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Austere   Listen
adjective
Austere  adj.  
1.
Sour and astringent; rough to the state; having acerbity; as, an austere crab apple; austere wine.
2.
Severe in modes of judging, or living, or acting; rigid; rigorous; stern; as, an austere man, look, life. "From whom the austere Etrurian virtue rose."
3.
Unadorned; unembellished; severely simple.
Synonyms: Harsh; sour; rough; rigid; stern; severe; rigorous; strict.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Austere" Quotes from Famous Books



... a brave meal; the Frenchmen noisy and hungry, the priests austere and quiet, the Indian converts solemnly impressed by their new dignity. When the meal was over and the women had repaired to their cabin for the night. Major du Puys signified that he desired to speak in private to Messieurs d'Herouville, d'Halluys, and du Cevennes; ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... Maids of Honour at the Court of Charles II., and was distinguished for the delicate purity of her nature, as well as for her high intellectual attainments. Some of the extracts Evelyn gives from her Diary seem to show an austere, formal, almost ascetic spirit; but it was inevitable that a nature so refined as hers should have turned in horror from such ideals of life as were presented by men like Buckingham and Rochester, like Etheridge, Killigrew, and Sedley, like the King himself, to whom ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... down, down these terraces fall until at their feet lie the tropical valleys with their orange and pineapple groves, and wild, luxuriant vegetation; and then, one turns and glances upward; above him the barren mountain sides, the summits austere, ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... pictures of the sort of life led in the country of Maillane. Of his father he says that he towered above them all, in stature, in wisdom, and in nobleness of bearing. He was a handsome old man, dignified in language, firm in command, kind to the poor about him, austere with himself alone. The same may be said of the poet to-day. He is a strikingly handsome man, vigorous and active, exceedingly gracious and simple in manner. His utter lack of affectation is the more remarkable, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer

... are before us. There stretches the range, its relief walling the southern horizon from west to the farthest east, the line of snow-tusks sharp and white in the sunshine. They are distant yet, but they stand as giants, parting two kingdoms. Austere and still, they face us, as they have faced this spot since that stormy Eocene morning when they sprang like the dragon's white teeth ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... start. Slanting rays flashed cheerfully from the brass of trumpets, cornets, bassoons; from the silver fittings of flutes; from the gold on scarlet tunics. And in the midst of this ordered brilliance stood the gun-carriage, grey and austere, its human burden hidden under the folds of the English flag. Behind the gun-carriage the Boy's charger waited, with an air of uncomplaining weariness, the boots hanging reversed over the ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... existence, if possible, cheerful and happy; nor does she ever willingly part with any pleasure but in hopes of ample compensation in some other period of their lives. The sole trouble which she demands is that of just calculation, and a steady preference of the greater happiness. And if any austere pretenders approach her, enemies to joy and pleasure, she either rejects them as hypocrites and deceivers, or if she admit them in her train, they are ranked, however, among the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... there can be no doubt, for as New York State was still seven-tenths Clintonian, conversion of a large portion of this scowling element was essential to the ratification of the Constitution. And yet he chose two men of austere and unimaginative style to collaborate with him; while his own style for purity, distinction, and profundity combined with ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... merchant well known to Numerian, who received it as a legacy at his friend's death. Disgusted, as soon as his reforming projects took possession of his mind, at the bare idea of propinquity to the ennobled libertines of Rome, the austere Christian determined to abandon his inheritance, and to sell it to another; but, at the repeated entreaties of his daughter, he at length consented to change his purpose, and sacrifice his antipathy to his luxurious neighbours to his child's youthful attachment to the beauties of Nature as displayed ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... Carbery's health was supposed to benefit by the waters. Her understanding was justly reputed a fine one; but, in general, it was calculated to win respect rather than love, for it was masculine and austere, with very little toleration for sentiment or romance. But to myself she had always been indulgently kind; I was protected in her regard, beyond any body's power to dislodge me, by her childish remembrances; and ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... yet been humanly set forth, otherwise the response had been different. Not humanly set forth,—and so was only barked at, as by the infinitude of little dogs, in all countries; and could never yet be responded to in austere VOX HUMANA, deep as a DE PROFUNDIS, terrible as a Chorus of AEschylus,—for in effect that is rather the character of it, had the barking once pleased to cease. "King of Prussia cannot sleep," writes Dickens: "the officers sit up with him every night, and in his slumbers he raves and talks of spirits ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... himself of staring at most people in a reproving manner, as though he had just found them out in some dark transgression. It was possibly a habit due to a lifelong experience of the faults and the failings of human nature, and it was one which stood Binks in good stead, giving him an austere and awe-inspiring appearance. Especially on Sundays did this detective air prove helpful, when he did duty as parish clerk in the quaint, old-time church on the shore, where it served to keep the small fisher-folk in ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell

... Melanthius, master of the bearded fold, The goodliest goats of all the royal herd Spontaneous to the suitors' feast preferr'd; Two grooms assistant bore the victims bound; With quavering cries the vaulted roofs resound; And to the chief austere aloud began The wretch unfriendly to the ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope

... of an occurrence, to me pathetic, that once attended such an early discovery. A distant cousin of mine—a man really not related except by the close bond of my regard—was brought up many years ago by an uncle of austere and miserly nature. Such goodness as this uncle had once possessed was cramped into a narrow and smothering piety. He would have dimmed the sun upon the Sabbath, could he have reached up tall enough. ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... turned to his follower and bade him hasten to Messer Folco, where he sat at his wine, and get his private ear, and tell him that a man was having speech with his daughter on the threshold of her apartments. Messer Simone knew well enough how great an effect such a piece of news would have upon the austere nature of his host, and I make no doubt that his red face grinned in the moonlight as he dispatched his fellow upon his errand. When Maleotti had gone, Messer Simone slowly ascended the staircase that conducted to the loggia, and concealed himself ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... purest Renaissance style austere woodwork; immense chests of caned pearwood, on which stand precious ewers in Urbino ware, and dishes by Bernard Palissy. The high stone fireplace is surmounted by a portrait of Diana of Poitiers, with ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... apparently disinterested conduct, they soon collected a numerous set of followers, half Christians and half Pagans. Unluckily for the cause of Christianity, a different sect of the same religion, but with principles more austere and of course less tolerant of others that deviated from their own, speedily followed the Jesuits into the East. The Dominicans, meeting with some of the half-christianized converts, soon gave them to understand that nothing less than eternal damnation would be the lot of all such as did not forsake ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... when the heather is out. But it has a day in May, under a hot sun, which is, in some ways, more distinct. The scent and the glow of the heather belong to other Surrey hills; but Chobham Common has its own features of sandy hillocks topped by clumps of pines, which set an austere gauntness on the place unlike the rolling flanks and ridges by Frensham and Hindhead. In May the heather is dark and dry; there are sparse patches of gorse scattered about the slopes, and looking ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... master, the reclaimed son, the reformed prodigal! ha, ha!—the young man who compensates himself for all this austere devotion to business and principle by dipping into the old man's vaults when he wants a pasear: eh, Shadow? That's the man we're after. Look here! I never took any stock in that young man's reformation. Ye don't teach old sports like ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte

... only," spoke Govinda, "wouldn't speak such terrible words, Siddhartha! How could it be that among so many learned men, among so many Brahmans, among so many austere and venerable Samanas, among so many who are searching, so many who are eagerly trying, so many holy men, no one will find the ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse

... were true, but Pyrrhus could not be induced to pay any heed to them. He was determined on carrying into effect his design of a descent upon the coast of Africa. He accordingly pressed forward his preparations in a more arbitrary and reckless spirit than ever. He became austere, imperious, and tyrannical in his measures. He arrested some of the leading generals and ministers of state—men who had been his firmest friends, and through whose agency it was that he had been invited into Sicily, but whom he now suspected of being unfriendly to ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... made his way through the crowd, putting them to the right and left with his elbows as he passed, and planting himself before Van Winkle, with one arm akimbo, the other resting on his cane, his keen eyes and sharp hat penetrating, as it were, into his very soul, demanded in an austere tone, "what brought him to the election with a gun on his shoulder, and a mob at his heels, and whether he meant to breed a riot in the village?"—"Alas! gentlemen," cried Rip, somewhat dismayed, "I am a poor quiet man, a native of the ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... eyes, which were singularly bright and penetrating. Much thought had furrowed his forehead and contracted his heavy eyebrows, so that he appeared to wear a perpetual frown, which often misled people as to his character, for though austere he was tender-hearted. He was popular among the students, who would gather round him after his lectures and listen eagerly to his strange theories. Often he would call for volunteers from amongst them in order to conduct some experiment, so that eventually there was hardly a ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... on the day of our visit two bullocks were tethered in the outer chamber, the materials of the stone-mason were lying here and there among the carved pillars, and a painfully modern stone wall is rising in face of the austere threshold of the inner sanctuary. The lintel of the shrine is surmounted with inferior coloured pictures of Hindu deities, and two printed and tolerably faithful portraits of the great Maratha chieftain. "Thence," in the words ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.

... insect-slaughtering thunder-clap With that between the fingers and the thumb. It seemeth mad to quit the Olympian couch, Which bade our public gobble or reject. O spectacle of Peter, shrewdly pecked, Piper, by his own pepper from his pouch! What of the sneer, the jeer, the voice austere, You dealt?—the voice ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... skill with his pencil—a real love for drawing was one of the instincts which his austere obsessions had crushed out of him. He revolved several styles in his mind, decided at length on the simplest, and drew his designs on a ragged scrap of wrapping paper, while the carpenter, leaning down from his chair by the door, watched him, smoking, and now and then fingering the leather ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... impossible to believe that so versatile a polymath should not at some time or other have courted the Muse, and if so, under what name could he have had a stronger motive for publishing his poems than that of SWINBURNE? So austere a theologian would naturally shrink from revealing his excursions into the realms of poesy, and under this disguise he was safe from detection. Lastly, while Sir W. ROBERTSON NICOLL has always championed the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various

... down, her voice stuck in her throat, but her eyes ought to have been enough. They were big and shining eyes, and when she made them appealing they had been known to work wonders with father and mother and other grown-ups, even with the austere Professor Sutton. But this burly figure in the baggy blue uniform had a face more like a wooden Indian than a human grown-up—and an old, dyspeptic wooden Indian at that. Missy's eyes were to avail ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin

... years of age, was in a position in which anyone but a partisan political opponent must have been moved to pity him. He had been so long and so loudly extolled for his extreme respectability and his austere virtues that he had never dreamed that public opinion on such a point as this could turn against him. He could not endure the idea of being dismissed with contempt less than two years after his re-election ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer

... vain for you to wish to become a hermit, or to find the Elixir of Life. These things are not for such as you—your life is not austere enough. It is best for you to go back to your paternal home, and to live a good and industrious life. Never neglect to keep the anniversaries of your ancestors, and make it your duty to provide for your children's future. Thus will you live to a good old age and be happy, but give up the ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various

... last of the Latins, and the Italians are the first. To his Italian origin Zola owed not only the moralistic scope of his literary ambition, but the depth and strength of his personal conscience, capable of the austere puritanism which underlies the so-called immoralities of his books, and incapable of the peculiar lubricity which we call French, possibly to distinguish it from the lubricity of other people rather than to declare it a thing solely French. In the face of all public and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... simple mission furniture. In a great chair that almost swallowed her sat Alice, gazing dreamily into the embers. Family portraits hung upon the wall, and one of these, stiff and haughty in the regimentals of a soldado de cuero, seemed to look down upon the domestic picture with a certain austere benignity. This was the painting of Francisco Garvez of hidalgo lineage, who had stood beside Ortega, the Pathfinder, when that honored scout of Portola had found the bay of San Francisco and ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... and rejected them one by one. There was some peculiar quality of coldness, of reserve—he could not altogether make it clear to himself: it might well be the knowledge of her power, her wealth, which lent that almost austere expression to her face. It was evident that her wonted composure had been seriously disturbed by the unlucky circumstance of the photograph. He had permitted the time and occasion which had prompted him to write those three fatefully familiar words on the back of the picture altogether ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... her literal, hard-working grandmother, or her artistic, simple-minded uncle, or the dreamy Mother Theresa, or her austere confessor, know of the strange forcing process which they were all together uniting to carry on in the mind of this sensitive young girl. Absolutely secluded by her grandmother's watchful care from any actual knowledge and experience of real life, she had no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... curious how cleverly this austere old man, unskilled in the arts of gallantry, now handled the problem to which he had addressed himself, even though that meant forecasting the whim of yet another woman. It all came easily about, precisely as ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough

... in attending upon his destined consort."—"Men of all sorts have taken a pride to gird at me," might this monarch have exclaimed. But everything has two handles, saith the ancient adage. Had an austere puritan chosen to observe that James the First, when abroad, had lived jovially; and had this historian then dropped silently the interesting circumstance of the king's "spending his time in the Danish courts of judicature," the fact would ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... devotion to study. Certainly one or two lines had begun to reveal themselves on Sibyl's forehead, which might possibly have come of late reading and memory overstrained; they might also be the record of other experiences. Her beauty was more than ever of the austere type; in regarding ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... them, and bestows their crown To gratify your acceptable zeal. For you are they, that not, as some have done, Do censure us, as too severe and sour, But as, more rightly, gracious to the good; Although we not deny, unto the proud, Or the profane, perhaps indeed austere: For so Actaeon, by presuming far, Did, to our grief, incur a fatal doom; And so, swoln Niobe, comparing more Than he presumed, was trophaeed into stone. But are we therefore judged too extreme? Seems it no crime to enter sacred bowers, ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson

... look in another direction. While big sheets of foolscap were being distributed to every desk, Miss Wilson, the teacher (an austere-looking young woman who went through the world as though it were a refrigerator, and who, even on the warmest days in the classroom, was to be found with a shawl or cape about her shoulders), arose, and on the blackboard ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London

... bottoms, the Borne-Jones photogravures, the "Hope" and the "Love Leading Life," and the "Love Triumphant." Their home would be the home of a material poverty, but to Aggie's mind it was also a shrine whose austere beauty sheltered the priceless ...
— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair

... porch roof which shaded the second floor windows. The doors in that house had a short-waisted effect with little panels above and long panels below. I had a chamber so clean and small that I called it in my mind the Monk's Cell, nearly filled with the high posted bed, the austere table and chairs. The whitewashed walls were bare of pictures, except a painted portrait of Stephen Williams, pastor of Longmeadow from 1718 to 1783. Daily his laughing eyes watched me as if he found my pretensions a great joke. He ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... love is guilty of any thing capable of being condemned, even by the most austere; most of the faults committed under that sanction, being in reality instigated by some other passion, such as avarice and ambition in the one sex, and a flame which is too often confounded and mistaken for a pure affection in the other.—Yet such is the ill-judging, or careless ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood

... came out the next morning into the little garden to a fresh silver day, his long face looking more austere than ever in that cold light, his eyelids a little heavy. He carried one of the swords. Turnbull was in the little house behind him, demolishing the end of an early breakfast and humming a tune to himself, which could be heard through the open window. A moment or two later he leapt to his feet ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... suddenly upon us. Men make jokes about old scientific professors, even more than they make them about bishops—not because science is lighter than religion, but because science is always by its nature more solemn and austere than religion. It is not I; it is not even a particular class of journalists or jesters who make jokes about the matters which are of most awful import; it is the whole human race. If there is one thing more than another which any one will admit who has ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... became at once contemptible. The distributor of the Imperial favours must have his banquets, his receptions, his slaves and freedmen; he must possess the means of attracting if not of bribing; he must not seem too virtuous, too austere, among an evil generation; in order to do good at all he must swim with the stream, however polluted it might be. All this inconsistency Seneca must have contemplated without blenching; and there is something ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca

... of possession that rang clarion-like in every syllable, and in response Lady Harriet was moved to offer a cold cheek in salutation to the bride. Stella bent instantly and kissed it with a quick graciousness that would have melted any one less austere, but in Lady Harriet's opinion the act was marred by its very impulsiveness. She did not like impulsive people. So, with chill repression, she accepted the only overture from Stella that ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... left their looms for stools by the fire; there were rumours of a conflict in Andra Gowrie's close, from which Kitty McQueen had emerged with her short gown in rags; and Lang Tammas was going from door to door. The austere precentor admonished fiery youth to beware of giving way to passion; and it was a proud day for the Auld Lichts to find their leading elder so conversant with apt Scripture texts. They bowed their heads reverently while he ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie

... them during a war, and in times of distress. I know that these and other similar strong expressions, for the purpose of exaggeration, are easily found; and, mild as Marcus Cato is in his disposition, yet in his speeches he is not only vehement, but sometimes even austere. What new thing, let me ask, have the matrons done in coming out into public in a body on an occasion which nearly concerns themselves? Have they never before appeared in public? I will turn over your own Antiquities,[1] ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius

... more to me, but remarked to no one in particular that "an austere manner is a poor passport in this country," which implied that I was new to the East, and would learn better if I stayed long enough. I ignored the remark, somewhat pleased that I had rebuffed him, for I well knew he would talk me into a fever if I did not keep ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore

... detachable passages embedded in mediocre verse, he rises for a moment to heights not reached by any other of our poets; but Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its texture can bear comparison with the world's best in this kind. In imaginative quality and austere richness of diction what other verse of our period approaches it? The day Emerson wrote Bacchus he had in him, as Michael Drayton said of Marlowe, "those brave translunary things that the first ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... described as "Romish" or "papist." Among these were the use of the surplice, of the ring in the marriage service, and of the sign of the cross in baptism. Some Puritans wanted to get rid of the Book of Common Prayer altogether. The Puritans were distinguished by their austere lives. They looked with disfavor on May Day and Christmas festivities, observed the Jewish Sabbath in all its rigor, and condemned the Anglicans who played games and danced upon the village green on Sundays. As the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... her deep blue eye might have become a dryad; but her brow denoted intellect of a high order, and her mouth spoke inexorable resolution. She was a woman of fixed opinions, and of firm and compact prejudices. Brought up in an austere circle, where on all matters irrevocable judgment had been passed, which enjoyed the advantages of knowing exactly what was true in dogma, what just in conduct, and what correct in manners, she had early acquired the convenient habit ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... refined, for Mr. Bertie Tremaine combined the Sybarite with the Utilitarian sage, and it secretly delighted him to astonish or embarrass an austere brother republican by the splendour of his family plate or the polished appointments of his household. To-day the individual to be influenced was Endymion, and the host, acting up to his ideal of a first ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli

... from that task being devoted to Molossus, the toy terrier, who almost dwelt in her lap. Aunt Ruth was equally devoted in the matter of embroidery, and in the watchful eye she kept upon the movements of Scipio, a Persian cat of lofty lineage and austere mien. ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various

... life-like portraiture, when he says that a character and conduct, such as Piso's, "met with the approbation of a large number of people, who, indulging in vice as delightful, did not want at the head of affairs a strict practiser of the moral duties and an austere abstainer from vice:"—"pluribus probabatur, qui in tanta vitiorum dulcedine summum imperium non restrictum ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... Agriculture. And they, between them, make me no more ado than whip me thirteen and six out of my pinched pocket to pay thee out of danger. How many masters would do this for their servant? Nay, I'll be sworn I have paid the fines inflicted by austere Magistrates, when thou, Crab, hast surreptitiously slipped thy muzzle, otherwise thou hadst been executed; I have "tipped" angry constables when thou hast stolen out not "under control," otherwise thou hadst suffered for't: thou thinkest not of this now! Nay, I ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various

... whether of Judea or of Rome. It was the fourth of the seven Haskells I knew, one typical throughout, in my belief, of what was best in your Carolinian development. With him, as I have said, I was closely and even intimately associated through years, and in him I had occasion to note that almost austere type represented in its highest development in the person and attributes of Calhoun. Of strongly marked descent, Haskell was, as I have always supposed, of a family and race in which could be observed those virile Scotch-Irish and Presbyterian qualities which found their representative ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams

... I do figure—prance and caracole and sufficiently kick up the dust—your eye won't suffer itself to be distracted from me. I think there's no adventure I'm not ready to undertake for you; yet my passion—chastened, through all this, purified, austere—is still enough of this world not wholly to have renounced the fancy of some ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... beckoned to the young man, who was seized with a sudden trembling. The sacristy door closed upon them and a miracle was wrought there and then on one who had lost his faith, his honor and his home. He came out in tears, remained at Ars to make a retreat, and entered an austere religious order to end his days ...
— The Life of Blessed John B. Marie Vianney, Cur of Ars • Anonymous

... natures were redeemed from grossness by the peculiar idealism they infused into their material battles. Of Scotch-Irish inheritance, the direct descendant of one Gregory Truesdale, who had died a martyr for Presbyterianism, Archibald Fowler was inspired by something of the austere devotion which had fortified his religious ancestor. Since his college days his private life had been irreproachable. Though he was a stronger character than his wife, he regarded her with almost superstitious reverence, and made no decision above Wall Street without consulting her. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... imposes silence on peaceable citizens, throws into retirement useful men, and whilst devotion to the sect or party stands in the place of public and private virtues, which, in a free country, ought to be the austere [severe, or strict] and only means ...
— Memoirs of General Lafayette • Lafayette

... and his wife had been dead for twenty years. It had seemed as if women were not for this bright star. And here Elizabeth Chetwynd, who had left the Five Towns a quarter of a century before at the age of twenty, had caught him! Austere, moustached, formidable, desiccated, she must have done it with her powerful intellect! It must be a union of intellects! He had been impressed by hers, and she by his, and then their intellects had kissed. Within a week fifty thousand women in forty counties ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... shall I vnderstand you? Poet. I will vnboult to you. You see how all Conditions, how all Mindes, As well of glib and slipp'ry Creatures, as Of Graue and austere qualitie, tender downe Their seruices to Lord Timon: his large Fortune, Vpon his good and gracious Nature hanging, Subdues and properties to his loue and tendance All sorts of hearts; yea, from the glasse-fac'd Flatterer To Apemantus, that few things loues better Then to abhorre himselfe; ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... still high when Zarwell left the analyst's office. The white marble of the city's buildings shimmered in the afternoon heat, squat and austere as giant tree trunks, pock-marked and gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell was careful not to rest his hand on the flesh searing surface ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet

... planning and of your accomplishment, the very rank luxuriance of your life, will be marveled at as a fairy wonder. We, victors and conquered and neutrals, will alike be confined by duty to austere simplicity of living. Your complaint is unfounded; only gird yourselves for a wee short time in patience. Whether the business deals which you grab in the wartime smell good or bad, we shall not now publicly investigate. If ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... relation to the external world, he could not so well bring to perfection. Man is sent forth to subdue the earth, to obtain command over the elements, to form political communities; and to him, therefore, belong the more hardy and austere virtues; and as they are made subservient to the relief of our physical wants, and as their results are more obvious to the senses, it is not surprising that they have acquired in his eyes an importance ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady

... commanded. This king, in our acted parable, first had the touch of Elisha's fingers, and then received the command from Elisha's lips, 'Shoot!' So Jesus Christ gives before He commands, and commands nothing which He has not fitted us to perform. He is not 'an austere man, reaping where He did not sow, and gathering where He did not straw'; but He comes first to us saying, 'I give thee Myself,' and then He looks us in the eyes and says, 'Wilt thou not give Me thyself?' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... for brevity we may term the stories based upon supernatural agency: this was a favourite with olden Persia; and Mohammed, most austere and puritanical of the "Prophets," strongly objected to it because preferred by the more sensible of his converts to the dry legends of the Talmud and the Koran, quite as fabulous without the halo and glamour ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... quickly. In New York mysteries beckoned at every street corner, but too importunately. Neither city was sufficiently discreet for Colwyn's reticent mind. But London! London was like a woman who hid a secret life beneath an austere face and sober garments. Underneath her air of prim propriety and calm indifference were to be found more enthralling secrets than any other city of the world could reveal. It was emblematic of London that her mysteries, ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees

... members of this Senate wished—that Mr. Root might hear from the mouth of the man of experience, authority, and austere demeanor who is to preside over us, the most eloquent and highest of these expressions of ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root

... power is chiefly notable for the strenuous efforts made by his prime minister, Mizuno Echizen no Kami, to substitute economy for the costly luxury that prevailed. Reference has already been made to this eminent official's policy, and it will suffice here to add that his aim was to restore the austere fashions of former times. The schedule of reforms was practically endless. Expensive costumes were seized and burned; theatres were relegated to a remote suburb of the city; actors were ostracized; a censorship of publications checked ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... thy pound hath gained five pounds. And he said likewise to him, Be thou also over five cities. And another came, saying, Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which I have kept laid up in a napkin: for I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow. And he saith unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant. Thou knewest that I was an austere man, taking ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... at full length. His brow, austere and naked, Shines like a fleshless skull, and on it ye may mark A mighty weight of woe. Around him—all is dark; Behind, a tented field. Tranquil and stern he raises His mournful eye, and with contemptuous calmness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various

... called civilization; at any rate, all dryness, all safety, all that stood up above the surge and preserved a consciousness of its own, was centered in the drawing-room of the Hilberys. Its purpose was beneficent; and yet so far above his level as to have something austere about it, a light that cast itself out and yet kept itself aloof. Then he began, in his mind, to distinguish different individuals within, consciously refusing as yet to attack the figure of Katharine. His thoughts lingered over Mrs. Hilbery and Cassandra; and then he turned to Rodney ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... plane, nor even, in some cases, the attempt at such complete suppression. In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists. Even in the eleventh century we find that the charming and saintly Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the order of Fontevrault, would often sleep with his nuns, notwithstanding the remonstrances ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis

... consider the purity of the Christian religion, the sanctity of its moral precepts, and the innocent as well as austere lives of the greater number of those who during the first ages embraced the faith of the gospel, we should naturally suppose, that so benevolent a doctrine would have been received with due reverence, even by the unbelieving world; that the learned and the polite, however ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... I cannot get men of the middle way I have to fall back on zealous and austere men. Zealous men push ahead and take things up, and there are things that austere men will ...
— The Sayings Of Confucius • Confucius

... breast-plate of faith that now fell off his own shrunken body, Clement said within himself: "Heaven itself led my foot hither to this end." It struck him, too, as no small coincidence that his patron, St. Bavon, was a hermit, and an austere one, a cuirassier ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... Georgie K.'s were not resumed, nor the boyish enjoyment of things, which James now recognized to have been simply feverish attempts to live through the horrible ordeal of his life and keep his sanity, while he had now settled down into a state of austere gloom, yet he begun again to attend to his practice and to take interest in it. Clemency remained away for a week. Then Gordon brought her home. She was at the dinner-table that night when James returned rather late from a call on a far-off patient. She simply said, "Good evening! Doctor ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman

... whittling. "Not at all," repeated Ellen's mother. "In America it is but little observed outside of the Eastern States. This is one of the beautiful traditionary customs of Catholic England, which even those austere Puritans, the Pilgrims, could not entirely divest themselves of; though among them it lost its former significance. Perhaps it was the gentle Rose Standish or fair Priscilla, or some other winsome and good maiden of the early colonial days, who transplanted to New England this ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley

... austere, Let us all read, whate'er the cost: O Maiden! why that bitter tear? Is it for dear one you have lost? Is it for fond illusion gone? For trusted lover proved untrue? O sweet girl-face, so sad, so wan What hath the Old Year ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... are merely mentioned as examples of her catholicism in literature. As she read she was unaware of the giggling boys and girls who came in noisily, and made dates, and were coldly frowned on by the austere Miss Perkins, the librarian. She would read until the fading light would remind her that the short fall or winter day was drawing to ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... of her husband, in whose household her son Walter had long before taken unwholesome lessons in fashion and extravagance. The Earl, now in his grand climacteric, had outlived his youthful frivolity, and though he had become a hard and austere man, was yet willing to do a kindness to his kinsman's widow by engaging a house for her, and offering for her grandson a squire's place which happened to be vacant in his household. She would have preferred some less showy and more solid means of livelihood for Aubrey, whose character was ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... brotherhood in the Soudan, founded by Mohammed-es-Senussi from Mostaganem, in Algeria, who flourished between 1830 and 1860. The brotherhood, remarkable for its austere and fanatical zeal, has ramified into many parts of N Africa, and exercises considerable influence, fostering resistance to the encroachments of the invading ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... they are for the most part as carelessly dressed as a busy business man or a clever young student might have been. They are none the less pretty for that, and far more beautiful. But the fashions have floated away to absurdity. Every now and then through the austere bustle of London in war time drifts a last practitioner of the "eternal feminine"—with the air of a foreign visitor, with the air of devotion to some peculiar cult. She has very high-heeled boots; she shows a leg, she has a short ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... Merrimac, strong cladded o'er, In quarters close begins her fire, Nor fears the rushing hail of shot, And deadly missiles swift and dire; But, rushing on 'mid smoke and flame, And belching thunder long and loud, Salutes the ship with bow austere, And then ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... to create a conventional world in which things forbidden by the Decalogue and the Statute Book shall be lawful, and yet that the exhibition may be harmless, or even edifying. For example, we suppose, that the most austere critics would not accuse Fenelon of impiety and immorality on account of his Telemachus and his Dialogues of the Dead. In Telemachus and the Dialogues of the Dead we have a false religion, and consequently a morality which is in some points incorrect. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... to make the most of any given place, and we have much in our own power. Things looked at patiently from one side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful. A few months ago some words were said in the Portfolio as to an "austere regimen in scenery"; and such a discipline was then recommended as "healthful and strengthening to the taste." That is the text, so to speak, of the present essay. This discipline in scenery,[2] it must be ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... view an anomaly of character. The austere Puritan divine, whose life was open and blank, bare and cold as a winter field, cherished a secret dissipation of the mind. He labored upon a book on the errors of magic. So laboring, he became snared by the thing he denounced. He believed ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram

... so much abused, the justice to say, that towards the close of 1848, when these disgusting dances were again revived, the Gardiens de Paris interfered, and proceeded to clear the room if they were persevered in. If this had been done in 1845 and 1846 by that austere minister, who so much boasted of his independence and morality, events might have taken a different turn. But it is now too late to speculate, and it is easy to be wise after the event. But M. Guizot, his prefet de police, and the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... of President Garfield, was elected to succeed him. Under Professor Hinsdale's strong and vigorous guidance, the department rapidly advanced to a recognized place in the curriculum. Though his bearing was somewhat austere and overwhelming, he could unbend, as was proved on one occasion in the Library when his booming voice brought an admonition from an official. Just then an influential member of the Library Committee chanced to appear. He proved a greater disturber ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw

... at times still of the austere, virtuous, kindly, poor Scotch home, one has a vision of the "Cottar's Saturday night." "Perish all other dreams," one cries, "rather than that such goodness and simplicity should end." But now let us look at the average poor Scotch home, and ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... expedition had been planned to Huckleberry Mountain, Joel revolted. Whether he had really been surfeited with picnics, or only feared that he might grow to enjoy such puerile forms of entertainment, and so lose some of the austere dignity which had hitherto distinguished him, it is certain that he came down to breakfast with his mind made up. Even to Celia's coaxing ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith

... hermitess," said Virginia. "You've exactly the right features for that profession; austere, yet benevolent. But ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson

... face, every feature of which was strongly marked. He was not a preacher, as was generally believed, though a man of deep religious and spiritual nature, and seemed inspired for the performance of some extraordinary work. He was austere in life and manner, not given to society, but devoted his spare moments to introspection and consecration. He thought often of what he had heard said of him as to the great work he was to perform. He eventually became seized ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various

... degradation, but as a form of non-development. The crab is harsh, and for itself worthless. But it is the germinal form of innumerable finer fruits: not apples only the most exquisite, and pears; the peach and the nectarine are said to have radiated from this austere stock when cultured, developed, and transferred to all varieties of climate. Superstition will finally pass into pure forms of religion as man advances. It would be matter of lamentation to hear that superstition had at all ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... historians. He marks the highest point which the enlarged and enriched prose of the Augustan age reached just before it began to fall into decadence. It is no longer the famous urbanus sermo of the later Republic, the pure and somewhat austere language of a governing class. The influence of Virgil is already traceable in Livy, in actual phrases whose use had hitherto been confined to poetry, and also in a certain warmth of colouring unknown to earlier prose. To Augustan purists this relaxation of the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... weak domestic and foreign demand, austere government budgets, and serious internal armed conflict. Other economic problems facing the new president URIBE range from reforming the pension system to reducing high unemployment. Two of Colombia's leading exports, oil and coffee, face an uncertain future; new exploration ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... road and then stood still to gaze at the facade of the Sytch Pottery. It was a long two-storey building, purest Georgian, of red brick with very elaborate stone facings which contrasted admirably with the austere simplicity of the walls. The porch was lofty, with a majestic flight of steps narrowing to the doors. The ironwork of the basement railings was ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... Bangor, arose to teach and govern the Church. Their monks lived by severe rule, based, no doubt, upon the customs of the East, of Egypt or Syria, most strict in the abasement of the selfish will, in penitence, in work, in prayer. "Good is the rule of Bangor," said the ancient sequence, "strait, austere, holy, and just." It was this rule, with the enthusiasm which marked all classes for religion and for knowledge, which inspired S. Columban in his great work. It was a work whose keynote was sacred study and which found its harmony in monastic service. S. Columban was the type, the representative ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton

... most beautiful studies of childhood—Rebecca's artistic, unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle of austere New Englanders. The stage version is making ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton

... hungry Countesses, their lean admirers, a superannuated abate or two, and a flock of threadbare ecclesiastics, made up Donna Laura's circle; and even her cicisbeo, selected in family council under the direction of her confessor, was an austere gentleman of middle age, who collected ancient coins and was engaged in composing an essay on ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... Holy Fair, Holy Tulzie, Two Herds, Holy Willie's Prayer, and Address to the Unco Gude, are satires against bigotry and hypocrisy. But in spite of the rollicking profanity of his language, and the violence of his rebound against the austere religion of Scotland, Burns was at bottom deeply impressible by religious ideas, as may be seen from his Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish, and Prayer in Prospect ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... a stern, austere man, usually very silent and reserved. I only remembered seeing him excited once or twice. My mother had died in my infancy—(I was but fifteen months at the time) and my father's sister became his housekeeper. I had but one brother a year older ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival

... had been so long drifting into a staid and ceremonious fashion of life that this visit of Betty's threatened at times to be disturbing. If Aunt Barbara's heart had not been kept young, under all her austere look and manners, Betty might have felt constrained more than once, but there always was an excuse to give Aunt Mary, who sometimes complained of too much chattering on the front door steps, or too much scurrying up and down stairs from Betty's room. It was impossible ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett

... disturb or interrupt you, sir," he said, beaming in the doorway like a benevolent high priest. He had doffed his professional manner of austere disapproval, as was his custom in ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... sombre vaultings of the great Florentine Cathedral, the impression was not weakened. The austere gloom of it chimed more nearly with his state of unrest. Then there are the galleries, the painted ceilings,—angels, saints, martyrs, holy families,—can art have been leashed through so many ages with a pleasant fiction? Is there not somewhere at bottom an earnest, vital truth, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... in here, will you?" "Here" was the unused "salon" of the house, and in its austere ugliness would have attracted the girl's attention at any other time. But she had now before her something she had never seen, a perfectly sober Pontefract. And though red, a little puffy, and watery as to eye, the man looked what he was, an English gentleman. Brigit felt as though she had ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... and energies demanding supply of action. Little by little these are supplied,—supplied by the billiard-table and its concomitants. It is the same story,—first, rumors, then equivocation, then exposure. Perhaps a petty sum is all; but, to the austere justice of banking, this is as bad, nay, worse than millions. And then a brief paragraph in the newspaper, and one more ruined young man, sulking beside the family-hearthstone, his father's shame, his mother's unextinguishable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various

... two formed a combination which for sheer genius has never been surpassed. But Barrett never commanded the adoration of the public as Booth did, because he lacked that power of enchantment which Booth possessed in a supreme degree. His mind was austere, he could win respect but not affection, and, as a result, criticism was more captious, honors came grudgingly or not at all, and the fight for recognition was up-hill all ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... assembled to conquer England, before one hundred thousand spectators and the entire army, to the roll of eighteen hundred drums. No ceremony, probably, was ever more exciting. The eminent surgeon, Larrey, then decorated, a man of austere virtue, spoke of it with emotion to the end of his life and never alluded that unique day but with a trembling voice. On that day, nearly all the men of superior and tried merit and talent in France[3346] are proclaimed, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... austere youth hitherto, I had not really had erotic experiences whatever. I had led the chaste life of the intellectual worker. My thoughts had been the thoughts of a man; they had ascended high and had delved deep, but my love ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... verse is best described by negatives. It has not the endless variety, the elasticity and freedom of Shakespeare's, it has not the massiveness and majesty of Milton's, it has not the austere grandeur of Wordsworth's at its best, it has not the wavy swell, "the linked sweetness long drawn out" of Shelley's, but its distinguishing feature is, if we may use the expression, its importunate beauty. ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... of Africa, and when it propagated itself in the southern regions of Europe, its stern inflexibility was not able to resist even the influence of clime; the perfumed breezes of the Betis and the Xenil despoiled it, in part, of the austere physiognomy which had been impressed on its whole structure by the sands of Arabia. Even the severe laws of the harem were relaxed in the courts of Boabdil and of Almanzor, for the wives of those two monarchs, openly, and without shame, ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous

... Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat austere and moral significance,—a ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James

... grudge any man the practice of it but himself; like that grave burgess, who being desired to lend his clothes to represent a part in a comedy, answered: No, by his leave, he would have nobody play the fool in his clothes but himself. Hence are his so austere reprehensions of drinking healths, lascivious talk, usury, and unconscionable dealing; whenas himself, hating the profane mixture of malt and water, will, by his good will, let nothing come within him but the purity ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... wonders of artistic composition, compared with the hordes of latter-day pictures. They were the aristocrats of their kind, full of reserved force, unimpeachable in dignity, stately even, at times veritably austere. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... her austere education," said Burr. "It is not possible for you to conceive how young people are trained in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... life separated by continents of silence from all the eager movement of the world. There are two pictures of the country, equally true; the country of Corot, idyllic, lovely, full of soft light and graceful form; the country of Millet, austere, harsh, bleak, impressive only by a certain gravity and grand severity. We all imagine that we could live in, and we all desire, the country of Corot. But could we live in the country of Millet? I confess that I could not have done so without resources in myself. It required ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... lawyer was rather severe and austere. He was a good deal of an aristocrat. While he did not seek to repel people, he had little of the knack of drawing people ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock

... all that sort of thing, And a monk with a book, and a monk with a bell, And "dear linen souls," In clean linen stoles, Swinging their censers, and making a smell.— And see where the Choir-master walks in the rear With front severe And brow austere, Now and then pinching a little boy's ear When he chants the responses too late or too soon, Or his Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La's not quite in tune. (Then you know They'd a "movable Do," Not a fix'd one as now—and of course never knew How to set up a musical Hullah-baloo.) ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... and whose dress never strikes the eye, but which seems to have developed on them as the natural foliage of their persons. He had a high appreciation of the enjoyments of life—vanity, ostentation, good eating, and even the austere joys of the family. At home with his wife he illustrated the tender assiduity of the young husband; abroad he was the personification of a youth just freed from parental discipline. While his wife was the ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... who approached him; his temper singularly stern, dauntless and haughty. But his wit was never filled with gaiety: he was never known to laugh. Amid the wildest uproar that his sallies caused, he would sit with face austere—unmoved. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... the first time in all these years I fell asleep on the stone floor of my dark cell with a happy smile, realising that my plan was crowned with complete success, passing from the realm of eccentricity to the domain of stern and austere reality. And the fear which I felt while falling asleep in the presence of my jailer, my fear of his resolute look, of his revolver; my timid desire to hear a word of praise from him, or to call forth perhaps a smile ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... masculine tone prevailed. So the Parisienne cast off her Grecian robes—a comparatively easy process—and put on the whole armor of the tailor-made. She wore cloth instead of diaphanous gauze, and her gowns were cut with a more austere simplicity. Then came the Restoration and the Romantic movement, and the great days of 1830. Woman read her Chateaubriand and her Victor Hugo and her Byron, and became sentimental. It was bon-ton to languish a good deal, and the dressmakers were required to find a suitable costume ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... factions which had sprung up within. The great religious movement known as the Protestant Reformation had not stopped in England with the separation of the English from the Roman Church under Henry VIII. It had brought into existence the Puritan, austere, bigoted, opposed to beauty of church and ceremonial, yet filled with superb moral and religious enthusiasm. It had brought about the persecution of Catholics and the still more merciless persecution of Protestants ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken

... to many hearts. The conception of God as 'knowing me altogether,' down to the very roots of my being, is either the most blessed or the most unwelcome thought, according to my conception of what His heart to me is. If I think of Him, as so many of us do, as simply the 'austere man' who 'gathers where he did not straw,' and 'reaps where he did not sow'; if my thought of God is mainly that of an Investigator and a Judge, with pure eyes and rigid judgment, then I shall be more ignorant ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... of Navarre. What could tempt Bacon to pick out a non-historical King Ferdinand of Navarre, plant him in the distant days of Jeanne d'Arc, and make him, at that period, found an Academe for three years of austere study and absence of women? But, if Bacon did this, what could induce him to give to the non-existent Ferdinand, as companions, the Marechal de Biron with de Longueville (both of them, in 1589-93, the chief adherents of Henri of Navarre), and add to them "Dumain," that is, the ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang

... The austere schoolmaster, with his dread insignia of birchen rod, steel-bowed spectacles, and swallow-tailed coat, was bad enough; the grinning, mischief-loving, and at times, belligerent, boys were worse. But the girls! Heavens! ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask

... correct; though all I need add on this point is that my old friend "Joe" is now an admiral, with grown-up daughters of his own, and from his austere manner no one would ever dream of his susceptible nature and flirtive disposition in the ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson

... weaker points stand out in noble contrast with the deficiencies of an age which admired prudential religion, and took in good earnest the words of the Preacher as to being righteous overmuch.[541] But his writings would probably have had greater and wider influence if his piety had been less austere, and his ideal of ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... pneumatic tube and climbed on the jitney that wound its way through the corridors of the pathology sector and into the quiet, austere quarters of the resident pathologists. He found the proper concourse, and moments later he was pressing his thumb against the identification plate outside the ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse

... Adam says:—"Brother Truth, what time is it on earth?" Brother Truth: "Mighty Father, it is midnight among the profane, or cowans, but the sun is in its meridian in this Lodge." Father Adam: "My dear children, profit by the favor of this austere luminary, at present showing its light to us, which will conduct us in the path of virtue, and to follow that law which is eternally to be engraved on our hearts, and the only law by which we cannot fail to come to the knowledge of pure truth." He then makes a sign, by putting ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan

... white heaven broke upon my vision, that breadth of mere white which is indeed almost the definition of Paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom. But alas! like all heavens, now that it is seen it is found to be unattainable; it looks more austere and more distant than the blue sky outside the window. For my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged—never mind by whom; by a person debarred from all political rights—and even my minor proposal to put the other ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton

... ruins, the bishop was discerned to be her most conspicuous man. Most opportunely, at this period Jerome had completed his Latin translation of the Bible. The Vulgate henceforth became the ecclesiastical authority of the West. The influence of the heathen classics, which that austere anchorite had in early life admired, but had vainly attempted to free himself from by unremitting nocturnal flagellations, appears in this great version. It came at a critical moment for the West. In the politic non-committalism of Rome, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... man who's sheer rogue in reality, Hides the harsh knave in the mask of "legality." When 'tis too gross, Robbery's rash, but austere orthodoxies Countenance such things as modern ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various

... are very grateful to those who can teach us to turn our eyes to the charm which surrounds us, and a life which is lived without such perception is apt to be a rough and hurrying thing, even though it may also be both high and austere. Like most of life, the true success lies in not choosing one force and neglecting another, but in an expectant kind of compromise. The great affairs and facts of life flash upon us, whether we will or no; and even the man whose mind is bent upon the greatest hopes ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson

... "Idle Times" a Capuchin monk, wandering apart from the dancers in consonance with the austere proclaiming of his garb, was studying the frivolous gamboling of a school of fountain gold-fish in the conservatory. He looked up, scowling, to take a note from ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... we see the nature of the dangerous game he is playing, and in Wallenstein's Death the unheroic hero becomes very impressive in his final discomfiture and his pitiable taking-off. The love-tragedy of Max and Thekla casts a mellow light of romance over the otherwise austere political action. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)



Words linked to "Austere" :   spartan, stern, austerity, ascetic, austereness, nonindulgent, ascetical, strict, severe



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