"Immodesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poet, that they will not allow me so much as to be a Christian, or a moral man); may I have leave, I say, to inform my reader, that I have confined my choice to such tales of Chaucer as savour nothing of immodesty. If I had desired more to please than to instruct, the Reeve, the Miller, the Shipman, the Merchants, the Sumner, and above all the Wife of Bath, in the prologue to her tale, would have procured me as many friends ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... province in her complexion, the warmth of perfect health in her blood. Impulsive and ingenuous as she was, the girl had, at first, drawn near to her cousin, simply and naturally, obeying the law of attraction that draws the young toward the young. She had met his friendly advances with the immodesty of innocence, artless effrontery, the liberties taught by life in the country, the happy folly of a nature abounding in high spirits, and with all sorts of ignorant hardihood, unblushing ingenuousness and rustic coquetry, against which her cousin's vanity was without ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... against the use of color in marble was to the effect that the whiteness removed the object represented into a sort of spiritual region, and so gave chaste permission to those nudities which would otherwise suggest immodesty. I have myself felt the truth of this in a certain sense of shame as I ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in a most matter-of-fact manner. This is a feature of the people we cannot understand, but they themselves consider it no impropriety. A writer on Japan, speaking of this says:—"We cannot, with justice, tax with immodesty the individual who, in his own country, wounds none of the social proprieties in the midst of which he has been brought up." These bath-houses are perfectly open to the public gaze, no one evincing the slightest curiosity to look within, except, perhaps, the ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... which, gradually lengthening as they fell by her side, took the graceful curves of a Greek peplum. This voluptuous garment of the pagan priestesses lessened the indecency of the rest of the attire which the fashions of the time suffered women to wear. To soften its immodesty still further, Marie threw a gauze scarf over her shoulders, left bare and far too low by the red drapery. She wound the long braids of her hair into the flat irregular cone above the nape of the neck which gives such grace to certain antique ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... is absurd! is madness!" cried the princess. "To wish to live thus alone, is to carry immorality and immodesty to their utmost limits." ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... after my arrival at Skidegate, a Hyda young man called at my cabin to see if I would not take a rather comely Indian girl, about twenty years of age, who accompanied him, to live with me, and neither seemed in the slightest degree embarrassed, either in making the proposition or when it was declined. Immodesty of speech or action in public places, however, is rare, even among those women who change their man so often as it suits their caprice or convenience. Both the married and unmarried have apparently not ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... simpler explanations are, and the less they are biassed by the subtleties of the philosophical critics, the more likely they are to be in unison with the intentions of the author. Take, for instance, the well-established fact that immodesty of expression, the recollection derived, it may often be, accidentally and unwillingly from oral sources during the previous life, is one of the numerous phases of insanity; and not only are the song-fragments chanted by Ophelia, but even the ribaldry ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... years: in boyhood, ere he became so hideously bald, the ready servant of the vilest vices; in youth a stage dancer limp and nerveless enough in all conscience, but, they tell me, clumsy and inartistic in his very effeminacy. Except for his immodesty he is said not to have possessed a single quality that should ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... us all! I send you our local newspapers. That I cut entrechats is false. It happens to be a thing I could do, and not an Englishman in England except myself; only I did not do it. I did appear in what I was educated to believe was the evening suit of a gentleman, and I cannot perceive the immodesty of showing my leg. A dress that is not indecent, and is becoming to me, and is the dress of my fathers, I wear, and I impose it on the generation of my sex. However, I dined Hickson of the Fourth Estate (Jorian considers him hungry enough ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... obscured to some extent by pulling out one shoulder and covering the other, taking the chances of the lines that mark the concealment and disclosure of breast and back. There is no expression of immodesty. The woman of the Philippines is sad as she is swarthy, and her melancholy eyes are almost always introspective, or glancing far away, and revising the disappointed dreams of long ago. Profounder grief than is read in the ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... much like that of a boy as of a girl. The expression of the head is gentle, yet saucy. It is, in fact, across thirty centuries of time, a portrait of one of those graceful little maidens of Elephantine, who, without immodesty or embarrassment, walk unclothed in sight of strangers. Three little wooden men in the Gizeh Museum are probably contemporaries of the Turin figure. They wear full dress, as, indeed, they should, for one was a king's favourite named Hori, and surnamed Ra. They are walking with calm and measured tread, ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... on him, for a moment, in speechless surprise; she looked back again at the bed. "Are you going to leave me by myself?" she asked wonderingly. Not the faintest suggestion of immodesty—nothing that the most profligate man living could have interpreted impurely—showed itself in her look or manner, as she said ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... answered the Scarecrow, pleasantly. "My complexion had become a bit grey and faded, you know, and the paint had peeled off one end of my mouth, so I couldn't talk quite straight. Now I feel like myself again, and I may say without immodesty that my body is stuffed with the loveliest oat-straw in all Oz." He pushed against his chest. "Hear me ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... true comrade, too had a splendid brain. In fact, and I who am about to die have the right to say it without incurring the charge of immodesty, the three best minds in San Quentin from the Warden down were the three that rotted there together in solitary. And here at the end of my days, reviewing all that I have known of life, I am compelled to the conclusion that strong minds are never docile. The stupid ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... on a surprising equality the one to the other. And where the men are so well aware of the women's experienced outlook, and the women so well aware of the men's, the affectation of ignorance might almost be construed as a form of immodesty, or at any rate as an imprudence. It would, indeed, be too absurd to pretend that these wives and mothers, who have to face every trial of life and death for themselves, do not know the things ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... Pamela he produced an essay in vulgarity—of sentiment and morality alike—which has never been surpassed. In these days it is hardly less difficult to understand the popularity of this masterpiece of specious immodesty than to speak or think of it with patience. That it was once thought moral is as wonderful as that it was once found readable. What is more easily apprehended is the contempt of Henry Fielding—is the justice of that ridicule he was moved to visit it withal. ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... character, Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "an immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle history, dealing with the story of ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... Lenaeus, and Sabazius. To this ceremonial, received from the Egyptians, the Greeks added other ceremonies replete with abominable licentiousness, and repulsive to common decency. These were often suppressed by public enactment, but were as often re-established by the votaries of lewdness and immodesty, and such as found in these festivals a pretext and opportunity for the commission ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... idioms, these productions are much to be commended. In one point they resemble the Latin comic poets; they are not deficient in indecency. This was, indeed, their general tone. The comedies of Pietro Aretino are merely remarkable for their shameless immodesty. It almost seems as if these writers, deeming the spirit of refined love inconsistent with the essence of Comedy, had exhausted the very lees of the sensual amours ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... sacred profession to devote those powers to the service of religion and virtue, he every where discovers a studious solicitude to excite indecent ideas. We turn away our eyes with disgust from open immodesty: but even this is less mischievous than that more measured style, which excites impure images, without shocking us by the grossnesses of the language. Never was delicate sensibility proved to be more distinct from plain practical benevolence, than in ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... first function of Modesty, then, being this recognition of place, her second is the recognition of law, and delight in it, for the sake of law itself, whether her part be to assert it, or obey. For as it belongs to all immodesty to defy or deny law, and assert privilege and license, according to its own pleasure (it being therefore rightly called "insolent," that is, "custom-breaking," violating some usual and appointed order to attain for itself greater forwardness or power), so it is the habit of all modesty ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... all the bashfulness of man with maiden were gone. Under the weight of that thought, that dreadful thought, he had grown old in a few minutes. His tone was hard, his manner pitiless. "You never loved him!" he repeated, the very immodesty of her excuse confirming his fears. "And I ask you, what is it? What is it that is between you and him? What is it that gives him this power ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... assumed that it was their privilege as relatives to laugh at Carol, and their duty as Christians to let her know how absurd her "notions" were. They objected to the food, to Oscarina's lack of friendliness, to the wind, the rain, and the immodesty of Carol's maternity gowns. They were strong and enduring; for an hour at a time they could go on heaving questions about her father's income, about her theology, and about the reason why she had ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... such incredible immodesty, of such monstrous effrontery, that d'Artagnan could scarcely believe what he saw or what he heard. He imagined himself to be drawn into one of those fantastic intrigues one meets in dreams. He, however, darted not the less quickly toward ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... maiden so early in the morning, Sancho showed no aversion to it whatever, for he bombarded Altisidora with all kinds of impertinent questions as to what was going on in Hell when she was there. Of course Altisidora denied having any intimate knowledge of this place, for in spite of her immodesty she had only got as far ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... victim to political criticism on literature was himself criminal, and has wreaked his own party feelings on the Papist Dryden, and the Tory Prior; Dryden he calls, in the most unguarded language, "a monster of immodesty and impurity of all sorts." There had been a literary quarrel between Dryden and Burnet respecting a translation of Varillas' "History of Heresies;" Burnet had ruined the credit of the papistical author while Dryden was busied on the translation; and as Burnet says, "he has wreaked ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "An immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle history, dealing with the story ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... images of Jesus and Mary, whose names were of course the first words he learned to utter. She checked in him by grave looks, and slight punishments fitted to his age, every ebullition of self-will, obstinacy, and anger; and later, of deceit, envy, and immodesty. Though she had the most tender mother's heart, she seldom indulged in passionate caresses, and never left unchastised any of his faults, or gave way in any instance to his tears and impatience. When others objected that it was absurd to expect self-command ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... exemplarity. And to give these his endeavors their due force, he lived an exact model of what he inculcated to others: but his zeal exasperated the tepid part of that order, and raised a storm against himself. The immodesty {241} of women in their dress in that gay capital excited in him sentiments of the most just abhorrence and indignation. Some young ladies seemed to have forgot that clothing is the covering of the ignominy of sin, and ought ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the world, or the least immodesty, she half protruded the foot which still retained its slipper. As I removed this latter, through some gay impulse, whose nature I did not pause to analyze, I half mechanically thrust it into the ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... per cent. of the entire manhood of America? There was only one place humanly conceivable where lingerie could be purchased; to prove it, the illuminated signboard promptly showed a lady in a costume usually confined to boudoirs. To equalise the immodesty of the sexes, a near male neighbour, at a height of two hundred odd feet, did an electrified turn by putting on and taking off a pair ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... invoked; but Richard was passive in his mother's hands, and listened complacently while in stronger, plainer language than he had used she repeated in substance all he had said about the impropriety of Ethelyn's mingling with the gay throng at Washington. Immodesty, Mrs. Markham called it, with sundry reflections upon the time when she was young, and what young married women did then. And while she talked poor Ethelyn lay upon the lounge writhing with pain and passion, wishing that she could ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... thought it was a joke, made his appearance, she could hardly utter a word, for evil pleasure is as intoxicating as adulterated liquor, so face to face with this immediate surrender, and this unconstrained immodesty, he at first thought that he had to do ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... form as distinctly as the lightest wet drapery of the studio. Her dress, in short, achieved in its pure simplicity all at which the artistic skill of matrons, milliners, and maidens aims in a Parisian ball costume, without a shadow of that suggestive immodesty from which ball costumes are seldom wholly free. Exactly reversing Terrestrial practice, a Martial wife reserves for strictest domestic privacy that undressed full-dress, that frank revelation of her beauty, which the matrons of London, Paris, or New York think exclusively ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... Goncourts he spoke with admiration tempered by dislike. Their books often repelled him, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way things should be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read Madame Gervaisais, and he spoke of Cherie (for all its 'immodesty') as an admirable thing, and a model for ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... sez to myself mildly, as I sot there, "Is it that men and wimmen lose their senses, or is there a sacredness in the strains of that fiddle, that makes immodesty modest, indecency decent, and immorality moral?" And agin I sithe heavy and gin 3 deep groans. And I see Josiah gin in. All the sound reasons weighed as nothin' with him, but 2 or 3 groans, and a few sithes settled the matter. Truly Love is ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... to prevent my remaining there an hour. When I arrived they sent me immediately two girls very showily dressed; the eldest could not be more than eleven years of age and the other seven, and both exhibited so much immodesty, that more could not be expected from public women; they carried concealed about them a magic powder; when they came I gave them some articles to dress themselves out with, and directly sent them back to the shore.[409-4] ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... Hebrew accomplishments, he tells us, with his native immodesty, that he acquired marvelous proficiency in learning, and was famous for his great memory and understanding. When he was fourteen years of age, he continues, such was his fame that the high priests and principal men of the city frequently ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... often told by fashionable women that one great objection to the woman's rights movement was the publicity of the conventions; the immodesty of speaking from a platform; and the trial of seeing one's name in the papers. Several ladies made such remarks to me one day as a bevy of us were sitting together in one of the fashionable hotels in Newport. We were holding a Convention there at that time, and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... love is solemnized and celebrated. I thought that of all miracles, the miracle which had occurred that night, and was even then occurring, might be counted among the most wondrous. What occult forces, what secret influences of soul on soul, what courage on his part, what sublime immodesty and unworldliness on mine had brought it about! In what dreadful disaster would it not end! ... I cared not in that marvellous hectic hour how it would end. I knew I had been blessed beyond the common lot ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... every way to their men, the Rodiya women are the most beautiful in all Ceylon. Their scantiness of raiment, it is pleaded in their behalf, is due in no sense to immodesty. Rodiya girls wander the country as dancers and jugglers, and their erect figures, elastic step, and regalness of carriage, would be envied by the proudest woman promenading Vanity Fair; some of them have faces so perfect in a classic ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... weeks' stay on our way around. I must have seen you on the beach at that very time— one of the kiddies that swam like fishes. Why, merciful me, the women here were all riding cross-saddle, and that was long before the rest of the social female world outgrew its immodesty and came around to sitting simultaneously on both sides of a horse. I learned to swim on the beach here at that time myself. You and I may even have tried body-surfing on the same waves, or I may have splashed a handful of water into your ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... descending the stairs she all but stopped and begged to be excused. The thought of stealing into Redgrave's bachelor home, even with Mrs. Strangeways, startled and offended her self-respect; it seemed an immodesty. She had never been invited to the bungalow; though Mrs. Carnaby had received and accepted such an invitation for an afternoon in the summer, when Mrs. Strangeways did the honours. Redgrave was now scrupulously respectful; he would not presume so ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Greeks," he said, "cut the hair in grief, the Romans let it grow; the Orientals veiled their heads in worship, the Greeks uncovered them; Christians take off their hats in a church, Mahometans their shoes; a long veil is a sign of modesty in Europe, of immodesty in Asia. You may as well try to change the size of people, as their forms of worship. Bateman, we must cut you down a foot, and then you shall ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... scaled the carriages, were many of the commonest men and boys), than for its innocent vivacity. For, odd as it may seem to say so, of a sport so full of thoughtlessness and personal display, it is as free from any taint of immodesty as any general mingling of the two sexes can possibly be; and there seems to prevail, during its progress, a feeling of general, almost childish, simplicity and confidence, which one thinks of with a pang, when the Ave Maria has rung it away, for ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... talent of my young parishioner from being buried in the ground, by giving it such warrant with the world as could be derived from a name already widely known by several printed discourses (all of which I may be permitted without immodesty to state have been deemed worthy of preservation in the Library of Harvard College by my esteemed friend Mr. Sibley), it seemed becoming that I should not only testify to the genuineness of the following ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... city, in which burned always the sacred fire, watched by the vestal virgins. In this worship, and its associations, we find the best side of Roman manners,—the love of home, the respect for family life, the hatred of impurity and immodesty. She was also called "the mother," and qualified as Mater Stata, that is, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... may without immodesty put forth for themselves something more than the claim of being re-translators of a translation: the present edition is, so far as they were able to make it so, an adaptation, correction, and extension of the work of the great German scholar to whose loving appreciation of the ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... beneath the theatre, Hugh led the way, while with greater poignancy than ever before the young playwright sensed the vulgarity, the immodesty, and the dirt of the world behind and below the scenes. It was all familiar enough to him, for he had several friends among the actors, but the thought of one so sovereign as Helen in the midst of a region so squalid stung him. He was jealous of the actors, the ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... history of this important discovery and of others of a similar nature, (which, by the way, are one and all announced with the same "modesty of assertion" as what goes before,) would appear to be this.—Natural science has lately woke up from her long slumber of well nigh sixty ages; and with that immodesty for which youth and inexperience have ever been proverbial, she is impatient to measure her crude theories against the sure revelation of GOD'S Word. Where the two differ, she assumes that of course the inspired Oracles are wrong, and her own wild guesses right. She is even ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the victim this time. When the deluge became choking, he turned his back, ducked, and then let fly in the general direction of the allied forces two slimy handfuls of mud. In the excitement of the game the boys had clean forgot the immodesty of bare shoulders, and had even broken away from their original close grouping until, to all appearances, Margery was one of them. So it happened that, when Freddy Larkin dodged aside, one handful of the watery mud caught Margery ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... when the occasion arose to help the young ladies enter a boat or jump out on shore; from the tender odour of maiden apparel, warmed by the sun; from the feminine cries of coquettish fright on the river; from the sight of feminine figures, negligently half-reclining with a naive immodesty on the green grass around the samovar—from all these innocent liberties, which are so usual and unavoidable on picnics, country outings and river excursions, when within man, in the infinite depth of his soul, secretly awakens from the care-free contact with earth, grasses, water and sun, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... Angela, when in such a case as this a woman goes to seek the man she loves, and whom she believes loves her, I do not myself see where there is room for immodesty." ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... casuists. I have looked through volume after volume of the most approved casuists,—and still I find disquisitions whether this or that act is right, and under what circumstances, to a minuteness that makes reasoning ridiculous, and of a callous and unnatural immodesty, to which none but a monk could harden himself, who has been stripped of all the tender charities of life, yet is goaded on to make war against them by the unsubdued hauntings of our meaner nature, even as dogs are said to get the hydrophobia from excessive thirst. I fully ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... which have been made upon their women. Writers are agreed, I believe, that their matrons are, as a rule, without reproach. If their maidens are chaste, as I contend that from very force of circumstances they cannot help being, what becomes of all these charges of vice and immodesty? Do they not rather recoil upon the accusers, who would appear to have studied the Japanese woman only in the harlot ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... in the two races respectively, but the feeling is the same. The feelings which prompt a Native woman to condemn barrenness in other women is the same as that which makes the average European lady look upon immodesty as a sign of immorality. The difference is objective, not subjective; it is in the outlook but not in the inner sense. That immorality is rife amongst Natives no one who knows them well will deny, but neither can putanism amongst the whites be ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... "Consistent with modesty," "sicut decet verecundiam sexus;" nothing can beat that bare-faced hypocrisy. So when afterwards the sex shortened their petticoats, other Simon Pures start up and put them in the stocks for immodesty. Poor women! Here was a wrong, Eusebius. Long or short, they were equally immodest. Immodest, indeed! Nature has clad them with modesty and temperance—their natural habit—other garment is conventional. I admire what Oelian says of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... repeated. The idea was broached to Overbury. That shrewd individual, of course, saw through the suggestion to the intention behind it, but he was at a loss for an outlet for his talents, having left Rochester's employ, and he believed without immodesty that he could do useful work as ambassador ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... know well enough that unostentatious immodesty is no part of your partner's programme. Of course, you will find yourself by-and-bye in a sort of perpetual ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... during the season of bridal-tours, may be said to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costly jewel of a precious ring. The place is, in fact, almost abandoned to bridal couples, and any one out of his honey-moon is in some degree an alien there, and must discern a certain immodesty in him intrusion. Is it for his profane eyes to look upon all that blushing and trembling joy? A man of any sensibility must desire to veil his face, and, bowing his excuses to the collective rapture, take the first train for the wicked outside world to which he belongs. Everywhere, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... me down stairs, which being apprised of, I fastened my door. Up stairs they came, and threatened to break it open; so I ordered the boys to open it, when they poured into my room; and as modesty forbid me to get out of bed, so I refrained; but their immodesty permitted them to draw me out of bed, as the phrase is, topsy-turvey; but, however, at the intercession of Mr. Porter, they permitted me to put on * * * my wife's petticoats; and in this manner they made me dance, without shoes and ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Creston had been more living for him than any woman but one. This lady had a face that shone as publicly as the jeweller's window, and in the happy candour with which she wore her monstrous character was an effect of gross immodesty. The character of Paul Creston's wife thus attributed to her was monstrous for reasons Stransom could judge his friend to know perfectly that he knew. The happy pair had just arrived from America, and Stransom hadn't needed to be told this to guess the nationality of the lady. Somehow ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... thing divided is not to be reckoned among its parts. But lust is reckoned together with the aforesaid: for it is written (Gal. 5:19): "The works of the flesh are manifest, which are fornication, uncleanness, immodesty, lust [Douay: 'luxury']." Therefore it seems that fornication is unfittingly ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... this discourse is very impertinent to you, whose judgment much better can discern the faults than I can excuse them; and whose good nature, like that of a lover, will find out those hidden beauties (if there are any such) which it would be great immodesty for me to discover. I think I don't speak improperly when I call you a lover of poetry; for it is very well known she has been a very kind mistress to you: she has not denied you the last favour, and she has been fruitful to you in a most beautiful ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... eye, mingling as they pass along—where splendid royalty is carried quicker than the clouds adown the road which palsied hunger scarce can cross for lack of strength—where lovely forms, and faces pure as angels' in their innocent expression, are met and tainted on the path by unwomanly immodesty and bare licentiousness—amongst such common sights you have not dwelt, and not observed some face pale and wasted from disease, and want, and sorrow, not one, but all, and all uniting to assail the weakly citadel of flesh, and to reduce it to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... "Your immodesty," said he, "falls in nothing short of the extraordinary frame of mind that you appear to be developing in connection with other matters. We shall have you beating a drum and screeching the Ca ira in the streets of Paris presently, ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... They are there, but she does not hear them, see them, or even acknowledge them by any courtesy of motion. But her own face always gives her the lie. In her assumption of indifference she displays her nasty consciousness, and in each attempt at a would-be propriety is guilty of an immodesty. Who does not know the timid retiring face of the young girl who when alone among men unknown to her feels that it becomes her to keep herself secluded? As many men as there are around her, so many ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... snobs, snobinibus quid reatumst, is not the matter but the manner of their worship. Those who will have it so maintain that we should pay to rank a certain discreet respect which must not be marred by crude expression. They compare snobbishness to immodesty, and profess that the pleasure of acquaintance with the great should be so enjoyed that the great themselves are but half-conscious of the homage offered them: this is rather a subtle and finicky critique of what is in honest minds ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... in this kind of fear is lacking, also, in sexual attractiveness to the normal and average man. The apparent exceptions seem to prove the rule, for it will generally be found that the women who are, not immodest (for immodesty is more closely related to modesty than mere negative absence of the sense of modesty), but without that fear which implies the presence of a complex emotional feminine organization to defend, only make a strong sexual appeal to men who are themselves lacking in the complementary ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... wealth manifested itself in every form of senseless luxury. Of refinement there was little; pleasures were coarse, indulgence was beastly. "Preachers, economists, and satirists," says Dr. Lindsay, "denounce the luxury and immodesty of the dress both of men and women, the gluttony and the drinking habits of the rich burghers and of the nobility of Germany. We learn from Hans von Schweinichen that noblemen prided themselves on having men among ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... caricature. He puts what he adores into some sacred, heroic form. If a man could paint the woman he loves a thousand times as the Stella Marts to put courage into the sailors on board a thousand ships, so much the more honor to her. Isn't that better than painting a piece of staring immodesty and calling it by ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... beruffled displays, that left one confounded as to what manner of creature dwelt therein, to the other extreme of mere gaudily ornamented nudity. I smiled as I recalled the world-old argument on the relative modesty of much or little clothing, for here immodesty was competing side by side in both extremes, both ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... see how unworthily thou him? But, woe is me, I now comprehend what has made thee give so little heed to what thou owest to thyself; it must have been some freedom of mine, for I will not call it immodesty, as it did not proceed from any deliberate intention, but from some heedlessness such as women are guilty of through inadvertence when they think they have no occasion for reserve. But tell me, traitor, when did I by word or sign give a reply to thy prayers ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the way of economy. Other and fewer students, to whom money was as the dust upon the bust of Pallas over the studio-door, talked of the last "first representations" at the Francais, of Croisette's rapidly amplifying figure, of Sarah Bernhardt's unnecessary immodesty in dressing Racine's Andromaque, of the Grant reception at Healy's, of Lefevre's slipperiness of texture, of the lack of the true sentiment of piety in Bouguereau's religious pictures, of the harum-scarum amusements among ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... more than satisfied with the progress of the C.M. What helped the movement very much was the character which Penloe and Stella gave it. When some of the more conservative element suggested the impropriety or immodesty of the C.I., they were met with the answer: "Look at Penloe and Stella, who live the idea every day of their lives. Are there any purer-minded persons than they are? Do not the best people of the city open their houses to welcome them? Did they not tell how living the life helped them ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... his Laureatcy. Lord Byron opens upon him on Monday in a Parody (I suppose) of the "Vision of Judgment," in which latter the Poet I think did not much show his. To award his Heaven and his Hell in the presumptuous manner he has done, was a piece of immodesty as bad as Shelleyism. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... redoubled after his having been confined, strove who shou'd shew me the most Respect, and make me the greatest Professions of friendship. They not only offer'd me their Purses, but even their Wives and Daughters, whom they often left with me and whose Immodesty has often put me to the Blush. Nay, a Boutofallalian, a Title answering to our Duke, told me, if I continued this Shyness, and would not do him the Honour to pass now and then an Hour with his Lady, he shou'd not take me for ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... was. Her crisping hair was over her ears and knotted behind her neck, without garland or fillet or so much as a brass pin; her green dress, though it was low in the neck, was tightly drawn over her bust; for what were glorious to be shown in a great lady, in her had been an immodesty. When she lifted her skirt out of the gutter you could see some inches of bare leg. Her hands were brown with work, though her neck was like warm marble in the sun. Eh, she knew herself through and through just a low-born wench; and "O Gesu Re!" her heart cried within her, "why can they ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... unbridled desire to publish family secrets, also to quarrel, to strike, to take revenge, to do evil, to steal, to tell lies, to deceive, to blaspheme; carelessness about the children, intemperance, luxury, excessive prodigality, drunkenness, uncleanness, immodesty, application to magic and witchcraft, impiety, with several other causes. By legitimate causes we do not here mean judicial causes, but such as are legitimate in regard to the other married partner; ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... condemnation requires such intimate knowledge that one can hardly pass it upon any but one's self. One cannot tear off all coverings from the hearts and minds of others, whereas one could strip one's own moral deformities naked, and that species of self-accusation does seem to me a kind of immodesty. One naturally shrinks, too, from speaking of deep and awful things, and then there is the all but insuperable difficulty of putting one's most intimate convictions, the realities of one's soul, into words ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... City, was a society leader, and was passing through her library to her carriage one evening, her little son said: "Mama, you are not going out on the street looking that way, are you? Why, you are scarcely dressed at all." The mother realizing as never before, the immodesty of her attire, returned to her room, changed her apparel to what met the approval of her boy, and has never since worn a ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... manner which Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the opera, or any fashionable assembly of young people display in America, are universally and justly condemned by sober thought as falling only a few grades behind actual immodesty. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... the winter blasts. Since Edmee had seen to his wants he had attained a certain cleanliness. Nevertheless, in the disorder of his toilet and his hatred of everything that passed the bounds of the strictest necessity (though he could not have been charged with immodesty, which had always been odious to him), the cynic of the old days was still apparent. His beard was shining like silver. His bald skull was so polished that the moon was reflected in it as in water. He walked slowly, with his hands behind his back and his head raised, like a man who is surveying ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... first bent upon me. I love you still, sire; it is a crime of high treason, I know, that a poor girl like myself should love her sovereign and should presume to tell him so. Punish me for my audacity, despise me for my shameless immodesty; but do not ever say, do not ever think, that I have jested with or deceived you. I belong to a family whose loyalty has been proved, sire; and ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... I behold Inspir'd with purple, pearl and gold, I think no other, but I see In them a glorious leprosy That does infect and make the rent More mortal in the vestiment. As flowery vestures do descry The wearer's rich immodesty: So plain and simple clothes do show Where virtue ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... by fashionable women that they objected to the woman's rights movement because of the publicity of a convention, the immodesty of speaking from a platform, and the trial of seeing one's name in the papers. Several ladies made such remarks to me one day, as a bevy of us were sitting together in one of the fashionable hotels ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... an uncouth peasant with a stubby nose, carroty cheeks, abundant breasts and hips, could give lessons in avarice to her sister, while in the matter of immodesty and undignified comportment she outdistanced her. She would go about the store with her bosom exposed and there wasn't a delivery-man who missed ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... naked ear into the bin and reaching for another. "Why, when I was young thar warn't nothin' in the way of meanness that a good woman wouldn't put up with. They'd shut thar eyes to Hagars, white or black, rather than lose the respect of men by seemin' to be aware of any immodesty." ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... a smile, with its sublime immodesty, that aspiration seemed to Felix infinitely touching. What less could youth want in the very heart of Spring? And, watching her face put up to the night, her parted lips, and the moon-gleam fingering her white ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the figure a Victory and place its date no earlier than the second century B.C. However this may be, the statue is justly one of the most famous in the world. It represents an ideal of purity and sweetness. There is not a trace of coarseness or immodesty in the half-naked woman who stands perfect in the maidenly dignity of her own conquering fairness. Her serious yet smiling face, her graceful form, the delicacy of feeling in attitude and gaze, the tender moulding of breast and limbs, make it a worthy companion of ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... writer does not mean to charge the girl with immodesty (after the style "Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance!") but to show how powerfully Fate and Fortune wrought upon her. Hence also she so readily allowed the King's son to ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... leg to the ground—listened; drew forth its companion—listened; glimpsed her white legs; shuddered at such immodesty with a man so close; veiled them to their toes with her bed- gown; listened; ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... fruits of the Spirit, the first place is given to charity, joy, and peace: to which, fornication, uncleanness, and immodesty, which are the first of the works of the flesh, are not opposed. Therefore the fruits of the Spirit are not contrary to the works ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... delicate Subject to talk upon; but if it were but hinted, I am in hopes it would give the Parties concern'd some Reflection that might expedite our Happiness. There is a Possibility, and I hope I may say it without Imputation of Immodesty to her I love with the highest Honour; I say, there is a Possibility this Delay may be as painful to her as it is to me. If it be as much, it must be more, by reason of the severe Rules the Sex are under in being ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... occasionally in shop windows, and, it may be, in human habitations, a species of abominable clock that has no kind of casing to conceal the works; it suggests the image of a prima ballerina. With the perfectly modest immodesty of the little boy cited in discussion by Laurence Sterne, she delights in exhibiting the works; more truthfully than a once famous conjuror, she insists upon showing us "how it is done"; and that really is quite the last thing a person of any taste wishes to know, or, rather, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... their revelation of it. That was, at least, an honest fashion, and men who married could not well complain that they had been deceived by concealment. But that tells nothing against the modesty of our grandmothers. What is modest in dress depends entirely on what is customary; and there is an immodesty that hides, as well as one that exposes. Unconsciousness is modesty's triple shelter against shame. See here, the dissolute Marguerite of Navarre, visible only at head and hands; the former from the chin ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... that by some unfathomable witchery of her devising conveyed a thought of maidenhood and modesty. It dawned on Tess, who watched her spell-bound, that there was not one immodest thought in all Yasmini's throng of moods, but only a scorn of all immodesty and its pretensions. And whether that was art, or sheer expression of the truth within her rather than a recognition of the truth without, Tess never quite determined; for it is easier to judge spoken word and ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... of God's truth and recommendation, as it were, to gratify and shield my own selfishness and—" here her voice sank, and her lips quivered, and grew dry, but she waited, and struggled, and finally went on—"and immodesty. I don't know why I should tell you this—except that I've told you every thing else, and this may save you from some of the wrong the rest has done you. But the most of it must remain irreparable." A long sigh quivered up from Sophie's heart, and quivered down again, like a pebble ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... disciples like leaving out the salt from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the divisions in Leaves of Grass, particularly that entitled Children of Adam, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness, Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit. The effort to get ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... this incident is purposely varied from the copy. It is but justice to the Otabeitans to apprize the reader, that in the account of the missionary voyage, published in 1799, and hereafter to be noticed, this conduct as to immodesty is in no small degree explained, and they are acknowledged even to excel in some parts, of delicacy of sentiment and behaviour. The testimony of that account, it may be remarked, is deserving the more credit, because the mission itself was avowedly ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... I have confined myself to Ghat and Ghadames; the oases of Fezzan, and the city of Mourzuk, have become too much vitiated by contact with The Coast and the Turks for affording fair specimens of Saharan tribes. Let us then compare what has been said to those hideous scenes of crime, of immodesty, and drunkenness, which abound in the great cities of Europe—the ever-present, ever-during stigma on our boasted civilization!—and ask the paradoxical question, What do we gain by European and Christian civilization? ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... bench and witness their chaste salutes, but it was that they did fail to perceive me at all! There is a kind of superb finish and completeness about their indifference to the public gaze which removes it from ordinary immodesty, and gives it ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... elders. At all ages the people will discard their clothing without any sense of shame, whenever the occasion demands; as, for instance, the fording of a stream, or when a number of both sexes happen to be bathing at the same time in the village pool. This does not lead to immodesty or lewdness, and a person who is careless about the acts, which are not considered proper in Tinguian society, is an object of scorn quite as much as he would be in a ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... schisms in the new school with regard to details, but on the whole it is a united one. The members are unanimous in their fearless optimism. One and all they preach the same hopeful doctrine, that the attainment of a high standard of immodesty by woman will in time make morality ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... always been notorious for their immodesty, and the island, notwithstanding the labours of zealous missionaries, continues to be the Polynesian Paphos. The French protectorate from which it suffers has not raised the moral ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... susceptibilities, but the consciousness of energy, of beauty, and of a social state full of danger and opportunity. And for this reason we find, side by side with the most measured and polished social forms, something our age would call immodesty, forgetting that by which it was corrected and counter- balanced— the powerful characters of the women who were exposed ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the honest simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... quality or invention, deserve the esteem and thanks of the public. Such a benefactor is a gentleman of this house, who is observed by the surgeons with much envy; for he has invented an engine for the prevention of harms by love adventures, and by great care and application, hath made it an immodesty to name his name. This act of self-denial has gained this worthy member of the commonwealth a great reputation. Some lawgivers have departed from their abodes for ever, and commanded the observation of their laws till their return; others have used other artifices to fly ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... heads. Their costume consisted of a loose piece of Soudan cloth, fastened on the left shoulder, and leaving the right uncovered, with a smaller piece wound about the head, and falling on the shoulders or flung back. In spite of this paucity of clothing, there was not the least immodesty in ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... me immediately two girls very showily dressed. The elder could not be more than eleven years of age and the other seven, and both exhibited so much immodesty that more could not be expected ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... but were more cautious of facts, because the meaning of facts cannot be misunderstood, young men had a refuge from the temptations of the stage in the reserved deportment and full clothing of domestic society, we cannot wonder that the good old ladies who abhorred the slightest immodesty in dress little, if at all less than they abhorred actual vice, should urge to their sons the necessity of keeping aloof from the allurements of the theatre. If at that time the costume of the stage differed essentially from that of private life, and was the reverse of modest, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... not be confused with self-conceit; for it implies no immodesty or egotism. Even if the faithful study of one's self reveals a high order of natural gifts, it is not needful to imitate the son of the Emerald Isle who always lifted his hat and made an obsequious bow when he spoke of himself or mentioned his own name. George Eliot hits off pompous self-conceit ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... the brain for assimilating fresh matter. At the Consulate of Damascus, however, in West Arabian Midian and in Maroccan Tangier the loss was readily recovered. In fact, of this and sundry other subjects it may be said without immodesty that I have forgotten as much as many Arabists have learned. But I repeat my confession that I do not know Arabic and I have still to meet the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... this immodest, but even modesty could be more easily dispensed with than marriage. Besides, without quitting our position as impartial observers, we may point out that it is only fair to the professor of husband-hunting to remember that there are two kinds of immodesty, and that some actions are immodest merely because it is the custom to consider them so. It would, no doubt, be immodest for a young lady to ride through Hyde Park in man's fashion. Yet what is there in the nature of things to ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... easily enough be confounded with the utter repudiation of it. Both forms of mind will discuss the same questions; both will discuss them freely, with a certain plainness and daring, which may range through all grades, from the bluntness of Socrates down to reckless immodesty and profaneness. The world will hardly distinguish between the two; it did not in Socrates' case, mistaking his reverent irreverence for Atheism, and martyred him accordingly, as it has since martyred Luther's memory. Probably, too, if a living struggle is going on in the ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... presence and ministries, were the gentility of those days, representing the better order of society, and told stories which would now be venal if told by vulgar men in some tavern of ill-repute. That Boccaccio should have reported these tales as emanating from such a company is proof positive of the immodesty of those days, whose story is rehearsed in the "Decameron." Rousseau's "Confessions" is another book showing the absence of current morality in his age. Notwithstanding George Eliot's panegyric, these memoirs are the production of unlimited conceit, of a practical absence of any ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... earthly things than for heavenly things, and that indecent thoughts occupied their minds. They were told that nakedness is no occasion either of shame or scandal to those who live in chastity, and in a state of innocence, but that it is to those who live in lasciviousness and immodesty. ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... plainly noticeable in certain races of primitive folks which are yet in existence, notably the autochthons of the Aleutian Islands. Huddled together in their communal kachims, naked, without any thought of immodesty, men, women, and children share the same fire and eat from the same pot. They recognize no immorality in the fact of the father cohabiting with his daughter—one of them naively remarking to Langsdorf, who reproached ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... her with that stolid contempt which Finistere Bretons cherish toward those women who show their hair—an immodesty unpardonable in the ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... "Honest! Open you name it! There is but one definition for it. Immodesty! In a young girl that is deadlier than impiety. It is the wild blood of her father," he ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... always been notorious for their immodesty; and notwithstanding the past labours of English missionaries, the island continues to be the Polynesian Paphos. The moral standard of the population has not been raised since they came under the shadow of a ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... quickly closed them again. She realized there was something inconsistent in her explanation. Mother had accused her of immodesty: riding astride and wearing those scandalous pepper-and-salts and showing her legs. If mother was right, if she WAS brazen, somehow it didn't tie up to ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... have done it in a favourable, others in an opposite manner. The bishop of Sarum in the history of his own times, says, that the stage was defiled beyond all example. 'Dryden, the great master of dramatic poetry, being a monster of immodesty and impurities of all sorts.'[8] The late lord Lansdown took upon himself to vindicate Mr. Dryden's character from this severe imputation; which was again answered, and apologies for it, by Mr. Burnet, the bishop's son. But not to dwell ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... is not easy to do. Aside from the ordinary commercial reasons I find none that I can offer with dignity: I cannot say without immodesty that the books have merit; I cannot say without immodesty that the public want a "Uniform Edition"; I cannot say without immodesty that a "Uniform Edition" will turn the nation toward high ideals & elevated thought; I cannot ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a wanton eye, or an eye that doth secretly affect itself with such objects as are tickling of the heart with the thoughts of immodesty and uncleanness. Isaiah calls this a wanton eye: and Peter an eye full of adultery, that cannot cease from sin (2 Peter 2:14; Isa 3:16). This is that also which Christ calleth an evil eye, and John the lust of the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... this was so as regards his bare chest, arms and waist, and to convince us that he had nothing hidden in his dhotie he showed us one bare leg at a time, avoiding barely any immodesty. Concealing our blushes, we felt satisfied that his dhotie was the only worldly possession that he had with him at the moment. He picked up his chanter and continued to circle round and round our orderly, ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... incipient desire, and prudence enough to avoid temptation. My condition encouraged introspection. I was almost constantly probing my own mind, and by mere strength of will, which I had long cultivated until—I suppose there is no immodesty in saying it—I could govern myself, I drew back from every obstacle which my judgment pronounced insurmountable. The Doctor had been of the greatest help to me in this development of the will, and especially in that phase or exercise of it called self-control; one of his common ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... Ceylon was Oriental in the last measure of completeness—utterly Oriental; also utterly tropical; and indeed to one's unreasoning spiritual sense the two things belong together. All the requisites were present. The costumes were right; the black and brown exposures, unconscious of immodesty, were right; the juggler was there, with his basket, his snakes, his mongoose, and his arrangements for growing a tree from seed to foliage and ripe fruitage before one's eyes; in sight were plants and flowers familiar to one on books but in no other way celebrated, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... this was no incentive to true religion; that the Holy Mother of God could hardly be edified by the performance, seeing that the players were almost nude, and that certain of the gestures verged on indelicacy and even immodesty. Every year he complained in like fashion: Ah, what would the Madonna say, if she ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... the shades of things,' I rejoined. 'Decencies and violations—there is no need for such heavy artillery! I can perfectly imagine that without the least immodesty she should have said to Jasper on the balcony, in fact if not in words—"I'm in dreadful spirits, but if you come I shall feel better, and that will be ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... but we can give you simplicities, or plain and straightforward paths. Are you fond of seeing contests or trials for victory? You shall see these also, and such as are not trivial, but important. You may see, in our christian example, chastity overcoming immodesty. You may see faithfulness giving a death-wound to perfidy. You may see mercy getting the better of cruelty. You may see modesty and delicacy of sentiment overcoming impurity and impudence. These are the contests in which it becomes us christians to be concerned, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... He was above all things a chaste-minded man, modest as a nun. To the immodesty rampant about him he was in the habit of closing his eyes and his ears, until the flagrancy or the noise of it grew to proportions to which he might remain ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... from his curious half-medical reading, he would not find some plausible pretext to tell. Man's kinship to the animal, the material, and all the proofs of it:—he would never blush at them! In truth, he led the way to the immodesty of French literature; and had his defence, a sort of defence, ready. "I know very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings, who have not more to quarrel with in the licence of ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... Wert but an ill looke. If I may so far, Without immodesty, entreat the knowledge Of what it was Ile chide her for't. Pray, sir,— We women are bold suitors; by your looke It is no meane perplexity her folly Has cast upon your temper,—pray, disclose it; And ift be anything the obedience ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... sermons, she considered, “immoderate length in a sermon is a fault which excellence itself cannot expiate.” . . . “The present mode of dress in our young women of fashion, and their imitators, is, for its gross immodesty, a proper subject of grave rebuke for the preacher.” . . . “Nothing is more disgusting to me, and, indeed, to the generality of people, than dictatorial egotism from the pulpit. Even in the learned and aged clergyman it is priestly arrogance. When we see ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... not astonishing that the church itself did little to remove the barbarism prevailing among the common people, for, in point of fact, buffoonery, immodesty, and cruelty had intruded into the very ceremonial of religion. Never were there more disgusting exhibitions of the low state of the public morals than when the occurrence of pestilence, drought, or some other ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Chahut a dance which was never performed except at the end of the ball, when the municipal guards had retired. Among the depraved couples who figured in the revel, the Slasher remarked two who won applause above all by the disgusting immodesty of their postures, gestures, and words. The first couple were composed of a man nearly disguised as a bear, by means of a waistcoat and trousers of black sheepskin. The head of the animal, doubtless too heavy to carry, had been replaced ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... adorn a prudish tale and Lancelot to point a moral. Oh, Mother Nature, give us back our freedom, with its strength of sinew and its humour! For lack of it we perish in false shame, and our fig-leaves point our immodesty to all the world. Teach us that love is not a tawdry sentiment, but a fire divine in order to the procreation of children; teach us not to dishonour our bodies, for they are beautiful and pure, and all thy works are sweet. Teach us, again, in thy merciful goodness, that man ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... in the second part of this play, where Bellafront, a reclaimed harlot, recounts some of the miseries of her profession, a simple picture of honor and shame, contrasted without violence, and expressed without immodesty; which is worth all the strong lines against the harlot's profession, with which both parts of this play are offensively crowded. A satirist is always to be suspected, who, to make vice odious, dwells upon all its acts and minutest circumstances with a sort of relish ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... sense-degrading She, Who swayed and sickened, scourged and scarified The unwilling slaves of fashion and discomfort A quarter of a century since! She sat, A spectral, scraggy, beet-nosed, ankle-less, Obtrusive-panted, splay-foot, slattern-shape, Of grim Medusa-faced Immodesty, Caged cumbrously in a stiff, swaying, swollen, Shin-scarifying, hose-revealing frame Of wide-meshed metal, like a monster mousetrap— Hideous, indecent, awkward! Oh, I knew her— This loathly revenant, revisiting The glimpses of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... that broke over Spinrobin's face was certainly reflected in the eyes that gazed so searchingly into his own, without the smallest sign of immodesty, yet without the least inclination to drop the eyelids. The two natures ran out to meet each other as naturally as two notes of music run to take their places in a chord. This slight, blue-eyed youth, light of hair and sensitive of ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... and many in merely contemptuous curiosity, to hear what a writer on painting could possibly say, or would venture to say, respecting your great art of war. You may well think within yourselves, that a painter might, perhaps without immodesty, lecture younger painters upon painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor young physicians upon medicine—least of all, it may seem to you, young warriors upon war. And, indeed, when I was asked to address you, I declined at first, and ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... and Mr. Waddington couldn't see himself doing all the work and handing over all the glory to Sir John. Still, between Mr. Waddington and the glory there was only this supine figure of Sir John, and Sir John once out of the running he could count without immodesty on the unanimous vote of any committee he ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair |
