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Forbidden fruit   /fˈɔrbɪdən frut/   Listen
Forbidden fruit

noun
1.
Originally an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden; it is now used to refer to anything that is tempting but dangerous (as sexuality).






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Forbidden fruit" Quotes from Famous Books



... these delicacies surrounding them, though invited to taste. It is not that the wish or the appetite is lacking to them, but all these fine fruits have been offered them so lately that they have still the somewhat acid charm of green apples or forbidden fruit. They approach, but they hesitate ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz

... teacher, and very little time is left to me to write PROFESSIONALLY, seeing that I cannot keep awake after midnight and that I want to spend all my evening with my family; but this lack of time stimulates me and makes me find a true pleasure in digging away; it is like a forbidden fruit that I ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... chums Tom Taylor and Charles Lamb had been O'er bottled porter and the Fairy Queen! In youth, one day, seeking forbidden fruit Tom tumbled from the branches with his loot, And broken bones compelled the lad to go On straddling crutches, warily and slow, Counting the pebbles on his path below. The noisy pleasures of the open air, The football kicked exuberant here and there. Cricket, beloved of sinewy juvenals, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... to have left no ill-effects, though I prefer that all inside matter be carefully edited before consumption by that small Red. So Struthers hereafter must stand the angel with the flaming sword and guard the gates that open upon that tree of forbidden fruit. Her own colic, by the way, is a thing of the past, and at present she's extremely interested in Pinshaw, who, she tells me, was once a cabinet-maker in England, and came out to California for his health. Struthers, as usual, ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... a subject in relief, at the bottom, which looked very like art as old as the end of the fifteenth century—although a good deal worn away, from the regularity pf periodical rubbing. The subject represented the eating of the forbidden fruit. Adam, Eve, the Serpent, the trees, and the fruit—with labels, on which the old gothic German letter was sufficiently obvious—all told a tale which was irresistible to antiquarian feelings. Accordingly I proposed terms of purchase (one ducat) to the good owner of the dish:—who was at first ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... perhaps forced to learn lessons tabooed by dragons," I replied to this; "so if I know things or have thought things that every other girl doesn't think or know, it's because they were forbidden fruit. They ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... Her eyes explored me with unjustifiable hostility. "He's got dirty hands," she said, stabbing at the forbidden fruit. "And there's a ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... striking water is wonderful. On the dryest parts of the prairie, miles from any permanent stream, his ejections of mud may be found. Shallow or deep, his borings always reach water. He is always at home, but less accessible to callers than the ant. To the smaller birds he is forbidden fruit. In wet weather, when his vestibule is shallow, the sand-hill crane may burglarize him, or even get a snap judgment on him at the front door. The bill of the great curlew cannot be sent in so effectively, not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... its way into the hearts of the first pair, and of all their descendants. For it begins with casting a doubt on the reality of the prohibition. 'Hath God said?' is the first parallel opened by the besieger. The fascinations of the forbidden fruit are not dangled at first before Eve, but an apparently innocent doubt is filtered into her ear. And is not that the way in which we are still snared? The reality of moral distinctions, the essential wrongness of the sin, is obscured by a mist of sophistication. 'There is no harm in it' steals ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... the weariness and heavy atmosphere of a sick-room, in no way can we send a ray of sunlight athwart their pallid faces more effectually than by placing a basket of fragrant fruit on the table beside them. Even though the physician may render it "forbidden fruit," their eyes will feast upon it, and the aroma will teach them that the world is not passing on, unheeding and uncaring whether ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... magnet, magnetism, magnetic force; allectation|, allective|; temptation, enticement, agacerie[obs3], allurement, witchery; bewitchment, bewitchery; charm; spell &c. 993; fascination, blandishment, cajolery; seduction, seducement; honeyed words, voice of the tempter, song of the Sirens forbidden fruit, golden apple. persuasibility[obs3], persuasibleness[obs3]; attractability[obs3]; impressibility, susceptibility; softness; persuasiveness, attractiveness; tantalization[obs3]. influence, prompting, dictate, instance; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... believe, Enamoured, simple-minded, poor, But the indifferent princess, Divinity without access Of the imperial Neva's shore. O Men, how very like ye are To Eve the universal mother, Possession hath no power to please, The serpent to unlawful trees Aye bids ye in some way or other— Unless forbidden fruit we eat, Our paradise is no ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... slavery gained a foothold in North America until the direful hour that witnessed its dissolution amid the shock of embattled arms, learning was the forbidden fruit that no Negro dared taste. Positive and explicit statutes everywhere, as fiery swords, drove him away hungry from the tree of intellectual life; and all persons were forbidden to pluck the fruit for him, upon ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... narrative, after Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit, "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons," or, as the Revised Version expresses it, "girdles". The girdle of fig-leaves, however, was originally ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... consumption that was evidently taking place. I had heard that there were nations of savages who considered shirts a sort of superfluity, and who moved about in very much the same costume as that in which our primal mother clothed herself just previously to indulging in the forbidden fruit. But they could not have thus suddenly taken to the wearing of machine-made shirts. There was a paragraph also in our paper which stated that the usual dress in hot weather, in some parts of our own South, was only a hat and spurs. This, however, I regarded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... the rubbish overboard. If you could succeed in getting off the peel of an orange in two or three big pieces, or if you could persuade yourself to leave a reasonably large core of an apple, or, best of all, if you had the limp skin of a yellow banana, you cast the forbidden fruit into the water, and saw how quickly one of the gulls would pick it up, and how beautifully the others would fight him for it. Evidently gulls have a wider range of diet than little boys; also they have never been told that it is wrong ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... the girl boasted, but she had no real influence over him now. The forbidden fruit had allured him, but since it was his for the gathering it seemed sour—as indeed it was, and he was not the man to allow himself to be tied to the apron-strings of a child. When he was in a good humour ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton

... us."[518] Usher then relates how he seriously advised the young schoolmaster to conform to the popular religion; but, as Lynch declined to comply with his wishes, he was bound over, under sureties of L400 sterling, to "forbear teaching." The tree of knowledge was, in truth, forbidden fruit, and guarded sedulously by the fiery sword of the law. I cannot do more than name a few of the other distinguished men of this century. There was Florence Conry, Archbishop of Tuam, and founder of the Irish College of Louvain. He was one of the first to suggest and to carry ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... to the heliotrope comes fluttering down The peacock-butterfly, who sips and flies, So each glad day gold-winged came to the land And sipped its sip of time and fled away. Now in an evil hour I hungered, and I saw The tree of life that grew forbidden fruit. What harm, I thought, is there to always live? To live is happiness; but to die is pain. The rental claimed by death falls due too soon. So I reached forth, and took the fruit, and ate. Then all the sky grew dark, and from the land Malignant terrors drove me shrieking ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey

... she was not free. She trespassed on forbidden ground. She tasted the forbidden fruit, and found ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell

... because Eve tempted him, was placed in the garden as its keeper, and it was necessary in those days, as it is now, that woman should be a helpmeet for him; but you recollect that by the eating of the forbidden fruit, original sin came into the world. What was the expression of God to Adam? He says in the third chapter of Genesis, 17th verse: "Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... to do it? If there ever is a forbidden fruit in an Eden, will not our young Adams and Eves risk soul and body to find out how it tastes? Little Tom, the oldest boy, had the courage and enterprise and perseverance of a Captain Parry or Dr. Kane, and he used them all in voyages of discovery to forbidden ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... of which are Adam and Eve, are now in the Museum at Brussels. The attempt to paint the nude figure of the size of life, with the most careful attention to minute detail, is eminently successful, with the exception of a certain degree of hardness in the drawing. Eve holds in her right hand the forbidden fruit. In the filling up, which the shape of the altar-piece made necessary over these panels, there are small subjects in chiaroscuro: over Adam, the sacrifice of Cain and Abel; over Eve, the death of Abel—death, therefore, as the immediate ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... of Eden, holy and happy. And he commanded him, "of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Adam disobeyed the high mandate of heaven; he ate of the forbidden fruit, and thus he fell by transgression from his high and holy estate. He was our federal head; and he fell not alone, for on all his posterity fell the withering curse of Almighty God. "Curst is the ground for thy sake." "Thorns and thistles ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward

... ardour—is even painful." In the same manner he dealt with the movement to abolish Primogeniture, strongly urged by John Bright; the movement to legalize marriage with a wife's sister—"the craving for forbidden fruit" joined with "the craving for legality"; and the doctrine, then supposed to be incontrovertible, of Free Trade. In all these cases, he proposed to "Hellenize a little," to "turn the free stream of our thought" on the Liberal policy of the ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... has its limits, and frequently the gentle, still power of sweet ennui is stronger than the pressure and compulsion of work. When this power is present, it never results in good, rarely in anything indifferent, and frequently forbidden fruit ripens slowly in its shadow. Nobody will assert that ennui is the cause of illicit relations, of seduction, of adultery and all the many sins that depend on it—from petty misappropriations for the sake ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... remote from man, but in the midst of the city. From the throne pours the river of life through the very heart of the city. The river is shaded on both sides by the "tree" or wood of life, with its perpetual variety of fruit. This is in contrast with the one tree and its forbidden fruit which was the means ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... As well as the Encyclopaedia, the works of nearly all the leading thinkers were written for the general public not merely for philosophers. The policy of the Government in suppressing these dangerous publications did not hinder their diffusion, and gave them the attraction of forbidden fruit. In 1770 the avocat general (Seguier) acknowledged the futility of the policy. "The philosophers," he said, "have with one hand sought to shake the throne, with the other to upset the altars. Their purpose was to change public opinion ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... him continually, to deceive him, to play at being in love merely because I was attracted by forbidden fruit, by the danger incurred and the friendship betrayed! No, that did not suit me, but what was I to do? To imitate Joseph would be acting a very stupid and, moreover, difficult part, for this woman was enchanting in her perfidy, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... is happy, as he could not be while that hunger for forbidden fruit was upon him. At times I am tempted to wish Frances had more tastes in sympathy with her husband, but one cannot have all that is desired for them we love, and she is as loving a wife as any man ever possessed. But, tell me sure, how fares it with the young ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall

... for him, quite unlike anything he had ever known in other women. There was something, too, in early associations: when those who parted as children meet as man and woman, there is always a renewal of that early experience which followed the taste of the forbidden fruit,—a natural blush of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... that way! It is the only gate before which I have ever stood filled with envy,—sorrowing to think that my steps might never pass under it. There are many portals forbidden to me, as there are many forbidden to all men; and forbidden fruit, they say, is sweet; but my lips have watered after no other fruit but that which grows so high, within the sweep ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope



Words linked to "Forbidden fruit" :   enticement, temptation



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