual sense, which develop in certain papillae of the corium of the phallus, and have been evolved from ordinary tactile corpuscles of the corium by erotic ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... which confound religion with nervous excitement, and are more or less erotic in their character. The excitement necessary for prophesying is commonly produced by dancing, jumping, pirouetting, or self-castigation; and the absurdities spoken at such times are regarded as the direct expression of divine wisdom. The religious exercises resemble ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace |
