"Incest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in that invidious position. They were practically without any defence. They were ignorant, poor, and half-starved. Thriftless, like their landlords, they ate up in the autumn what harvests they gathered, and begged for their winter's support. Adultery and incest were common and bred a body of lawless creatures, who herded together like wild beasts ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... ridiculed by her brother, who saves her from suicide. He is not in the least ashamed of her conduct, and tells her she has no reason for loss of pride; indeed, he does not think of blaming the officer. He is ready to commit incest with his sister, whose physical charm appeals to him; but she is not sufficiently emancipated for that, so he advises her to get married with a friend who loves her, before the child is born. This is finally ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... the dagger to be given you which pierced your Sister's bosom; and it was I who warned Elvira in dreams of your designs upon her Daughter, and thus, by preventing your profiting by her sleep, compelled you to add rape as well as incest to the catalogue of your crimes. Hear, hear, Ambrosio! Had you resisted me one minute longer, you had saved your body and soul. The guards whom you heard at your prison door came to signify your pardon. But I had already triumphed: My plots had already ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... child of Thetis and the lover of Patroclus has been sung for us by Homer? Are the human agonies of the doomed house of Thebes made less appalling by tracing back the tale of OEdipus to some prosaic source in old astronomy? The incest of Jocasta is the subject of supreme tragic art. It does not improve the matter, or whitewash the imagination of the Greeks, as some have fondly fancied, to unravel the fabric wrought by Homer and by Sophocles, into its raw material in ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... heretics, and demons! the vermin of the schools! the dregs of Hell! This fellow here, Marcion, is a sailor from Sinope excommunicated for incest. Carpocras has been banished as a magician; AEtius has stolen his concubine; Nicolas prostituted his own wife; and Manes, who describes himself as the Buddha, and whose name is Cubricus, was flayed with the sharp end of a cane, ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... into the cornerstones of character-building, and the jewels, five or fifty words long, of literature. The fate and metaphysical aid that determine the relations of Tristram and Iseult; the unconscious incest of Arthur and Margause with its Greek-tragic consequence; the unrewarded fidelity of Palomides, and (an early instance of the soon to be triumphant allegory) his fruitless chase of the Beast Glatissant; all these are matters in point. But of course the main nursery of such things is the Lancelot-and-Guinevere ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... relegated to the pseudo-dormant consciousness. This has been brought about by a "process of selection out of an infinity of possible elements solely on the grounds of utility." Thus the cause for our horror of incest is hidden away in our subliminal consciousness; yet we cannot but think, with Westermarck, that this instinct is but the result of natural selection,[102] the utility of the factor or factors occasioning it being no longer in evidence or required. Again, at certain seasons, man ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... thorough-going partisan. I know a man,—an excellent fellow, who, being himself a strong politician, constantly expresses a belief that all politicians opposed to him are thieves, child-murderers, parricides, lovers of incest, demons upon earth. He is a strong partisan, but not, I think, so strong as Mrs Proudie. He says that he believes all evil of his opponents; but she really believed the evil. The archdeacon had called ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... essence of all conceivable wickedness. Theft, robbery, pollution, unbridled passion, incest, cruelty, cold-blooded murder, blasphemy, and defiance of the laws of God. It teaches children to disregard parental authority. It tears down the marriage altar, and tramples its sacred ashes under its feet. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... property, and from other still more recondite reasons; but I cannot accept this view, seeing that the savages of Australia and South America,[268] who have no property to bequeath or fine moral feelings to confuse, hold the crime of incest ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... 'Fly hence to Hell; there hide thy Head lower than Darkness. Wou'd thou hadst been acting Incest, Murder, Witchcraft, when thou cam'st to pray: Thou hadst in any thing sinn'd less ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous
... recently been visited by her father. At the same interview she spoke of masturbation, of wanting to marry her uncle, and of having been in bed with her father. The last she referred to as a "fall." Such frank incest ideas are never found in benign psychosis in our experience. Other dementia praecox ideas appeared quite soon, for within three days, when she was talking slightly more freely, she spoke of having often imagined she was having sexual ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... youngest daughter by the hand, and gave her to the wise prophet immediately for his wife, who without further ceremony took the damsel and deflowered her. Thus for some time they continued in acts of incest and adultery, until that period which made the fatal discovery, and introduced the bloody scene of blind fanaticism ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... established, in this way—"If she has had a child, she has laid with a man. But she has had a child." This then is established. "Therefore she has lain with a man." If you are unwilling to draw this inference, and prefer inferring what follows, "Therefore she has committed incest," you will have terminated your argumentation but you will have missed an evident and natural ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... and the gods. Upon which one of the tribunes impeached him for profaning the holy rites, and some of the principal senators combined together and gave evidence against him, that besides many other horrible crimes, he had been guilty of incest with his own sister, who was married to Lucullus. But the people set themselves against this combination of the nobility, and defended Clodius, which was of great service to him with the judges, who took alarm and were afraid to provoke the multitude. Caesar at once dismissed ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... thumb-screws, paddles, blood-hounds, overseers, drivers, patrols, were not all indispensable to keep the slaves down, and to give protection to their ruthless oppressors! As if, when the marriage institution is abolished, concubinage, adultery, and incest, must not necessarily abound; when all the rights of humanity are annihilated, any barrier remains to protect the victim from the fury of the spoiler; when absolute power is assumed over life and liberty, it will not be wielded with destructive sway! Skeptics of this character abound in ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... promulgate articles of faith. During the revolt against Hadrian an Assembly of Rabbis was held at Lydda. It was then decided that a Jew must yield his life rather than accept safety from the Roman power, if such conformity involved one of the three offences: idolatry, murder, and unchastity (including, incest and adultery). But while this decision throws a favourable light on the Rabbinic theory of life, it can in no sense be called a fixation of a creed. There were numerous synods in the Middle Ages, but they invariably dealt with practical morals or with the problems which arose from time to time ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... an eye-witness, of the processions, like those of a triumphing monarch. But the horrible stories were then still fresh at Rome of the late Pope Alexander and his children, the murder of his brother, the poisoning, the incest, and other crimes. Of the then Pope, Julius II., Luther heard nothing reported, except that he managed his temporal affairs with energy and shrewdness, made war, collected money, and contracted and dissolved, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... pollution, the curses; the "insane and beastlike cruelty," as an ancient Greek commentator calls it, of piercing the exposed child's feet in order to ensure its death and yet avoid having actually murdered it (Schol. Eur. Phoen., 26); the whole treatment of the parricide and incest, not as moral offences capable of being rationally judged or even excused as unintentional, but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the last limit of imaginable horror: all these things take us back to dark regions of pre-classical and even pre-homeric belief. We have no right to ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... from that of a male. She would rather be guilty of incest than reveal to a man the hidden thoughts which sometimes, without the least scruple, she will confide to another woman. Friendship between men is a very different thing. Something honest and frank, from which consequently ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... instance, still more resembling; I would fain ask any one, why incest in the human species is criminal, and why the very same action, and the same relations in animals have not the smallest moral turpitude and deformity? If it be answered, that this action is innocent in animals, because they have not reason ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... And the cry of revenge that comes from the sorrowful lips is the cry of a king and a Dane rather than of a wronged man. It is for public justice and not individual vengeance he calls. He cannot endure that the royal bed of Denmark should be a couch for luxury and damned incest. To stay this he would bring the murderer to justice. There is a worse wrong, for which he seeks no revenge: it involves his wife; and there comes in love, and love knows no amends but amendment, seeks only ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the contrary, every care is taken to avoid marriages of consanguinity. Bowdich, indeed, assures us that a man may not look at nor converse with his mother-in-law, on pain of a heavy, perhaps a ruinous fine; "this singular law is founded on the tradition of an incest." ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the Key of the Divine Power: but he alone understands how to avail himself of it who comprehends the necessity of never revealing it. If Œdipus, in place of slaying the Sphynx, had conquered it, and driven it into Thebes harnessed to his chariot, he would have been King, without incest, calamities, or exile. If Psyche, by submission and caresses, had persuaded Love to reveal himself, she would never have lost him. Love is one of the mythological images of the grand secret and the grand agent, because it expresses at once an action ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... beefcake; [magazines with sexual photos], Playboy, Esquire, Hustler. [unorthodox sexual activity] perversion, deviation, sexual abnormality; fetish, fetishism; homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality; sodomy, buggery; pederasty; sadism. masochism, sado-masochism; incest. V. mate, copulate; make love, have intercourse, fornicate, have sex, do it, sleep 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the human species is on the whole much smaller than in any other animal species. (3) The dependence of offspring upon parents is far longer in the human species than in any other species. (4) Man has an antipathy to incest or close inbreeding which seems to be instinctive. This is not found clearly in any animal species below man. (5) There is a tendency among human beings to artificial adornment during the period of courtship, but ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... Sisters, two Brothers, Two Fathers, a Son, Two Daughters, Two Mothers, A Grandfather, a Grandmother, a Granddaughter, An Uncle and an Aunt—their Niece follow'd after. This catalogue of persons mentioned here Was only five, and all from incest free. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... The crime of incest is by no means unknown among them; rum, the greatest scourge and curse of the Indian race, is undoubtedly the principal cause of this dreadful corruption: but is it not strange that religion should have so little effect in reforming their manners? ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... that the great majority of savages extend their idea of incest much further than we do. The reason of this has been much discussed. It was formerly said that consanguineous marriage was contrary to the commandments of God; that it offended the natural sentiment of modesty; that it obscures relationship, etc. Nowadays, it is said to be injurious ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Through many a labour'd tome, Rankly embalm'd in thy too natural pages. Faith, friend De Foe, thou art quite at home! Not one of thy great offspring thou dost lack, From pirate Singleton to pilfering Jack. Here Flandrian Moll her brazen incest brags; Vice-stript Roxana, penitent in rags, There points to Amy, treading equal chimes, The faithful handmaid to her ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... But ever as he spoke there was a film before her eyes. There was a gaunt priest, with canonical robes, stood before the gates of heaven. Before him and through him was the way to an eternal happiness, below him was a fiery hell; and he shouted with hoarse voice, Incest, incest, incest!—And ever as he shouted, he pointed with his finger of scorn at this Christian hell, and she conjured up in her mind the old stories of this priest, until she saw the livid flames rising up higher till they encircled her form, and then the priest screamed with fury, Anathema ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... D'Aubigne, by "the celebrated and scandalous Tariff of Indulgences," which went through more than forty editions. The least delicate ears would be offended by an enumeration of all the horrors it contains. Incest, if not detected, was to cost five groats; and six, if it was known. There was a stated price for murder, infanticide, adultery, perjury, burglary, &c. Polygamy cost six ducats; sacrilege and perjury, nine; murder, eight; ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... thing they name a Cross, Said to be blest and Sanctyfyed by the poluted words and hands of a wretched priest, a Spawn of the whore of Babylon, who is a Monster of Nature and a Servant to the Devill, Who for a Riall will pretend to absolve them from perjury, Incest and parricide, and Cannonize them for Cruelties Committed to we Herreticks, as they stile us, and Even Rank them in the Number of those Cursed Saints who by their Barbarity have Rendered their Names Immortall and Odious to all true Beleivers. ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... dregs of humanity. Ordinary enough to look at from the street, but pierced by a maze of foul alleys, in the depths of which skulked the tramp and the outcast thief with loathsome wrecks that had once laid claim to the name of woman. Every foot of it reeked with incest and murder. Bandits' Roost, Bottle Alley, were names synonymous with robbery and red-handed outrage. By night, in its worst days, I have gone poking about their shuddering haunts with a policeman on the beat, and come away in a ferment of anger and disgust that would ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... an incestuous passion between Manfred and Astarte. Shelley, in a letter to Mrs. Gisborne, November 16, 1819, commenting on Calderon's Los Cabellos de Absalon, discusses the question from an ethical as well as critical point of view: "The incest scene between Amon and Tamar is perfectly tremendous. Well may Calderon say, in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... general; yet nothing succeeded with him. The long warfare which he carried on against the Duke of Montefeltro ended in his discomfiture. Having begun by defying the Holy See, he was impeached at Rome for heresy, parricide, incest, adultery, rape, and sacrilege, burned in effigy by Pope Pius II., and finally restored to the bosom of the Church, after suffering the despoliation of almost all his territories, in 1463. The occasion on which this fierce and turbulent ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... commentaries the following reason is given for this law: "When husband and wife are of the same surname, their children do not do well and multiply." The prohibited degrees were more distant than among us. It was a horror of incest that had led to the general custom all over Polynesia of exchanging children for adoption. Only this explanation could reconcile it with the almost superstitious love the Polynesian father and mother have for children. Their feeling ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... presented of his own free will to the torture, bore the anguish of the rack, the scourge and the fire without uttering a word that might incriminate his master.[840] The free employment of such methods in trials for incest throws a grave doubt on the value of the judgment which they elicited; and, when a court is established for the purpose of appeasing the popular conscience, a part at least of its conduct may be easily suspected of being preordained. Cassius's rigour in this matter ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... corruption? Was it moral crimes confined to Adam's race? Let us see. It was not the eating of the forbidden fruit; for that had been done long before. It was not murder; for Cain had murdered his brother. It was not drunkenness; for Noah, though a preacher of righteousness, did get drunk. It was not incest; for Lot, another preacher of righteousness, committed that. It was not that of one brother selling his own brother as a slave, to be taken to a strange land; for Joseph's brethren did that, and lied about it, too. It was not—, but we may go through the whole catalogue of moral ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne
... That is the picture of a wretched ancestress of mine, of whose crimes a black and fearful catalogue is recorded in a family history in my charter- chest. The recital of them would be too horrible; it is enough to say, that in yon fatal apartment incest and unnatural murder were committed. I will restore it to the solitude, to which the better judgment of those who preceded me had consigned it; and never shall any one, so long as I can prevent it, be exposed to a repetition of the supernatural horrors which could shake ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... a planet entered into a sign, they made of this conjunction a marriage, an adultery, an incest.* Having said that the planet was hid or buried, when it came back to light, and ascended to its exaltation, they said that it had died, risen again, was ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... salbe judgit by the fruit," (as Christ Jesus affirmeth, that it must be,) than of necessitie it is that your Prelattis, and the hole rable of thair clergie, be evill treeis. For yf adultrie, pryde, ambitioun, dronknes, covetousnes, incest, unthankfulnes, oppressioun, murther, idolatrie, and blasphemye, be evill fructis, thare can none of that generatioun, whiche clame to thame selfis the title of Churche men,[782] be judged gud treeis; for all these pestilent and wicked fruittis do they bring furth ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... fed themselves with men's flesh, and, like savage and brute beasts, did drink their blood? in conclusion, how that, after they had put out the candles, they committed adultery between themselves, and without regard wrought incest one with another: that brethren lay with their sisters, sons with their mothers, without any reverence of nature or kin, without shame without difference; and that they were wicked men without all care of religion, and without any opinion of God, ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... either guilty in a noble manner, or entirely good. Although crime may have a certain grandeur of its own, or at least a mixture of more generous motives, they do not attain to this. Gianpaolo, careless though he was about incest and parricide, could not, or dared not, on a just occasion, achieve an exploit for which the whole world would have admired his spirit, and by which he would have won immortal glory: for he would have been the first to show how little prelates, living and ruling as they do, deserve to be esteemed, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Theft, incest, infanticide, parricide, have all had a place among virtuous actions. Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... hour of vengeance strikes, no compunction, not even the commonest human instincts—such as mother love—can avert the blow. Signy in the "Voelsunga Saga" is implacable as fate. To avenge the slaughter of the Volsungs is with her an obsession, a fixed idea. When incest seems the only pathway to her purpose, she takes that path without a moment's hesitation. The contemptuous indifference with which she hands over her own little innocent children to death is more terrible than the readiness of the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... disgusting that I soon cut all tales short so soon as her name occurred. Nor is it now necessary to rake up old muck-heaps. One point though is of interest. Among many races all over the world there is a widespread belief that sexual immorality, whether in the form of adultery or incest will inevitably entail most serious consequences not only upon the guilty parties, but upon the community as a whole, and even menace the existence of a whole people. Thebes, for example, suffered blight and pestilence owing ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... to the crime and consequences of incest is so plain in 'Manfred,' that it is astonishing that any one can pretend, as Galt does, that it had ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... but one thing. There are many who set perilous snares for married folk, especially in case of incest; and when any one (for these things can happen, nay, alas! they do happen) has defiled the sister of his wife, or his mother-in-law, or one related to him in any degree of consanguinity, they at once deprive him of the right to pay the debt of matrimony, ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... things, that "a native of Mbau, who lived for some years near the Nanga, assured me that the visit of the women to the Nanga resulted in temporary promiscuity; all tabus were defied, and relations who could not speak to one another by customary law committed incest" (op. cit. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... so haynously transgresse the law. Howbeit, hee deliuered her vnto him, although they both refused as much as they could. Wherefore carying them to bed, they constrained the youth, lamenting and weeping, to lie down and commit incest with his brothers wife. To be short, after the death of their husbands, the Tartars wiues vse very seldome to marrie the second time, vnlesse perhaps some man takes his brothers wife or his stepmother in marriage. They make no ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... evidently known to their unhappy authors. Next upon Burnet, down comes Mr. Froude. Burnet had shaped his criticism thus: 'If,' he says, 'the queen was not married to the king, there was no adultery.' Certainly not. But, says Mr. Froude, Burnet forgets that she was condemned for conspiracy and incest, as well as for adultery. Then thirdly come we, and reverting to this charge of forgetfulness upon Burnet, we say, Forgets! but how was he bound to remember? The conspiracy, the incest, the adultery, all alike vanish from the record exactly as the character of wife vanishes from Anne. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... homes of the poor compel the children to witness everything. Sexual morality often comes to have no meaning to them. Incest is so familiar as hardly to call for remark. The bitter poverty of the poor compels them to leave their children half fed. There are few more grotesque pictures in the history of civilisation than that of the compulsory attendance of children at school, faint with hunger because they had no breakfast, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... government in accordance with republican ideas; for it acknowledges a higher law than even the human conscience, in the will of a person whom it professes to believe a vicegerent of Divinity, and in obedience to whom perjury, robbery, incest, and even murder, may be justifiable,—for his commands are those of Heaven. It is obvious that it is fruitless to anticipate fair dealing from a people professing such doctrines; and the result has shown, that, in transactions with Mormons, even under oath, no one who does not acknowledge ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... me of my senses! And was Mrs Waters, then—but why do I ask? for thou must certainly know her—If thou hast any affection for me, nay, if thou hast any pity, let me beseech thee to fetch this miserable woman back again to me. O good Heavens! incest——with a mother! To what am I reserved!" He then fell into the most violent and frantic agonies of grief and despair, in which Partridge declared he would not leave him; but at last, having vented the ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... and her brother were to be tried on the following Monday. Their crime was not adultery only, but was coloured with the deeper stain of incest. On the Friday, while the other prisoners were at the bar, "Letters patent were addressed to Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, Treasurer and Earl Marshal of England, setting forth that the Lady Anne, Queen of England, and Sir George Boleyn, knight, Lord ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... immoral. Shelley replied with his famous poetical curse "To the Lord Chancellor." While the poem stands as a masterpiece of lyric invective it did not mend matters for Shelley in England. In many of his other poems his detractors saw nothing but the glorification of revolution, incest, and atheism. When he wrote a satirical drama on so delicate a subject as the unhappy affairs of Queen Caroline, even his publisher turned against him. Yet the charm and beauty of Shelley's purely lyric ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... ancient society?" Only by declaring war against "contracts" (traditions, morality). This Siegfried does. He starts early at the game, very early—his origin itself is already a declaration of war against morality—he is the result of adultery, of incest.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Not the saga, but Wagner himself is the inventor of this radical feature, in this matter he corrected the saga.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Siegfried continues as he began: he follows ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... if my secret thoughts Have ever harbour'd swellings against you, They could not hurt you, and it is in you To give me sorrow, that will render me Apt to receive your mercy; rather so, Let it be rather so, than punish me With such unmanly sins: Incest is in me Dwelling already, and it must be holy That pulls it thence, where ...
— A King, and No King • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... say that this is all very sad and pitiful, but that a man who defiled his profession of letters by the guilt of incest deserves to suffer. It is true that he confessed his guilt, but it is an open question whether he did so because he was guilty or because he feared an even heavier punishment if he denied it. For Domitian was in a great rage and was boiling over with fury because his ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger |
