"Ascetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Then it was that, seen from above, it flashed like a falchion lying between the hills; then its reflected glory, striking up, transfigured the two acclivities, tipped the cold heather with fire, gladdened the funereal pines, and warmed the ascetic rocks. And it was in one of those rare, passionate intervals that the consul, riding along the wooded track and turning his eyes from their splendors, came upon a ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and the wholesome companionship of other girls, of course the ascetic impulse died a natural death; but the temper did not die. It only hid itself under that sense of propriety which is responsible for so much of our good behavior. When it did break loose, the child suffered afterward from the consciousness ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... to them a suspicion: such an enormity of self-negation and anti-naturalness will not have been coveted for nothing—they have said, inquiringly. There is perhaps a reason for it, some very great danger, about which the ascetic might wish to be more accurately informed through his secret interlocutors and visitors? In a word, the mighty ones of the world learned to have a new fear before him, they divined a new power, a strange, still unconquered enemy:—it was the "Will ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... men cannot work without friction; but in all things it was devotion to the public service, and not personal ambition, that carried Charles Napier to such extremes. From his youth he had trained himself to such a pitch of self-denial and ascetic rigour that he could not make allowance for the frailties of the average man. His keen eye and swift brain made him too impatient of the shortcomings of conscientious officials. He was ready to work fifteen hours a day when the need came; ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... for instruction as to the nature of the Guru. He it is who defines the Guru's work, He it is who inspires the Guru's teaching. Every Guru on earth is a reflection of Mahadeva, and it is His life which he is commissioned to give out to the world. Yogi, immersed in contemplation, taking the ascetic form always—that marks out His functions. For the symbols by which the mighty Ones are shown in the teachings are not meaningless, but are replete with the deepest meaning. And when you see Him represented ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... as a reputable man just as he palmed poor Macbeth off as a murderer. To-day the palming off is no longer necessary (at least on your plane and mine) because Don Juanism is no longer misunderstood as mere Casanovism. Don Juan himself is almost ascetic in his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my attempt to bring him up to date by launching him as a modern Englishman into a modern English environment has produced a figure superficially quite ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... feet? But things being as they are, why, Antony, what can be so sweet as thy sweet words? The harbour of his rest to the storm-tossed mariner—surely that is sweet! The dream of Heaven's bliss which cheers the poor ascetic priest on his path of sacrifice—surely that is sweet! The sight of Dawn, the rosy-fingered, coming in his promise to glad the watching Earth—surely that is sweet! But, ah! not one of these, nor all dear delightful things that are, can match the honey-sweetness of thy words to me, O Antony! For ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... cheerful, even sanguine disposition, and his countenance faithfully reflected the ordinary bent of his humour. Seeing him at a distance, the casual observer would at once have judged him to be either an athlete or an ascetic. There was no superfluous flesh about him; he was tall and muscular, with well- knit limbs, broad shoulders, and a head altogether lacking in the humble or conciliatory 'droop' which all worldly-wise parsons cultivate for the benefit of ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... The thin ascetic countenance was that of a woman of strong character, and her funereal habit seemed much too large for her stunted, ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... kings, be dispelled. The gods attained to their divinity for absence of desire, covetousness, and of enmity, as also for their indifference to all worldly affairs. Formerly, Dwaipayana-Vyasa and Narada of great ascetic austerities, and Rama, the son of Jamadagni, told us this. The gods never like human beings to engage in work, O bull of the Bharata race, from desire, or wrath, or covetousness, or envy. Indeed, if Agni, or ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... man like Glanville, with costly tastes, luxurious habits, great talents, peculiarly calculated for display, courted by the highest members of the state, admired for his beauty and genius by half the women in London, yet living in the most ascetic seclusion from his kind, and indulging in the darkest and most morbid despondency. No female was ever seen to win even his momentary glance of admiration. All the senses seemed to have lost, for his palate, their customary allurements. He lived among his books, and seemed to make his favourite companions ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... practising the most severe austerities for the space of three years, Siva, mounted on his bull, with his spouse Parvati by his side, appears before the hermit, who is overjoyed at the sight of the deity. Siva bids him ask any boon and it should be granted. The royal ascetic desires to have a son. Then says Siva: "For thy long penance we grant thy request. Choose then—a son who shall always be with thee till death, but shall be the greatest fool in the whole world, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... a flagged room like a cellar—cold, ascetic and bare. There was a big open fire-place, with a chimney hooded by massive masonry and blackened by the fires of immemorial winters. This was where Joan's parents had lived. She had probably been born here. The ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... beside it was musing the young Brahman priest who served the temple. Since I had joined Vanna I had begun with her help to study a little Hindustani, and with an aptitude for language could understand here and there. I caught a word or two as she spoke with him that startled me, when the high-bred ascetic face turned serenely upon her, and he addressed her as "My sister," adding a sentence beyond my learning, but which she willingly translated later.—"May He who sits above the Mysteries, have ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... same thing in the same way. Some of them would set out to do one thing and some another. Some would prefer to walk alone high up on the ridge; others would choose a bevy of companions and chatter along the road under the hill. Some would be thin, ascetic persons, who liked to stride along and see how far they could go without eating or drinking; some would be pleasant, good-tempered creatures, who would amble by dusty places and be thankful for cool beer; some would eat or drink mechanically, filled with a single thought ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... Sunday evening concerts at a club of Polterham workmen. His discourse on this subject, systematically developed, lasted until the ladies withdrew. It allowed him scarcely any attention to his plate, but Mr. Vialls had the repute of an ascetic. In his buttonhole was a piece of blue ribbon, symbol of a ferocious total-abstinence; his face would have afforded sufficient proof that among the reverend man's failings were few distinctly of ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... patched dormitory where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for his ascetic sanctity. ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... and came to our shores with an eager desire to realize it, and a hunger for it such as some of us no longer felt, for we were as if satiated and satisfied and were indulging ourselves after a fashion that did not belong to the ascetic devotion of the early devotees of those great principles. Strangers came to remind us of what we had promised ourselves and through ourselves had promised mankind. All men came to us and said, "Where is the bread of life with which you promised to feed us, ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... island to another either as trader or seaman. Of such money as he made he sent the greater portion to his sisters in the Colonies, retaining only enough for himself to enable him to live decently. He was not an ascetic, he drank fairly with his rough companions, gambled occasionally in a moderate manner with them, swore when the exigences of seafaring life demanded it, but no one had ever heard his name coupled ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... still enshrined, thy rites, Though dark Tibet, that dread ascetic, falls, In strange austerity, whose trance appals,— Before thee, and a suppliant on thee calls. Continue still thy silence high and sure, That something beyond fleeting may endure— Something that shall forevermore allure Imagination on to mystic ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... an irrepressible joy, an outbreak of enthusiasm which will not be controlled. The glorious Gargantuan creature, in the best sense Rabelaisian, is uplifted by Browning into a very saint of joyous effort; no pallid ascetic, indeed, beating his breast with the stone, but a Christian saint of Luther's school, while at the same time a somewhat over-boisterous benevolent ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Daniella of Orvieto, clothed with the Habit of St. Dominic To Monna Agnese, wife of Francesco, a tailor of Florence Letters in response to certain criticisms To Monna Orsa, wife of Bartolo Usimbardi, and to Monna Agnese To a Religious man in Florence, who was shocked at her Ascetic Practices To Brother Bartolomeo Dominici To Brother Matteo di Francesco Tolomei To a Mantellata of Saint Dominic, called Catarina di Scetto To Neri di Landoccio dei Pagliaresi To Monna Giovanna and her other ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... illusion which lures on that age fades when the ascetic zeal of the saint is frustrated by the joy of life, and the crusader's valour is broken on the Moslem lances, and the scholastic's indefatigable pursuit of a harmonizing, a reconciling word of reason and of faith, his ardour not less lofty than the crusader's to pierce the ever-thickening ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... portraits and characters, most observers must perceive the absence of the note of passion. I have sometimes tried to think that miraculous episode of Isopel Berners and the Armenian verbs, with the whole sojourn of Lavengro in the dingle, a mere wayward piece of irony—a kind of conscious ascetic myth. But I am afraid the interpretation will not do. The subsequent conversation with Ursula Petulengro under the hedge might be only a companion piece; even the more wonderful, though much less ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... Pythagorean philosopher, born in Cappadocia about four years before the Christian era. After being early educated in the circle of philosophy, and in the practice of the ascetic discipline of his predecessor Pythagoras, he imitated that philosopher in spending the next portion of his life in travel. Attracted by his mysticism to the farthest East as the source of knowledge, he set out ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... From this time dates his friendship with Robert Leighton (1611-1684), who greatly influenced his religious opinions. Leighton had, during a stay in the Spanish Netherlands, assimilated something of the ascetic and pietistic spirit of Jansenism, and was devoted to the interests of peace in the church. Burnet wisely refused to accept a benefice in the disturbed state of church affairs, but he wrote an audacious letter to Archbishop ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... can be indifferent to wealth and comfort and popularity, one has a better chance of serenity. The essence of that teaching is not that pleasant things are not desirable, but that one is more miserable if one loses them than if one never cares for them at all. The ascetic trains himself to be indifferent about food and drink and the apparatus of life; he aims at celibacy partly because love itself is an overmastering passion, and partly because he cannot bear to engage himself with human affections, the loss of which may ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... therefore, from the contumely which vulgar minds are always ready to bestow upon saints and mystics who sit aloof from them, high enthroned amidst the truths and solemnities of God. The secluded and ascetic life of most scholars, highly favorable as it undoubtedly is to contemplation and internal development, has likewise its disadvantages, and puts them, as being undisciplined in the ways of life, at great ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... San-Lucar was chosen by Don Juan to be the director of the consciences of the Duchess of Belvidero and her son Felipe. The ecclesiastic was a holy man, well shaped, and admirably well proportioned. He had fine dark eyes, a head like that of Tiberius, worn with fasting, bleached by an ascetic life, and, like all dwellers in the wilderness, was daily tempted. The noble lord had hopes, it may be, of despatching yet another monk before his term ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... to the respect he commanded from the students because of his extraordinary feats in walking and lifting. He was impressive, almost handsome. For what of his face his ragged, rusty beard left uncovered was regularly if coldly featured. He was ascetic in type. Moreover, the look of the born disciplinarian lay on him. His blue eyes carried a glacial gleam. Even through his thick mustache, the lines ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... world. Religion would have grown to superstition, ecstasy would have ruled in the hearts of the religious devotees, weakening their hold on the real, and wafting them away into misty regions of paradise. We should have had every exaggeration of ascetic practice, hermitages multiplying among the rocks and islands of the sea, men and women torturing their bodies for the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... habitation, no sense of the value of money, giving it away to those in need as readily as if it had no value, often enduring privation himself in consequence; with a mode of life so simple that the entire menage was frequently transported elsewhere on slight provocation, this ascetic was now to encounter housekeeping problems, make money, save it (most difficult of all), employ servants, in short undertake in middle-age and in impaired health, duties the nature of which he could not even ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... ascetic old man would have attracted the interest of the world even more, had it not been for one of his disciples. This was a young man from Sinope, on the Euxine, whom he did not take to at first sight; the son of a disreputable money-changer who had been sent to prison for defacing the coinage. Antisthenes ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... Hall, and as her table and her accommodations were the best on the camp ground, she often invited and pressed good Father Gray to rest and refresh himself in her tent. And the old man, though a severe ascetic, yielded to her repeated solicitations, until at length he seemed to live ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... ascetic conscience, that overemphasizes the need of sacrifice, and deletes all the positive joy of life for the sake of freedom from possible pain. This particular misdirection of conscience is not prominent in contemporary ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... art. Surprising pictures, glowing in color, are on the walls. These are cherubs rioting in health, smiling old men, benignant matrons, radiant maidens, all feasting on nectar and ambrosia. Here and there is a pale ascetic, with a look of agony on ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... fought bitterly against the observance of the Kalends; she condemned repeatedly the unseemly doings of Christians in joining in heathenish customs at that season; she tried to make the first of January a solemn fast; and from the ascetic point of view she was profoundly right, for the old festivals were bound up with a lusty attitude towards the world, a seeking for ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... Buddha, into a mere allegory:—Kapilavastu meaning, according to him, the substance of Kapila or of the Sankhya philosophy. This is not all. Mr. Spence Hardy (p. 132) quotes a legend in which it is said that Buddha was in a former existence the ascetic Kapila, that the Sakya princes came to his hermitage, and that he pointed out to them the proper place for founding a new city, which city was named after him Kapilavastu. But we have looked in vain for any definite similarities between the system of Kapila, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... indigenous sectaries, are in question. Nor would bran and hot water be a Hindu regimen. The staple diet of the Tibetans is Chamba, the meal of toasted barley, mixed sometimes with warm water, but more frequently with hot tea, and I think it is probable that these were the elements of the ascetic diet rather than the mere bran which Polo speaks of. Semedo indeed says that some of the Buddhist devotees professed never to take any food but tea; knowing people said they mixed with it pellets of sun-dried beef. The determination of the sect intended in the text is, I conceive, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... cities, and because of the direct intervention of President Roosevelt. The central figure of this gigantic struggle was the miners' young leader, barely thirty years old, with the features of a scholar and the demeanor of an ascetic, marshaling his forces with the strategic skill of ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... and high thinking." It is always open to character and intellect to perceive and to assert their essential superiority. Why should Socrates heed Sardanapalus? Why indeed? But the average young man at college is not an ascetic, nor a devotee, nor an absorbed student unmindful of cold and heat, and disdainful of elegance and ease and the nameless magic of social accomplishment and grace. He is a youth peculiarly susceptible to the very influence that Sardanapalus typifies, and the wise parent will hesitate ...
— Ars Recte Vivende - Being Essays Contributed to "The Easy Chair" • George William Curtis
... the center of the hut. The old buck knelt beside her. He was very old indeed. His time-ravaged features were lean and ascetic. His clay-matted hair was streaked with white; his black eyes were deep-sunk and his temples were hollow. But there was a fine sort of dignity about the old medicine-man, despite his squalor. He gazed on Rhoda in silence for some time. Alchise and Cesca sat on the floor, ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... public assemblages, the foolish eye roves in search of the vanity of female beauty, and rests upon some lovely visage, or pretty figure; but here it seemed to matter nothing whether ladies were well or ill-looking; and one might have been perfectly ascetic without self-denial. A blue eye or a black,—what of it? A mass of blonde or chestnut hair, this sort of walking-dress or that,—you might note the difference casually in a few hundred around you; but a sense of those myriads of other eyes and chignons and walking-dresses absorbed ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... closely familiar with the Court yet still somewhat aloof, apartado. like Gil Terron. Vicente regards himself as a rustico peregrino (III. 390), an ignorante sabedor (I. 373) as opposed to the ignorant-malicious or ignorant-presumptuous of the Court. But Vicente was no ascetic, his was a genial, generous nature, he liked to have enough to spend and give and leave in his will. Kindly and chivalrous, he was a champion of the down-trodden but had first-hand knowledge of the malice and intrigues of the peasants and of the poor in the towns. Above all he was thoroughly ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... chronicle the ascetic sternness of the old Norman castles had been humanized and refined so that the new dwellings of the nobility, if less imposing in appearance, were much more comfortable as places of residence. A gentle race had built their houses ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... illustrated paper that tramples with a swine's hoofs and routs up with a swine's nose the matter its clients best love to purchase. Mary, supported by her father and her cousin, preserved a brave composure. Indeed, she was less visibly moved than they. It seemed that the ascetic parent of the dead had power to lift the widow to his own stern self-control. The chaplain of Tom May's ship assisted at the service, but Septimus May conducted it. Not a few old messmates attended, for the sailor had been ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... the barns, the out-buildings. The brethren must have suffered much from cold in winter. The day divided by services, the nights broken by prayers; probably the time was dull enough, but passed quickly, like all lives full of monotonous engagements. They were not particularly ascetic, these Benedictines, and insisted much on manual labour in the open air. Probably at first the monks did their farm-work as well; but as they grew richer, they employed labourers, and themselves fell back on simpler and easier garden-work. Perhaps some few were truly ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as he himself has defined it, the sage is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an ascetic living only on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine; so in love with retirement that even in the village he was for a long time almost unknown, so careful was he to go round instead of through it on his way to the neighbouring ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... can rise up again, but the enemy reconciled is truly vanquished. In the moral philosophy of Kant the idea of duty is proposed with a harshness enough to ruffle the Graces, and one which could easily tempt a feeble mind to seek for moral perfection in the sombre paths of an ascetic and monastic life. Whatever precautions the great philosopher has been able to take in order to shelter himself against this false interpretation, which must be repugnant more than all else to the serenity of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... enlightenment, it is said that Gautama was seized by the temptation to enter at once into Nirvana, without proclaiming his doctrine to the world. But putting the temptation from him, he began his ministry by announcing the tidings of release to the companions of his ascetic life, who, after scoffing for awhile, were at length convinced. In the course of this, his first sermon, Buddha proceeded to enunciate the eight steps on the path which leads to Nirvana—(i) Right faith, (ii) right resolution, (iii) right speech, (iv) right action, ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... to drink so much," said the abstemious and ascetic Simes. "They ought to stop this side of a drop ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... of her. Then Mandaravati suddenly dies of a fever. The three Brahmans take her body to the cemetery and burn it. One builds a hut there, and makes her ashes his bed; the second takes her bones, and goes with them to the sacred river Ganges; the third becomes an ascetic, ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... to do was to turn himself into a young modern ascetic, prick his legs well in going through the furze, and then take a little bark off his shins in climbing twenty feet up on to the great monolith, ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... instructors of his early manhood supply the corrective which his boyhood lacked. From Protagoras, Prodicus and others he learnt to laugh at the common ideas of justice, temperance, holiness and patriotism. The laborious thought, the ascetic life of his master Socrates, he was able to admire, but not to imitate or practise. On the contrary, his ostentatious vanity, his amours, his debaucheries and his impious revels became notorious. But great as were his vices, his abilities were even ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... such superior men who are already above worldly or heavenly prosperities, and for whom the Vedic duties have ceased to have any attraction. Wheresoever there may be such a deserving person, be he a student, a householder or an ascetic, for him the Upani@sads have been revealed for his ultimate emancipation and the true knowledge. Those who perform the Vedic duties belong to a stage inferior to those who no longer care for the fruits of the Vedic duties but are eager for final emancipation, and it is the latter ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... his chief characteristics. In 1516, King Ferdinand, dying, left Cardinal Ximenes regent of Castile, thus bringing Charles into contact with one of the foremost statesmen of Spanish history. Ximenes was rigorously ascetic in his life, and absolutely irreproachable in his morals, in an age when the clergy were excessively corrupt. He doubled his fasts, wore a hair shirt, slept on the bare ground, scourged himself with assiduity and ardor; became the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... of them wrote and circulated some abusive verses, in which he made reference to the Bishop's comfortable way of life. The biographer then explains that the Bishop was so tender-hearted that he suffered for the horses who drew his episcopal coach, and so ascetic that he would have lived on tea and toast if he had been permitted to. A curious condition in English society, where the Bishop would have lived on tea and toast, but was not permitted to; while the working people, who didn't want to live on tea ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... few days' pause he starts from London for Malbourne, stopping at Belminster, through which he had made his last free journey with Cyril, when he told him that "an ascetic is a rake turned monk." Passing the gaol in which he had suffered so much, he goes to the cathedral. He asks who is ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... rescuing and avenging the oppressed, destroying the agents of hell, and everywhere delivering mankind from the devices of terrorism, thrall, and the power of darkness. The divine Order of Chivalry is the enemy of ascetic isolation and indifferentism. It is the Order of the Christ who goes about doing good. The Christian knight, mounted on a valiant steed (for the horse is the symbol of Intelligence), and equipped with the panoply of Michael, is the type of the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... little to the general knowledge. He had first heard of Mr. Adams through a Philadelphia lawyer, since dead, who had assured him of his client's respectability and undoubted ability to pay his rent. When they came together and Mr. Adams was introduced to him, he had been struck, first, by the ascetic appearance of his prospective tenant, and, secondly, by his reserved manners and quiet intelligence. But admirable as he had found him, he had never succeeded in making his acquaintance. The rent had been uniformly paid with great exactitude on the very day it was due, but his own visits ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... more than any other writer of his time to establish certain latent tendencies as characteristics of the Catholic spirit. His pleading in favour of ascetic life and of virginity, that entirely Christian virtue, was very influential. He lauds the virgin above the wife, and, indeed, he goes so far as to tell parents that they can obtain pardon of their sins by offering their daughters to God. His teaching ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... and was rediscovered there in 1874. It is supposed to be this San Giovannino by Michael Angelo, though it has nothing of the large quality of Michael Angelo's work. Donatello has been suggested as the author, but it has still less of the square planes and ascetic character of the great Donato. It is a charming, almost a cloying statue. St. John seems to find his ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... provincial, local, distorted. His Christ is the Christ of morbid Seminarists and ascetic undergraduates; not the Christ that Leonardo da Vinci saw breaking bread with his disciples; not the Christ that Paolo Veronese saw moving among the crowds of the street like a royal ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the astounded Colonel; "do you mean Hotchkiss the President of the Ditch Company?" He had recognized the name of a prominent citizen—a rigid ascetic, taciturn, middle-aged man—a deacon—and more than that, the head of the company he had just defended. It ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... He was ascetic through habit, contented himself with very little, and, like all those used to work from childhood and whose muscles have been developed, he could work much and easily, and was quick at any manual labour; ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... Plump down into castles as full of little milk-white princesses as a nest is of young sparrows. All love me dearly at once.—Charming idea of life, but too high-colored for the reality. I have outgrown all this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive,—almost, perhaps, ascetic. We carry happiness into our condition, but must not hope to find it there. I think you will be willing to hear some lines which embody the subdued and limited ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... height of military fashion, evidently a gallant and debonair gentleman. He has just ceased from badinage with Rooke, in which that honest soldier's somewhat homely army jokes have been worsted by the graceful play of Graham's wit, who was ever gay, but never coarse, who was no ascetic, and was ever willing to drink the king's health, but, as his worst enemies used grudgingly to admit, cared neither for wine nor women. Silence falls for a little on the company. Claverhouse looking into the fire and seeing things of ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... book we have never read. Earnestness of purpose is apt to be attended with something of excess or extravagance; but in "Ravenshoe" there is nothing morbid, nothing cynical, nothing querulous, nothing ascetic. The doctrine of the book is a reasonable enjoyment of all that is good in the world, with a firm purpose of improving the world in all possible ways. It is one of the many books which have appeared in England of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an almost prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used to run between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes of life; from the most debauched of men he had become the most ascetic. His was a bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of Nature's eternal injustice. The forehead was low, projecting over the eyes, and the sandy hair was plastered down over it and then brushed back at an abrupt right angle. The chin was heavy, the nostrils were low and wide, and ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... unintentionally began to preserve and use the ancient Roman books, and from using them at first as models for style, an interest in their contents was later awakened. While many of the monasteries remained as farming, charitable, and ascetic institutions almost exclusively, and were never noted for their educational work, a small but increasing number gradually accumulated libraries and became celebrated for their literary activity and for the character of their ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... three hundred and fifty-four candidates for six vacancies. The cook has run away and left us liable, which makes our committee very plaintive. Master Brook, our head serving-man, has the gout, and our new cook is none of the best. I speak from report,—for what is cookery to a leguminous-eating Ascetic? So now you know as much of the matter as I do. Books and quiet are still there, and they may dress their dishes in their own way for me. Let me know your determination as to Newstead, and believe ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue; with only that one ornament,—the scarlet letter,—which it was her doom to wear. The child's attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a fanciful, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... great public in general know of what the singer often suffers in the way of nervousness or stage fright before appearing in front of the footlights, nor that his life, outwardly so feted and brilliant, is in private more or less of a retired, ascetic one and that his social pleasures must ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... prolixity and occasional repetition in his two large volumes, for the full examination of the most extraordinary religious aberration which ever extensively affected the mind of man. The worship of a mad tyrant is the basis of a subtle metaphysical creed, and of a severe, and even ascetic, morality.—M.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... upon his knees, a slight and thoughtful smile playing around the corners of his finely-cut mouth. His whole face was intensely spiritual in expression. The features were delicately cut, and bore the impress of an ascetic life, as well as of gentle birth and noble blood. He was, in fact, a scion of an ancient and powerful house; but it was one of those houses that had suffered sorely in the recent strife, and whose members had been scattered and cut ...
— The Secret Chamber at Chad • Evelyn Everett-Green
... article of diet with both Mussulmans and Hindoos. Many of the latter take a vow to touch no flesh of any kind. They are called Kunthees or Boghuts, but a Boghut is more of an ascetic than a Kunthee. However, the Kunthee is glad of a fish dinner when he can get it. They are restricted to no particular sect or caste, but all who have taken the vow wear a peculiar necklace, made generally of sandal-wood beads or neem beads round their throats. Hence ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the idea that he was like someone in print, he chuckled under his breath. Soon they came to the part that had struck Kate as being so particularly appropriate to her husband. It concerned a scene between this ascetic courtier and a handsome, middle-aged widow who frequently gave him to understand that her feelings regarding him were of the tenderest kind; but on every occasion he pretended to misunderstand her. The humour of the whole thing consisted in the innocence ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Kempis, Drelincourt's Defence against Death, and Law's devotional works had all their part in kindling his piety into a flame. He was haunted with gloomy and superstitious fancies, and his religion assumed the darkest and most ascetic character. He always chose the worst food, fasted twice a week, wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes, and was subject to paroxysms of a morbid devotion. He remained for hours prostrate on the ground in Christ Church Walk in the midst of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... of the self-mastering ascetic for the sodden debauchee, Bill proceeded coldly with his task of "crowding" Jan out and away from the safety of that place and into the wilderness. In a few minutes he ventured to hasten matters by actually nipping one of Jan's hind ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... their appearance which was calculated to strike terror into the stoutest heart. Behind a table, set upon a dais, sat the Chief Inquisitor, with his assistant on one side of him and his secretary on the other. They were all robed in black, and their thin, ascetic faces looking out from the dark recesses of their cowls, had in them neither mercy nor pity, nor indeed aught but merciless resolution. There were other robed and cowled figures in the room, but I noticed none of ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... devious and criminal work, one brief tale will explain how his revolutionary activities were brought quickly to an end. There was in Moscow, so the story runs, a gentle, kindly, and influential member of Nechayeff's society. Of ascetic disposition, this Iwanof spent much of his time in freely educating the peasants and in assisting the poorer students. He starved himself to establish cheap eating houses, which became the centers of the revolutionary groups. The police ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... French Revolution, as the terrorism of a comite du salut public seems to be necessary physic when we read the confessions of the aristocratic world of France, so we recognize the wholesomeness of ascetic spiritualism when we read Petronius or Apuleius, which are to be regarded as the pieces justificatives of Christianity. The flesh had become so arrogant in this Roman world that it required Christian discipline to chasten it. After the banquet of a Trimalchion, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... He joined with Glyndon in imploring her to fly, if she felt the smallest doubt that her husband's pursuits were of the nature which the Roman Church had benevolently burned so many scholars for adopting. And even the little that Viola could communicate seemed, to the ignorant ascetic, irrefragable proof of sorcery and witchcraft; he had, indeed, previously heard some of the strange rumours which followed the path of Zanoni, and was therefore prepared to believe the worst; the worthy Bartolomeo ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... fourteen years after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England, and I would remind you that we stocked the new nation in the west with some of the bluest blood in Britain. Even in this hall there were Puritans whose ascetic tastes disapproved of Milton's imageries, of children play-acting, of the brave show ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... were true, God, who is in no wise evil, could not have created matter. And since our bodies are matters they are evil and God could not have created them. From this notion that our bodies are evil two extremes of error arose: (1) That only by various ascetic practices, whereby we punish the body, can we hope to save it, 2:20- 23. (2) That since the body is evil, none of its deeds are to be accounted for. License was, therefore, granted to evil conduct, and evil passions were indulged at ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... Ramersdorf amused themselves with a dance, as was their wont to do, in the courtyard of the monastery. It was a privilege that they had enjoyed time immemorial, and it had never been gainsaid by the abbots who were dead and gone, but Anselm von Lowenberg, the then superior of the convent, an austere, ascetic man, who looked with disdain and dislike on all popular recreations, had long set his face against it, and had, moreover, tried every means short of actual prohibition to put an end to the profane amusement. The rustics, however, were not to be debarred by his displeasure ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... essence, the basis of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's whole distinction between Christianity and Paganism. I mean, of course, the virtue of humility. I admit, of course, most readily, that a great deal of false Eastern humility (that is, of strictly ascetic humility) mixed itself with the main stream of European Christianity. We must not forget that when we speak of Christianity we are speaking of a whole continent for about a thousand years. But of this virtue even more than of the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... though an idealist philosopher, is Greek and not Oriental in spirit and feeling. He is no mystic or ascetic; he is not seeking in vain to get rid of matter or to find absorption in the divine nature, or in the Soul of the universe. And therefore we are not surprised to find that his philosophy in the Timaeus returns at ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... country like this who is not well versed in English—a country where they think, so far from understanding any language besides his own, scarcely one individual in ten speaks his own intelligibly; or an ascetic person where, as they say, high and low, male and female, are, at some period of their lives, fond of a renovating glass, as it is styled, in other ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... used to—to not thinking 'bout you at all," he said, looking at her with the stern eyes of a young ascetic. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... winged god? It is fortunate for my Charles that he is again permitted to quaff the beaker of happiness! Only too soon—I know it—he will again withdraw it from his lips with his own hand, if it were only because the inclination to self-torture which he inherits, the ascetic instinct, that constantly increases in strength, destroys and stamps as sinful forgetfulness of duty every pleasure which he enjoys for any length of time. We will hope that he will not retain this new happiness too briefly. It would be of service to us all. What he might possibly ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Snurge president of the United States? Many have asked that question, he frequently used to ask it himself, and his wife—the sainted Amy Snurge of ever revered memory—would rest her thin, ascetic hand upon his coat sleeve and answer him with yearning sympathy ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... Smoothbeard.) A village some three miles below Gulmarg; the ziarat is named after a rishi, or ascetic, of the sixteenth century. Baloo, (Kashmiri, Harpat) "Rara avis in terras, nigroque similima cignis." Anglice, a bear. Bandipur, An important village on the north shore of the Wular Lake, the starting-point for Gilgit, &c. Oddly enough, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... complaint—the same, perhaps, that will terminate one day in his sudden and frightful death. There is a wild look about him, which at first sight is startling. His dress and demeanor are those of a rigid ascetic. He wears a long coat with short sleeves, and a scarf of only half size, such as was the mark of an austere life; and his hair hangs in a tangled mass over his head. He is usually silent, but at times breaks out into fierce excitement, such as will give the impression of madness. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... in its fundamental conceptions. Its deities are not identified with the moral law and the saint is above that law. But this dangerous doctrine is corrected by the dogma, which is also a popular conviction, that a saint must be a passionless ascetic. In India no religious teacher can expect a hearing unless he begins ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the English, and that this was the great charm of New-England society. His own habits were of the same kind, sometimes almost austere in their simplicity. Luxury he disliked, and sometimes his friends thought him even ascetic. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... relishing this ascetic prospect] Hm! [He rises]. Ah, well: you must come and tell my wife and my young people all about it; and you will bring your daughter with you, of course. [He shakes hands with Savvy]. Goodbye. [He shakes hands with ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... an unthinking manner, we must seek the Truth wherever it is found and follow wherever it may lead regardless of consequences. This requires more courage than professing Jesus, whose teachings can be construed to mean whatever the reader desires. While the majority regard Jesus as an ascetic, a reformer, opposed to business and joviality, Bruce Barton has convinced thousands that Jesus was the great business man, ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... be less like the popular politician of our very noisy days than this slight and gentle person whose refinement of mind reveals itself in a face almost ascetic, whose intelligence is of a wide, comprehensive, and reflecting order, and whose manner is certainly the last thing in the world that would recommend itself to the mind of an advertising agent. But there is no living politician who watched so intelligently the long beginnings of ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... position in the Imperial household. Augustin happened to be alone in the house with his friend Alypius. They sat down to talk, and by chance the visitor noticed the Epistles of St. Paul lying on a table for playing games. This started the conversation. Pontitianus, who was a Christian, praised the ascetic life, and especially the wonders of holiness wrought by Antony and his companions in the Egyptian deserts. This subject was in the air. In Catholic circles at Rome, they spoke of little else than these Egyptian solitaries, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... immovable self-abnegation cared to answer was, 'He must increase, but I must decrease.' He was glad 'to fade in the light of the Sun that he loved.' What a wealth of suppressed emotion and lowly love there is in the words so pathetic from the lips of the lonely ascetic, whom no home joys had ever cheered: 'He that hath the bride is the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Joaquin Ortiz (1814-1892) page 289 imitated Quintana in form but not in ideas. Though a defender of neo-classicism, he did not entirely reject romanticism. Ortiz was an ultra-catholic, sincere and ascetic. His verses are impetuous and grandiloquent, but often lacking depth of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... side of the highway on a strip of waste land. There were no tents; but there were four or five miserable little caravans, roofed over with tattered and dirty canvas. They were tents on wheels. Some thin and ascetic-looking old mules and wizen donkeys had been taken out of the shafts, and were now nibbling the short wayside grass, the young burdocks and mulleins, which, but for the rain, would have filled their mouths with dust. Small portable stoves—alas! ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Rodriguez's fate. Whatever the temperamental struggle had been, he was "take him for all in all," the least disappointing famous man that my experience had ever shown me. He was more virile than handsome, and no more aesthetic to look at than he was ascetic. At that time he was on the sunny side of forty, and not yet at the zenith of his great career. His face was fine, manly, and sympathetic. His brow was broad, his eyes deep-set and widely spaced, but very heavy lidded. The mouth and ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... spirit. His pious sister Jacqueline warned her brother that he was going too far. But he was still more effectively warned by an accident, in which he almost miraculously escaped from death. Withdrawing from the world, he adopted a course of ascetic practices, in which he continued till he died—in his thirty-ninth year. He wore about his waist an iron girdle armed with sharp points; and this he would press smartly with his elbow when he detected himself ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... I'm no ascetic; I'm as pleasant as can be; You'll always find me ready with a crushing repartee; I've an irritating chuckle, I've a celebrated sneer, I've an entertaining snigger, I've a fascinating leer; To everybody's prejudice I know a thing or two; I can tell a woman's ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... those of secular life generally during the middle ages and later were in striking contrast to the ascetic ideals of the early Christian Church; in some respects they were like those of the Greeks. Honor was the leading ideal, and muscular development and that of the body were held in high respect; so that the spirit of ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... something, so they loved this child whom they looked upon as their ward, and who, as there was none other of her age and sex in their community, had no rival in their hearts. She was the one joy of their laborious and ascetic hours; she represented all the sweetness and youth of this self-renewing world, which to them was so grey and sapless. Moreover, she was a lovely maid, who, wherever she had been placed, would have ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... Adam's remark was justified. Alvarez lived with Indian frugality and looked ascetic; besides he had been long in power and had no doubt had opportunities for enriching himself at his country's expense. Kit liked Alvarez, but did not think him much honester than other Spanish-American rulers he ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... side, his purpose plain upon his stern, rather ascetic features, Dundee had taken a hasty glance at the watch cupped in his palm and noted the exact minute and second of the interruption. ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... Maximov, stood a little aside, waiting also. The Father Superior stepped into the middle of the room to receive his guests. He was a tall, thin, but still vigorous old man, with black hair streaked with gray, and a long, grave, ascetic face. He bowed to his guests in silence. But this time they approached to receive his blessing. Miuesov even tried to kiss his hand, but the Father Superior drew it back in time to avoid the salute. But Ivan and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... threw a glow across the faces of the prisoners. Most of them were asleep, but Ned saw them very distinctly now. One was a boy but little older than himself, his face pale and worn. Near him was an old man, with a face very uncommon on the border. His features were those of a scholar and ascetic. His cheeks were thin, and thick white hair crowned a broad white brow. Ned felt instinctively that he was a ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in effect, capped by the heavy masses of her black hair, her singular eyes full of light, the red of her lips and tinge of stationary pink in her cheeks supplemented by a glow of quick excitement. A few weeks ago the ascetic in Iglesias might have taken alarm. Now it was different. He had his idea, and, walking in the strength of it, dared adventure himself in ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... recently begun to make itself felt, also, at Paris. The chief of its promoters was John Standonck of Mechlin, educated by the brethren of the Common Life at Gouda and imbued with their spirit in its most rigorous form. He was an ascetic more austere than the spirit of the Windesheimians, strict indeed but yet moderate, required; far beyond ecclesiastical circles his name was proverbial on account of his abstinence—he had definitely denied himself the use of meat. As provisor of the ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... the Mahommedan religion in general is sinking to corruption along the coast, there are ascetic sects rising up in the interior which unite its last zealous followers by a religious bond. From some of these sects travellers receive much ill-treatment and annoyance. On the 15th of July the doctor determined to visit a remarkable mountain which appeared in the distance. Being unable ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... travel. His favourite place of residence was Rome, to which city he repeatedly returned with increasing affection. In 1848 he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, for Gogol never departed from the pious Christian faith taught him by his mother; in fact, toward the end of his life, he became an ascetic and a mystic. The last years were shadowed by illness and—a common thing among Russian writers—by intense nervous depression. He died at Moscow, 21 February 1852. His last words were the old saying, "And I shall laugh with a ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous resolution to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson. This is the position of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man who sees only ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... of ribald dirtiness, at the next hymns full of holy solemnity; it is, I think, merely because this versatile artist takes pleasure in trying whether his face may not be painted into grinning drunkenness, and then elongated and whitened into ascetic gentleness. Instead of seeking, like most of his contemporaries, to be Greek, Roman, or mediaeval by turns, he preferred trying on all the various tricks of thought and feeling which he remarked among his unlettered townsfolk. His realism ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... visceral tone. There is, for instance, the sexually cold type, comfortable by creating for itself an anaphrodisiac environment composed of pressures that can be fitted into its own. Or there may be an insufficiency of standard pressure in the alimentary tract, and we have the ascetic, mal-nourished, striving, uplifting type. Different types will be made by the permutations and combinations of factors that determine the intravisceral pressure and the environmental, i.e., social resistances ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... me, Mike." Her fingers slipped round his throat. "And now I should like to kill you, yes, kill you! Strangle you and leave your austere, ascetic body for the ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... he called himself by his proper patronymic Mordaunt—he would not have wanted a visitor to enlighten him half-an-hour after the rumour had began to proclaim itself in the streets and public haunts of the village. No one, however, thought of the haughty and secluded young gentleman who lived so ascetic a life at the Tiled House, and hardly ever showed in the town, except in church on Sundays; and who when he rode on his black hunter into Dublin, avoided the village, and took the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... If the ascetic virtues, or disciplinary exercises, derived from the schools of philosophy (Pythagorean, Platonic and Stoic) were carried to an extreme in the middle ages, it is most certain that they are at present in a far more grievous disproportion underrated and neglected. The 'regula maxima' ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... when Genji became subject to periodical attacks of ague, that many exorcisms and spells were performed to effect a cure, but all in vain. At length he was told by a friend that in a certain temple on the northern mountain (Mount Kurama) there dwelt a famous ascetic, and that when the epidemic had prevailed during the previous summer, many people had recovered through his exorcisms. "If," added the friend, "the disease is neglected it becomes serious; try therefore, this method of procuring relief at once, and ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... been the pre-Buddhistic conception of salvation, and of the way to be followed by those who would attain thereto. No more thorough mortification of the flesh has ever been attempted than-that achieved by the Indian ascetic anchorite; no later monachism has so nearly succeeded in reducing the human mind to that condition of impassive quasi-somnambulism, which, but for its acknowledged holiness, might run the risk ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... who were at best sinners. Bernard was a total disbeliever in Scholasticism; so was Voltaire. Bernard brought the society of his time to share his scepticism, but could give the society no other intellectual amusement to relieve its restlessness. His crusade failed; his ascetic enthusiasm faded; God came no nearer. If there was in all France, between 1140 and 1200, a more typical Englishman of the future Church of England type than John of Salisbury, he has left no trace; and John wrote ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... of the movements of history, ancient and modern; endowed as a preacher with homiletic skill and the spiritual art of making life seem large and the Kingdom of God the one supreme reality for man; and all this in spite of the fact that he is far from being Puritan; never showing the marks of an ascetic nor any tendency or inclination to self-martyrdom; as much in need of reform in some things as the time honored secretary of the Club; popular with men because in so many respects like them; popular also as a public speaker and on occasions where grace of speech and manner ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... we must admit that he led an ascetic and saint-like life, renouncing all worldly pleasures. An Englishman who saw much of him about 1851 declared that his goodness of soul surpassed even his ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... fables without number clustered round his elusive personality. One account would paint him a church deacon, frock-coated, smug; another with cloven hoof. He was said to be a Hedonist, a Marcus Aurelius; a glutton, an ascetic; a satyr, a pattern of domestic virtue; an illiterate Philistine, a collector of book plates and first editions. A legend, widely current, ran that he played chief bacchanalian at dinners whose vaudeville accompaniments were too gross ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... and superior culture coming into conflict with, and strong enough to withstand, a vigorous barbarism. These epistles are full of commonsense and clear, practical advice, and often give us a glimpse of the human, as distinct from the ascetic, element in monastic life. They show how men could pass pleasant and thoughtful days amid the barbarism ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... man with the lean, ascetic face moved about his new abode, arranging, changing, altering, hardly yet into his working-stride again, he gave the impression of almost spinster-like precision and nicety. For twenty years past, ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... were distinctly serious. While Mr. Wentworth meditated upon this anomaly his nephew was admiring him unrestrictedly. He thought him a most delicate, generous, high-toned old gentleman, with a very handsome head, of the ascetic type, which he promised himself the profit of sketching. Felix was far from having made a secret of the fact that he wielded the paint-brush, and it was not his own fault if it failed to be generally understood that he was prepared to execute ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... embellishments being some old pictures in black frames, and a number of hunting, shooting, and racing prints, with red tape round them to serve the purpose of frames; while the library so-called was worthy of being the habitation of an ascetic monk, though two of the walls were covered with book-shelves which contained but few books, and they served chiefly to enable countless spiders to form their traps for unwary flies, while a table covered with green cloth and three wooden chairs ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... singing and plucking flowers beside the stream of Lethe, in the stern and warlike chatelaine of Canossa. Unfortunately we know but little of Matilda's personal appearance. Her health was not strong; and it is said to have been weakened, especially in her last illness, by ascetic observances. Yet she headed her own troops, armed with sword and cuirass, avoiding neither peril nor fatigue in the quarrels of her master Gregory. Up to the year 1622 two strong suits of mail were preserved at Quattro Castelli, which were said to have been worn by her in battle, and which ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the mild Augustinian rule differed from the Benedictines, and it was not in their genius to seize great rocks and convert them into fortresses. Their attitude was humane, their rule not excessively ascetic; they allowed men and women to exercise the religious life side by side in neighbouring houses; they lived in the country but they were in familiar touch with the world. The White Canons ruled Maldon, but they lived at Beeleigh. They appear to have been ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... gathered around him, making a circle; he stood in the midst, alone, and in that way with prayer and dedication from the lips of the young man and his friends began one of the most useful lives in the American ministry. This young man became an ascetic. I gave him to read the life of Francis of Assisi, and he went to the extreme in emulation. He divested himself of collars and ties and on graduating read his thesis for his Bachelor's ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... well as Christian ethics. He asserted that the true motive of morality is not the salvation of the individual man but the Progress of humanity. In fact, with Fichte Progress is the principle of ethics. That the Christian ideal of ascetic saintliness detached from society has no moral value is a plain corollary from the idea of earthly Progress. [Footnote: X. Leon, La Philosophie de Fichte ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... and, in the true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered. There is a time to dance and a time to mourn; to be harsh as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as to glorify the appetites; and if a man were to combine all these extremes into his work, each in its place and proportion, that work would be the world's masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Partiality is immorality; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... E'er he renounced the honors of a Knight And doffed his coat of mail and helmet bright, For sober cassock and monastic hood, Leaving the castle for the cloister rude, And changed the banquet's sumptuous repast For frugal crusts and the ascetic fast; Forsook his charger and equipments for The crucifix and sacerdotal war; While yet with valiant sword and blazoned shield He braved the dangers of the martial field, Or sought the antlered trophies of the chase In forest and sequestered hunting place; Or, tiring of the hunt's ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... country, it was again plunged in barbarism. The monasteries were in every way similar to any other feudal residence, and the ascetic rule of St. Benedict was entirely forgotten. The abbots rather distinguished themselves from the other nobles by their greed and violence. They married and indulged in drinking bouts and predatory expeditions. A reform was ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... was a tall, thin, ascetic-looking man of probably sixty or sixty-five years of age. He had doubtless been, in his prime, an exceedingly handsome man, for, even now, his features were well modelled and clean cut, but his sallow skin was deeply wrinkled about the forehead, eyes, and the wings of his ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... said she, marvelling at the serious, ascetic temper, coupled with the very high animal spirits. 'For your comfort, I believe the unsettled feeling you complain of is chiefly the effect of novelty. You have led so very retired a life, that a lively family party is to you what dissipation would be to other people: and, as you ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... no natural action of a man is more degrading than another, Nafzawi could never think of amatory pleasures without ejaculating "Glory be to God," or some such phrase. But "Moslems," says Burton, "who do their best to countermine the ascetic idea inherent in Christianity, [576] are not ashamed of the sensual appetite, but rather the reverse." [577] Nafzawi, indeed, praises Allah for amorous pleasures just as other writers have exhausted the vocabulary in gratitude for a loaded fruit tree or an iridescent ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... evils most prone to follow good works, had no place amongst them. He that was weaker in ascetic exercises entertained no thought of malice against him of brighter example. Nor again was he, that had accomplished great feats, deceived and puffed up by arrogance to despise his weaker brethren, or set at ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... Love, and that caused him to remember a patient to whom her selfish little heart had shown no kindness. It was her brother. He was some nine or ten years older, and very different in character. His face was pale and thin—almost ascetic—and he had the fiery and watery eyes of the devotee. He had broken a blood-vessel and was threatened with consumption, but his case was not considered dangerous. When Polly was about, his eyes would follow her round the ward with ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... dangerous and unpardonable trangressions into which young people generally, and this young person in particular, were likely to run, to hold up examples of those who had fallen into evil ways and come to an evil end, to present the most exalted standard of ascetic virtue to the lively girl's apprehension, leading her naturally to the conclusion that a bright example of excellence stood before her in the irreproachable relative who addressed her. Especially with regard to the allurements ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... women-travelers upon that steerage-deck, her father offered as strong contrast to the men. Among the swart Italians, blonde, stupid-looking Swedes, Danes and Norwegians and fat, red-faced Germans of the male steerage company, his finely-chiselled features, pale and ascetic-looking in their frame of whitened hair, stood out with accentuated testimony to high breeding, right living and exalted aims. And there was another difference, but less pleasing. By this, the ninth day out from port, grief, born of leaving friends and childhood ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... meet two such little, unknown people as the Hubbards; and then, to avoid marking them as the subjects of the festivity by the precedence to be observed in going out to supper, she resolved to have tea served in the drawing-room, and to make it literally tea, with bread and butter, and some thin, ascetic cakes. ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... effeminate triflers. And now let me show you how completely you have been mistaken; you will find that the art you have been maligning is the greatest boon of our existence. There is some excuse for your strictures: how should you know any better, confirmed ascetic that you are, believing that ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... last there was another small howl, and the screen lit up. Dr. O'Connor's face, as stern and ascetic as ever, stared ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to his own independence. Whenever the pair argued, they came to an open rupture; and arguments were frequent, for they were both positive, and both loved the work of the intelligence. It was a treat to hear Mr. Naseby defending the Church of England in a volley of oaths, or supporting ascetic morals with an enthusiasm not entirely innocent of port wine. Dick used to wax indignant, and none the less so because, as his father was a skilful disputant, he found himself not seldom in the wrong. On these occasions, he would redouble in energy, and declare ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... these fourteen years, and reviewing my impressions of his personality, I must put first the physical aspect of the man. He seemed older than he was, and even more ascetic, for he looked as if, like the cardinal in Lothair, he lived on biscuits and soda-water; whereas he had a hearty appetite for his midday meal, and, in his own words, "enjoyed his tea." Still, he carried the irreducible minimum of flesh on his bones, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... Michael Maurice,—as the bride's brother,—had led his sister up the aisle, and duly surrendered her to Captain Lenox, R.A., serenely unaware, the while, of censorious side-glances bestowed upon him by the ascetic-featured chaplain, who had an air of officiating under protest, of silently asserting his own aloofness from this hole-and-corner method of procedure. But his attitude was powerless to affect the exalted emotion of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... fit to teach children, or to be with them: I had already reduced the boy to little better than an automaton; I had broken his fine spirit with my rigid severity; and I should freeze all the sunshine out of his heart, and make him as gloomy an ascetic as myself, if I had the handling of him much longer. And poor Rachel, too, came in for her share of abuse, as usual; he cannot endure Rachel, because he knows she has ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... ascetic life. I believe not only in the thorns on the rosebush, but in the roses which the thorns defend. Asceticism is the child of sensuality and superstition. She is the secret mother of many a secret sin. God, when he made man's body, did not give us ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... did not, at mildest, lead an immaculate life. But by the passion that now possessed him the tiny man seemed purified and transfigured beyond masculinity. His face was ascetic in its reverence as he waited there, with his head slightly bowed. "I go," he said, at last, as if picking his way carefully among tumbling words; then bent over her hand, which, she made no effort to ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... his quality, with something of the child's unearthly wisdom added, and a Ulysses-like cunning in the hour of necessity, an ascetic simplicity almost like the saints', looking things in the face, so that to that fine carelessness everything, all enterprises, hazards, fortunes, shipwreck, if it come, or battle, are but the incidents of a chequered day, and his part merely to 'carry on' in the path ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... more genial; only for those who perversely seek to impose the ethics of selfish individualism upon a world which obeys no such law, science has in reserve a blacker pessimism than ever brooded over the ascetic of the cloister. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... the young teacher suffered from too ascetic a life, and unmistakable danger-signals began to appear, fortunately heeded in time, but disappointment and delay resulted, borne, however, with sense and courage. His course at the Divinity School in Cambridge was much broken; nevertheless, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson |
