"Cult" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little of the narrow and acrid temper of the special pleader. He is content to show humanity. It is quite conceivable that the future, forgetful of the special social problems and the humanitarian cult of to-day, may view these plays as simply bodying forth the passions and events that are timeless and constant in the inevitable march of human life. The tragedies of Drayman Henschel and of Rose Bernd, at all events, stand in no need ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... certainly be about somebody else, even admitting that it did not relate to incongruous phantoms. When, for instance, he mentioned Haydn with that same warmth which made us so suspicious when he praised Lessing, and when he posed as the epopt and priest of a mysterious Haydn cult; when, in a discussion upon quartette-music, if you please, he even likened Haydn to a "good unpretending soup" and Beethoven to "sweetmeats" (p. 432); then, to our minds, one thing, and one thing alone, became certain—namely, that his Sweetmeat-Beethoven is not our Beethoven, and his ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... international relations. I'm afraid that for a long time to come there will be those who will want to wage war and will have to be crushed with their own weapons. But I think this insane and devilish cult of war will be a thing of the past. War will only remain as an unpleasant means to an end. The next stage will be, one hopes, the gradual realisation that the ends for which one wages war are generally selfish: and anyway that law is preferable to ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... lectures and religious rites had been attended by hundreds—many of them rich society women, who came rolling up to the temple in their limousines. Also there had been a school, where children had been initiated into the mystic rites of the cult. The prophet would take these children into his private apartments, and there were awful rumors—which had ended in the raiding of the temple by the police, and the flight of the prophet, and likewise ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... so much, both as conductor and publisher, for living composers (he is the high priest of the Sibelius cult), he has been called a modernist. ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... standing a little by itself in Cambridge Gate. He used to declare that this situation combined all the advantages of London and the country, also that the Park that was good enough for the Regent was good enough for him. He had a decided cult for George IV; and there was even more than a hint of Beau Brummel in his dress. The only ugly thing in the house was a large coloured print of ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... in fact the north of France is the nearest. Each slab is about twenty feet in height and they are fashioned rudely in the form of a temple. It is said that in the design geometrical figures were used, and that some sun cult was practised by those who reared them, for the sun's shadow passes through various points only on Midsummer and on May Day. The Druids are supposed to have used this as the great shrine of their faith, and worshippers came from all over Europe every year to take part in the religious ceremonies. ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... said the late Mrs. Barrow (the dearly-beloved "Aunt Fanny" of a host of little ones) to me at an evening musicale, "that seven out of ten professed disciples of the Wagner cult here present would, if they dared be unfashionable and honest, ask for music that has a tune in it rather than that movement in something flat or sharp to which they have seemed to give breathless attention for the ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... majority of the great men who have swayed men's minds no longer have altars, but they have statues, or their portraits are in the hands of their admirers, and the cult of which they are the object is not notably different from that accorded to their predecessors. An understanding of the philosophy of history is only to be got by a thorough appreciation of this fundamental point of the psychology ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... intervals, administered in bottles with moral labels upon them of soothing colours. In fact, man has been able to make his pursuit of power easier to-day by his art of mitigating the obstructive forces that come from the higher region of his humanity. With his cult of power and his idolatry of money he has, in a great measure, reverted to his primitive barbarism, a barbarism whose path is lit up by the lurid light of intellect. For barbarism is the simplicity of a superficial life. It may be bewildering in its surface adornments and complexities, but it ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... central object shaped like the Latin cross. "The Latin, the Greek, and the Egyptian cross or tau (T) were evidently sacred symbols to this ancient people, bearing some religious meanings derived from their own cult."[14] ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... grave man receives the most chaff most good-humoredly. But he had a nervous dread of being found out. He had made a sort of religion of suppressing the fact that he was a prince; the holy of holies of this cult was the fact that he was a prince who sought to do good to his neighbor—a prince in whom one might ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... means unanimous. They owned that there was much to be said even for compulsory Greek, if only Greek had been intelligently taught. And with that, of course, I agree: for to learn Greek is, after all, a baptism into a noble cult. The Romans knew that. I believe that, even yet, if the schools would rebuild their instruction in Greek so as to make it interesting, as it ought to be, from the first, we should oust those birds who croak and chatter upon the walls of our old Universities. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... unmixed wine, Cratus. Beyond this precinct was a building with images of clay, representing, among Page 80 other scenes, Pegasus, who brought the worship of Dionysus to Athens. This building also was plainly devoted to the cult of the wine-god. In fact, the most venerable traditions in Athens, with reference to Dionysus, centre here. All the various representations here are connected with the oldest legends. Pausanias (I. 3. 1.) says that the Ceramicus ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... give frank recognition to that will above others, and such recognition will dictate conduct. The gods of Epicurus, leading a lazy existence in the interstellar spaces, indifferent to man and in no wise affecting his life, could scarcely become the objects of a cult. But the God of the Mahometan, of the Jew, or of the Christian, is a ruler to be feared, loved, obeyed. His will is law, and is determinative ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... wearing a cap at home. She carries herself artificially well, as women were taught to do as a part of good manners by dancing masters and reclining boards before these were superseded by the modern artistic cult of beauty and health. Her hair, a flaxen hazel fading into white, is crimped, and parted in the middle with the ends plaited and made into a knot, from which observant people of a certain age infer that Mrs. Clandon had sufficient individuality and good taste to stand out resolutely ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... I say, we have a clue to the labouring-man's temper. The courage, the carelessness of discomfort, the swiftness to see what should be done, and to do it, are not inspired by any tradition of chivalry, any consciously elaborated cult. It is habitual with these men to be ready, and those fine actions which win our admiration are but chance disclosures in public of a self-reliance constantly practised by the people amongst themselves—by the women quite as much as ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... to be regarded necessarily as local variations of one and the same god, like the many Virgins or Madonnas of Catholic lands, but as distinct numina. Each community could speak of its own baal, although a collection of allied communities might share the same cult, and naturally, since the attributes ascribed to the individual baals were very similar, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... was also bitter about Christian Science, and could easily be led to expose its falsity. He would wittily say it wasn't Christian and wasn't science; merely the chuckleheadedness of a lot of women. This because a local adept of the cult had told him, and—what was worse—told Mrs. Penniman and Winona, that if he didn't quit thinking he was an invalid pretty soon he would really have something the ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... contemplate it—the religion of the primitive Chaldaeans, that it will be unnecessary, after the full treatment which that subject received in an earlier portion of this work, to do much more than notice in the present place certain peculiarities by which it would appear that the cult of Assyria was distinguished from that of the neighboring and closely connected country. With the exception that the first god in the Babylonian Pantheon was replaced by a distinct and thoroughly national deity in ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... a continued turning to Nature, not as to a cult like a latter-day nature-student, but as a child to its mother, or a hart to the water brook. As even in a border, stayed between two lines of solid-coloured galloon, flowers and fruit do not stand forever upright without help, the weaver gave probability to his abundant mass by tying it here ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... composer had genius or merely talent. And that Brahms on his own part made the regrettable mistake of falling asleep while Liszt in turn was playing for him his newly completed sonata for pianoforte, is an incident which was important only for the moment. The Liszt circle took up the Brahms cult in earnest, played the trio at the chamber concerts, and the members, when they departed to their homes, generally carried with them their admiration of this new personality which ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... Drummond would have been almost a certainty for a silver medal, and Stanning would probably have been a runner-up. And here they were, both injured; Wrykyn would not have a single representative at the Queen's Avenue Gymnasium. It would be a set-back to the cult of ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... the discovery of islands of happiness, or to find, like Columbus, an America on the way to India. The Greeks called this power; the Latins, Fortuna, and deified it; erected temples and made sacrifices to it; dedicated to it a cult, of which Augustus was a devotee, and which contained more secret wisdom of life than all the superb theories on human destiny conceived by European genius in the delirium of this quarter-hour of measureless ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... The Black ones who waited upon the Spider were a mysterious order—so mysterious, indeed, that none knew exactly who were members of it and who were not. Nor could she tell how the strange and gruesome cult first originated, save that it was dimly whispered that the Ba-gcatya had taken it over from the nation they had driven out, and that in accordance with an ancient prophecy uttered by a famous magician at ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... Lanier, Timrod, and Hayne, Lanier was by far the greatest, and has even become, in a small way, the centre of a cult; but his voice, while often pure and sweet, lacks the strength needed to carry it down the ages. He is like a little brook making beautiful some meadow or strip of woodland; but only mighty rivers reach the ocean. Lanier is memorable not so much for his work as for the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... I understand, much in vogue in the purlieus of Fifth Avenue where it is practiced with skill and persistence by a large and needy cult of grateful recipients. Our Square doesn't take to it. As recipients we are, I fear, grudgingly grateful. So when Miss Holland transferred her enthusiasms and activities to our far-away corner of the world she met ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... interpreting the details sketched above, the recovery of the historical Aaron is a work of peculiar intricacy. He may well have been the traditional head of the priesthood, and R. H. Kennett has argued in favour of the view that he was the founder of the cult at Bethel (Journ. of Theol. Stud., 1905, pp. 161 sqq.), corresponding to the Mosaite founder of Dan (q.v.). This throws no light upon the name, which still remains quite obscure: and unless Aaron (Aharon) ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... pale, thin, ascetic Winnie Wilberforce, who, as a theosophist, is understood to believe that, in a former incarnation, he came near to having an affair with a danseuse; he was expounding the esoterics of his cult to a high-coloured brunette with many turquoises, who, in turn, was rather inclined to the horse-talk of one of ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... "The Egyptian cult I follow is very briefly explained. The Soul begins in protoplasm without conscious individuality. It progresses through various forms till individual consciousness is attained. Once attained, it is never lost, but it ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Monsieur," replied Brother Jacques quietly. "I should go to further lengths of disapprobation. I should say that Monsieur le Marquis's philosophy is the cult of fools and of madmen, did I not know that he was simply testing our patience when he advanced such ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... bold carriage and in free toilettes, step forward out of the past with the proud and insolent graces of the divinities of some Bacchanalia." With the provocative and sensual charm which is so powerful in its appeal, she had a rare skill in displaying her beauty to its fullest advantage. Her cult of the toilette, the Duc de Luynes tells us, went with her even by night. She never went to bed without decking herself with all her diamonds; and her most seductive hour was in the morning, when, in her bed, with her glorious ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... The cult of the out-of-doors had not yet begun to be developed. The beginning of "A Painter's Camp" was most attractive to my thirsty soul. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... blind that he could not see the sham and cant of some of the speeches, but in general there was much earnestness and truth. When Priscilla rose in her turn and spoke, with downcast eyes, he felt the beauty and simplicity of her religious life. And he rightly judged that from the soil of a cult so severe there must grow some noble and heroic lives. Last of all the class leader reached the marquis, ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... It consists in the unravelling of a skilfully woven fabric. Le Fanu, who resented the term "sensational" which was justly applied to his works, plays pitilessly on our nerves with both real and fictitious horrors. He, like Wilkie Collins, made a cult of terror. Their literary descendants may perhaps be found in such authors as Richard Marsh or Bram Stoker, or Sax Rohmer. In Bram Stoker's Dracula the old vampire legend is brought up to date, and we are held from beginning to end in a state of ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the class struggle, profess to believe in permeating the capitalist class with Socialism, and hold that the tendency of society is towards government by the expert-Fabianism therefore tends towards the rule of the bureaucrats or that section of the educated middle-class. The Fabians are the cult of the civil service and are Socialists neither in ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... on the periphery, and not exposed to thought of inner meanings, another cult took shape. Here concern was solely with the outer shape and size and weight and measurement of things, and how the size and shape and weight of one interacted with another. The Dravidian culture, which grasped only the idea but not the method of how the inner vibration could ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... development of the "Roland Saga" in French literature; for, even setting aside much legendary lore and accumulated tradition, the Roland of the old epic is a perfect hero of the early days of feudalism, when chivalry was in its very beginnings, before the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary added the grace of courtesy to its heroism. Evidently Roland had grown in importance before the "Chanson de Roland" took its present form, for we find the rearguard skirmish magnified into ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... impelled by no fanatical zeal, and have no creed or cult of my own to vindicate. I am influenced only by a noble love of truth and a sublime sense of duty in arraying myself with the despised minority,—perhaps I may say by a sense of fair play for the "under dog." I do not ask the kynolatrist to "call off ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... keep With the doe, at her call. With her following, the roe From the danger of ken Couches inly, and low, In the haunts of the glen; Ever watchful to hear, Ever active to peer, Ever deft to career,— All ear, vision, and limb. And though Cult[121] and Cuchullin, With their horses and following, Should rush to her dwelling, And our prince[122] in his trim, They might vainly aspire Without rifle and fire To ruffle or nigh her, Her mantle to dim. Stark-footed, lively, Ever capering naively With motion alive, aye, And ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... from the nations. It was Israel's temptation either to mix with them, or to keep aloof from them in contempt and hatred. Ahab's marriage with Jezebel was, no doubt, thought by his father a clever stroke of policy, assuring them of an ally. But it flooded the nation with the cruel and lustful cult of Baal, and that finally ruined Ahab and his house. God's servants can never mingle themselves with His enemies without harm, unless they mingle with them for the purpose of turning them into His servants. If we prefer the company of those who do ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... approaching variety and completeness, to our own public expression and interpretation of the devotional life. If anyone objects to this use of formal prayers on the ground of their formality, let him remember that we, too, are formal, only we, alas, have made a cult of formlessness. It would surprise the average minister to know the well-worn road which his supposedly spontaneous and extempore devotions follow. Phrase after phrase following in the same order of ideas, and with the same pitiably ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... who divide the average pittances of success or ill success on the road to honored retirement. Few of the heroes among modern nations have left such vivid and lasting memory as "the strong men of Ireland." During the nineteenth century their lore and cult have traversed the whole world in the wake of the great emigrations. Whether they failed or succeeded in wresting the independence and ideals of Ireland for a while from the fell clutch of circumstance, they ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... at her with the air of a naturalist examining an interesting specimen of his cult. He said nothing till, driven by his scrutiny, she turned and ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... miseries inherent in the mere fact of existence, but he has found no remedy; he looks for consolations in the cult of beauty, in the strength of free individuality, in the flight towards a superior ideal. But he does not know where to find this superior ideal, which vivifies everything. This is perhaps the reason why people have thought they ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... is a new Revolution! the revolt of the peasantry of the poor, the humble, the oppressed! The hatred which they felt against that old regime which had come back to them with its old arrogance and its former tyrannies had joined issue with the cult of the army for the Emperor who had led it to glory, to ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... to-day this cult of the Stuarts is nothing but a fad. No one ever expects to see a Stuart on the English throne. But it is significant of the deep strain of romance which the six Stuarts who reigned in England have implanted in the English heart. The old Jacobite ballads still have power to thrill. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... not living in state here," said Rachel; "I never could enter into the cult some people, mamma especially, pay ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... believe that it is not right to cultivate the heads of the young to the exclusion of their hearts, we mingle with abstract knowledge a cult of morality and religion, to be agreed upon by the different churches; for there are a hundred points wherein they agree to one wherein they differ. And, as to the points peculiar to each creed, we require the children to attend school but five days in the week, thus leaving one day ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... the form of a naos with the winged solar disk upon its frieze. He stands on the back of a lion and is clothed in Asiatic costume with the high Syrian tiara crowning his abundant hair. The Syrian workmanship is obvious, and the Syrian character of the cult may be recognized in such details as the small brazen fire-altar before the god, and the sacred pillar which is being anointed by the officiating priest. But the god holds in his left hand a purely Egyptian sceptre and in his right ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... their ambition in the study of the Law, and consoled themselves with the Messianic hope. Empty casuistry and dry dogmatism sufficed for the intellectual needs of the most enlightened. A piety without limit, the rigorous and minute observance of Rabbinical prescriptions, and a cult compounded of traditional and superstitious practices accumulated during many centuries, filled the void left in their minds by the wretched life of the masses. To satisfy the cravings of the heart, they had the homilies of the Maggidim ("preachers"), ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... Hermes in the time of the Ptolemies. He was honored as the Lord of the highest wisdom and it was a favorite practice to assign to him the authorship of philosophical and especially of theological works. Hermes' congregations were formed to practice the cult, and they had their special Hermes literature.(2) In later times the divine, regal, Hermes figure was reduced to that of a magician. When I speak, in what follows, of the hermetic writings I mean (following the above mentioned traditions) the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... called Irminsaeule, erected in honour of this god. And that combined with the passage in Tacitus leaves us with the conclusion that it was not that famous Arminius who was an enemy of the Romans, but a much greater and more ancient hero, that this cult concerned. Arminius bore the same name as those who are called Hermann to-day. Arminius was not great enough, nor fortunate enough, nor well enough known throughout Germania to attain to the honour of a public cult, even at the hands of remote tribes, like the Saxons, who came long ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... want you." "Come not into this house, this village, or its plantations." He knows from experience that the spirits pay little heed to these objurgations, and as they are the people who must be attended to, he develops a cult whereby they may be managed, used, and understood. This cult is what ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... emotional, feel the doctrinal movement less. But they are not unmoved, as they show by relaxation of tests and inclination to informal if not formal union, as well as by increasing the aesthetic and social attractions of their cult. Wild theosophic sects are born and die. But marked is the increase of scepticism, avowed and unavowed. It advances probably everywhere in the track of physical science. We are confronted with the vital question what the world would be without religion, without trust in Providence, without ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... Socialists as a class are upon a higher ethical plane than individualists may be dismissed. Personally, I fear that at present the average ethical plane of Socialists is below that of opponents for the allurements of Socialistic theory have attracted to that cult a great number of the economically impotent, but nevertheless greedy, who know nothing and care less about Socialistic theory but lust for that which they have never earned. It is they who promote class hatred as well as class consciousness. They ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... were a question of a few months, and I made a cult of men as some women do, it would be all right. But marry another man that I am not sure—that I know I don't want to spend my ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... think that men are going to stand for it?" yelled Sayre, waving his hands, "ordinary, decent, God-fearing, everyday young men like you and me? If this cataclysmic cult gains ground among American women—if these exasperating suffragettes really intend to carry out any such programme, everybody on earth will resemble everybody else—like those wax figures marked 'neat,' 'imported,' and 'nobby'! And I told Amourette that, too; but ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... once. A witless popinjay. Liebknecht is a man. Flames in his heart. But a poor orator. He will be killed. They must kill him. A little Jew, Haase, has brains. You will meet him. And the Dadaists—they know how to laugh. The cult of the absurd. Perhaps the next emperor of Germany will be a Dada. An Ober Dada—who knows? Once the world learns to laugh we may expect radical changes. And in Muenchen I know a dancer, Mizzi. Dear God, what legs! You must ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... transient vandals had pencilled mustaches regardless of sex. She looked at the fly-roost of pampas grass in the sky-blue vase on the shelf from which hung an old-gold lambriquin that represented the highest art of the Kensington cult—water lilies on plush—and at the crowning glory of the parlor, a pier glass in a ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... lectures to go to, with a professor instead of a priest, and a lantern slide of a stomach by way of altar-piece; and alcohol they make their Devil, and their god is Hygiene—a curious and instructive case of mental inertia. I understand, too, there are several other temples of this Cult in London—South Place Chapel and Essex Hall, for instance, where they worship the Spirit of the Innermost. But the thing that struck me so oddly was the number of bald heads glimmering faintly in the reflected light from the lantern circle. And that set me thinking upon a difficulty ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... naught but derision and will deserve it! Truth! Only he who consorts with chambermaids knows it, only he who steals to their pillow and listens to the unconscious utterance of a dream, hears it. He alone knows it who makes a woman of himself, and initiates himself into the secrets of her cult of inconstancy! But man, who asks for it openly, he who opens a loyal hand to receive that frightful alms, he will never obtain it! They are on guard with him; for reply he receives a shrug of the shoulders, and, if he rouses himself in ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... patriotically to perpetuate the beauty of Lichfield's past." But for present purposes it is sufficient to say that this jewelsmith of words was slight and dark and hook-nosed, and that his hair was thin, and that he was not ill-favored. It may be of interest to his admirers—a growing cult—to add that his reason for wearing a mustache in a period of clean-shaven faces was that, without it, his mouth was ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... milestones upon time, Those tombstones of dead selves, those hours of birth, Those moments of the soul in years of earth. They mark the height achieved, the main result, The power of freedom in the perished cult, The power of boredom in the dead man's deeds Not the bright moments ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... case the evil would not have been external, it would have seemed quite natural to her, and would not even have been distinguishable from herself; and as for virtue, respect for the dead, filial obedience, since she would never have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious delight in their profanation. 'Sadists' of Mlle. Vinteuil's sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so virtuous by nature, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, a privilege reserved for the wicked. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to say, there was a time when we both thought ourselves good mid-Victorian Liberals—a school of politicians whose ideas have now been swept into the limbo of forgotten things, the only surviving principles of that age being apparently those associated with a faint and somewhat fantastic cult of the primrose. In 1866 he wrote to his sister—and I cannot but smile on reading the letter—"I am more and more Radical every year"; and he expressed regret that circumstances did not permit of his setting up as "a fierce demagogue" in ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... are another matter. Those we have seen appear unobjectionable if their circulation is restricted to nudists and persons interested in the nudist cult. They have, however, been appearing in some newsagents' and tobacconists' shops and openly displayed in windows, and we consider circulation in this form to be undesirable. Serious consideration is being given to the prosecution of any ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie
... alike of time and eternity, they made the smallest trifles and the biggest tragedies the subjects of chaff and badinage till the next diverting occurrence. But to the Cross Canon outfit Mat Barlow's love for Netty Nevins was so obviously a downright worship, an all-absorbing, dominating cult, that, in a way, and all unknown to her, she became the nearest thing to a religion ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... object the restoration of the Romish doctrine of Purgatory with all its attendant horrors, and finally I need scarcely add he is a member of the Confraternity of the "Blessed Sacrament" which seeks openly to popularize the idolatrous and blasphemous cult of the Mass. ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... happened that a cult of the Middle Ages was in vogue, and the Duke had been told there that the rough North land was the one good thing ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Hindu ascetic Rmnanda. Rmnanda had brought to Northern India the religious revival which Rmnuja, the great twelfth-century reformer of Brhmanism, had initiated in the South. This revival was in part a reaction against the increasing formalism of the orthodox cult, in part an assertion of the demands of the heart as against the intense intellectualism of the Vednta philosophy, the exaggerated monism which that philosophy proclaimed. It took in Rmnuja's preaching the form of an ardent personal devotion to the God Vishnu, as representing the personal aspect ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... being fully satisfied that, thanks to it, man will regain his natural powers of expression, and at the same time his full motor faculties, and that art has everything to hope from new generations brought up in the cult of harmony, of physical and mental health, ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
... where the priest said he would cause the prized tools to reproduce their kind, like fruit. He planted them in a field near by and watched for results. The lack of any result except rust was an able argument for the Christian missionaries, when they came, to destroy his cult by laughing at the foolishness of his ideas and the weakness ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... laid in the grave, supplied with all these magic texts which were to restore and revive the soul and guide it across waters and through dangers to the place of Osiris. But the chapel was not wanting, the cult of the ka was maintained, the statues were placed in the hidden room, the food and drink were brought daily to the door of the grave. Thus, while a special immortality was evolved for the king, the funeral customs continue to show the same service ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... sic.] sunt Dux noster et socij eius, sed nihil profecerunt propter nimiam velocitatem eorum. Septima die inceperunt nobis apparere ad meridiem montes altissimi: et intrauimus planiciem, qu irrigabatur sicut hortus, et inuenimus terras cultas. [Sidenote: Asuni velocissimi. Montes Altissimi. Terr cult. Kenchat villa Saracenorum.] In octauis omnium Sanctorum intrauimus villam quandam Saracenorum nomine Kenchat: cuius capitaneus occurrebat extra villam duci nostro cum ceruisia et ciphis. Hic est enim mos eorum; quod de omnibus villis subditis eis, occurratur nuncijs ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... religion. We seldom reflect on the strangeness of the fact that the modern working-man has few or no superstitions. At other times the masses have evolved for themselves some picturesque nature-religion, some pious ancestor-worship, some cult of saints or heroes, some stories of fairies, ghosts, or demons, and a mass of quaint superstitions, genial or frightening. The modern town-dweller has no God and no Devil; he lives without awe, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the proximity of the church, of the tombs and of their flowers, gave soon a serenity detached from material things and as if free from all alliance with the senses. In her first mystic dreams as a little girl,—inspired especially by the pompous rites of the cult, by the voice of the organ, the white bouquets, the thousand flames of the wax tapers—only images appeared to her—very radiant images, it is true: altars resting on mists, golden tabernacles where music vibrated ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... had been seen there more than once, making one of a party of six, five of whom were men. She did not care for women as a sex, and said so in the plainest language, denouncing their mentality as still afflicted by a narrowness that smacked of the harem. But for certain women she had a cult, and among these women Lady Sellingworth held a prominent, ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... monarchy and republic." From the fervid admiration for the Roman Republic which animated the men of the French Revolution to the unmeasured Caesarian apologies of Duruy and of Mommsen, from the ardent cult of Brutus to the detailed studies on the Roman administration of the first two centuries, all historians have studied and regarded Roman history mainly from the point of view of the struggle between the two principles that yet ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... bishops appointed by the emperor,[5137] "he will, on his coronation, swear not to take any measures against the four propositions of the Gallican Church,"[5138] he will become a grand functionary, a sort of arch-chancellor like Cambaceres and Lebrun, the arch chancellor of the Catholic cult.—Undoubtedly, he resists and is obstinate, but he is not immortal, and if he does not yield, his successor will: it suffices to choose one that is manageable, and to this end things work ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... all de rest ob de womans," said the negro, as they hurried through the streets; "awrful dif'cult to manidge. Come 'long, we'll go home and hab ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... having his own property stolen. The child's face became, under the forced humiliation of the apology, revolutionary, anarchistic, rebellious. He might have been the representative, the walking delegate, of some small cult of rebels against the established order of regard for the property-rights of others. The sinner, the covetous one of another's sweets, became the accuser. Just as he was going out of the door, following the pink flutter of his ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... guilty of trying to rationalize an unsolvable mystery, to find an intellectual solution forbidden to man. In some obscure way the question seems to be involved in that other of the function of the Blessed Virgin as the fount of mercy and compassion, and at this time when the cult of the Mother of God had reached its highest point of potency and poignancy anything of the sort ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... one word, not one hint about the method by which Stanley Martin intended to bring the Nipe in was released. There were all kinds of speculations, ranging from the mystically sublime to the broadly comical. One self-styled archbishop of a California nut cult declared that Martin was a saint appointed by God to exorcise the Demon Nipe that had been plaguing Mankind and that the Millennium was therefore due at any moment. He was, he said, sending Stanley Martin a sealed letter which contained a ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... were still more of a word-civilization than the English. Our architectural, painting, and sculptural history is concerned with men now living, or their immediate predecessors. And even such work as we have is pretty largely a cult by the wealthy. This is the more a cause for misgiving because, in a democracy, the arts, like the political parties, are not founded till they have touched the county chairman, the ward leader, the individual voter. The museums ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... among some of the non-Aryan tribes of India, by the use of intoxicating drugs or the inhaling of stupefying fumes; among the dervishes, by whirling in a mad dance of religious fervour until vertigo and insensibility supervene; among the followers of the abominable practices of the Voodoo cult, by frightful sacrifices and loathsome rites of black magic. Methods such as these are happily not in vogue in our own race, yet even among us large numbers of dabblers in this ancient art adopt some ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... physical activity, will have a value. Yet, as a matter of fact, such things have very little substantial value in an ordinary citizen's life at all, except in so far as they play their part in the elaborate cult of athletic exercises, with which we beguile the instinct which craves for manual toil. All the races, and games, and athletics cultivated so assiduously at school seem now to have very little aim in view. It is not important for ordinary life to be able ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... developing largely power and capacity in the individual as such. Its implicit, and oftentimes its avowed, aim was individual success. The popularity of higher education in the nineteenth century especially rested upon the cult of individual success. It became, therefore, largely commercialized, and emphasized chiefly the professions and occupations which best assured the individual a successful career among ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... Madison, his voice lowered a little. "I found this tucked away as a filler in a corner of the newspaper this evening. It's headed, 'A New Cult,' with an interrogation mark after it. Now listen, ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... which teaches them to be flighty, lightsome, and false. Here and there one finds a passionate and exaggerated adoration of "pure forms" in philosophers as well as in artists: it is not to be doubted that whoever has NEED of the cult of the superficial to that extent, has at one time or another made an unlucky dive BENEATH it. Perhaps there is even an order of rank with respect to those burnt children, the born artists who find the enjoyment of life only in trying ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... oblong box covered with brown hair; to pull it out she had to get under the bed, and it was with trembling and eager fingers that she untied the old twisted cords. Remembrance with Kate was a cult, but her husband's indifference and her mother-in-law's hard, determined opposition had forced the past out of sight; but now on the first encouragement it gushed forth like a suppressed fountain that an incautious hand had suddenly liberated. And with what joy she turned over the old books! ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... A few years after the reformer's death, the old cults were re-established and the monuments of Aton studiously defaced. Hymns were then addressed to Amen-re, which are almost monotheistic in expression. The cult of the supreme god spread throughout Egypt and was carried by the Egyptian conquerors into other lands, Syria, Ethiopia and Libya, and was accepted by the natives both in Ethiopia and in the Libyan cases, where civilization was low and Egyptian influence ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Far East. He was the exact type of one of those Germans of the new style, whose affectation it is scoffingly to repudiate the old idealism of the race, and, intoxicated by conquest, to maintain a cult of strength and success which shows that they are not accustomed to seeing them on their side. But as it is difficult at once to change the age-old nature of a people, the despised idealism sprang up again in him at every turn in language, manners, and moral ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... Virgin has supplanted Freya; so that Freyjuhaena and Frouehenge have been changed into Marienvoglein, which corresponds with Our Lady's Bird. There, can, therefore, be little doubt that the esteem with which the lady-bird, or Our Lady's cow, is still regarded, is a relic of the ancient cult.] ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... stagnant water!' Now it will require at least a decade, to train us to appreciate the subtile symphonies of ditch slime. An English friend compassionating my American stupidity, essayed to initiate me in the cult of 'culture', and gave me a leaf to study, from the latter-day gospel. I learned it after a time, as I did the multiplication table. 'Culture steps in, and points out the grossness of untempered belief. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Placed in a garden it was supposed to be a protection against thieves. "In the earliest ages," observes the writer of the preface, "the worship of the generative energy was of the most simple and artless character... the homage of man to the Supreme Power, the Author of Life.... Afterwards the cult became depraved. Religion became a pretext for libertinism." Poets wrote facetious and salacious epigrams and affixed them to the statues of the god—even the greatest writers lending their pens to the "sport"—and eventually some nonentity collected these scattered ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... the work concerning which nothing need be said: it is bodily borrowed from Lane's Preface (pp. ix. xv.), and his Terminal Review (iii. 735-47) with a few unimportant and uninteresting details taken from Al-Makrizi, and probably from the studies of the late Rogers Bey (pp. 191-92). Here the cult of the Uncle and Master emerges most extravagantly. "It was Lane who first brought out the importance of the 'Arabian Nights' as constituting a picture of Moslem life and manners" (p. 192); thus wholly ignoring the claims of Galland, to whom ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... called the one persistent follower of this cult. He has consistently embodied his convictions in his pictures, the value of which to English art cannot yet be determined. This is also true of the marvellous work of Burne Jones; but although they have but few faithful followers, Pre-raphaelite art ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... the other of them for hours at a time. It was in vain that the servant tried to glance inside, in vain that she listened at the doors when he spent his holidays at home; she saw nothing and heard nothing. Nobody could have told what relics those chapels contained, nor with what religious cult he honored them. Another cause of surprise was his niggardly, avaricious life, which, as time went on, had become more and more pronounced, in such wise that his only expenses were his rental of sixteen hundred francs, the wages he paid to his servant, and the few pence per day which she with ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... her away from exercising the right of suffrage which affords the citizen the most effective means to make his influence felt in social questions and in the improvement of the public affairs. How are we to inculcate in our children, that sacred pledge of the future of the nation, the cult and worship of native land and liberty if we do not give their mothers that practical education involved in the exercise of the right of suffrage; if they are taught that government and politics ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... abandon the old lines. But it would be detestable treachery to the cause of education, of humanity. To me the learning of any blessed thing is a matter of little moment. Greek is not learned by nineteen-twentieths of our Public School boys. But it is a baptism into a cult, a faith, not more irrational than other faiths or cults; the baptism of a regeneration which releases us from I know not what original sin. And if a man does not see that, he is a fool, such a fool that I shouldn't wonder if he gravely asked me to explain what I meant ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... reached its place and never held its mummy. It was the last. Even while men were slowly rolling it, with tense muscles and panting cries, towards what might well have seemed its eternal chamber, others gods were born, and the cult of the Apis had come to an end—suddenly, then and there! Such a fate may happen indeed to each and all of the religions and institutions of men, even to those most deeply rooted in their hearts and their ancestral ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... railway rate cases in 1911 at once made it a matter of public interest. Later discussion may not have extended acceptance of scientific management, but it has not caused interest in it to flag. The movement has become essentially a cult. Its prophet, the late Frederick Taylor, by ignoring trade-unionism and labor psychology in the exposition of his doctrines, at once drew down upon them the hostility of organized labor; the movement was branded as another speeding-up ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss
... use of grain and the arts of farming-rites linked with an immemorial past, awful rites that gave men a new hope of eternal life. The Mother of the Gods, from Phrygia in Asia Minor, had her rites, too; and her cult spread all over the world. When the Roman poet, Lucretius, wants to describe the wonder and magic of the pageant of Nature in the spring-time he goes to the pomp of Cybele. The nearest thing to it ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... said awkwardly, and tossed the cigarette in the fire. "You used to smoke like a furnace, Margaret. Is this some new 'cult'?" ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... interweave in the twisted rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest, the fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable in any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship of the one true God. Priest religion is the ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... our country, and I told him that so far as I could remember we had ninety-five different ones. You might have knocked him down with a feather, and really it is difficult not to pity a high priest of a well-established cult who is haunted by the possible approach of one or all of ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... cold and rain in the north, our fresh springs and summers, we are men of action, of science, of no reflection. The seed is the same, but according to the soil it brings forth differently. Here the patience, the beauty, the abjection before the Devilish-Divine; there the defiance, the cult of the proud self. And these things have met. ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the nature of the Christian Science appeal largely explains the rapid spread of this cult. Christian Science is quite unlike other religions in this, that while they promise at most salvation—an intangible boon—Mrs. Eddy promises her followers health, relief from bodily pain and sickness, and thus addresses herself to a universally ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... kind of crafts or science; any cult of stars or figures?" But again she shook her head, and said, "Hath might know, Hath understood most things, but herself knew little of either." "Armies or navies?" and again the Martian shrugged ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... pioneer novel which now seems old-fashioned and even absurd, expressed Queen Anne's day. "Sensibility," as it was called, was a favorite idea in letters, much affected, and later a kind of cult. A generation after Pamela, in Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," weeping is unrestrained in English fiction; the hero of that lachrymose tale incurred all the dangers of influenza because of his inveterate tendency toward damp emotional effects; ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... right to speak my mind," said the man, laughing. "Honestly I don't find things much better in Britain. You were always famous for a dogged common sense which was never tricked with catch-words, and yet the British people seem to be growing nervous and ingenuous. The cult of abstract ideals, which has been the curse of the world since Adam, is as strong with you as elsewhere. The philosophy of 'gush' is good enough in its place, but it is the ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... Proclamation. Caucus of South Carolinians. Governor Gist's Message. The Disunion Cult. Presidential Electors Chosen. Effect of Lincoln's Election. Disunion Sentiment. Military Appropriation. Convention Bill ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... benefactor of his kind, who wrought much good to his times, and helped others to do it, and who had what Sir John Seeley called the 'enthusiasm of humanity' in very honourable, if noisy and demonstrative, form. But, since The General mingled all this with a cult—a distinct theological teaching, a theory of the Divine government and destiny of mankind which was in external form, as Huxley styled it, 'Corybantic'—the question does and must arise whether religion of the Salvationist ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... read Disraeli's novels over again, from time to time, with a renewal of sentiment. "I am dedicating my leisure hours to Endymion. What a charm after the beef and mutton of ordinary novels!" She gradually developed a cult for Swinburne, whom she had once scorned; in her repentance after his death, she wrote: "I never hear enough about that genius Swinburne! My heart warms when I think of him and read his poems." I think she was very much ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... the weed, said in part: "Death, as it must to all, came last week to cult-harboring, movie-producing Los Angeles. The metropolis of the southwest (pop. 3,012,910) died gracelessly, undignifiedly, as its blood oozed slowly away. A shell remained: downtown district, suburbs, beaches, sprawling ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... sixteenth centuries there was a cult that wore furs in Summer and thin clothes in Winter, to prove that love made them strong enough to resist the elements! You will recall the Euphuists of England, the Precieuses of France and the Illuminati of the eighteenth century, ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... At home, too, the cult of appearances went hand in hand with generosity and enthusiasm. "C'est presque un monde," she writes to Voltaire, "a creer, a unir, a conserver!" First comes the administration of justice, and her ukase of 1762, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... that this cult originated in Britain, and was transferred to Gaul. Gaul and Britain had one religion and one language, and might even have one king, so that what Caesar wrote of Gallic Druids must ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... to a scimetar, Thrace to the Samian runaway Zamolxis, Phrygia to a Month-God, Ethiopia to a Day-Goddess, Cyllene to Phales, Assyria to a dove, Persia to fire, Egypt to water. In Egypt, though, besides the universal worship of water, Memphis has a private cult of the ox, Pelusium of the onion, other cities of the ibis or the crocodile, others again of baboon, cat, or monkey. Nay, the very villages have their specialities: one deifies the right shoulder, and another across the river the left; one a half skull, another ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... worship spread rapidly over the ancient world and helped to unite all classes in allegiance to the new government. It provided a universal religion for a universal empire. Yet just at the time when this new cult was taking root, and in the midst of the happy reign of Augustus, there was born in Bethlehem of Judea the Christ whose religion was to overcome the worship of the emperors and with it all other faiths of ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... the conviction that there would one day be a great crash, believing himself to be doing his part by undermining the structure, and working on undoubtingly. Abenali was not aggressive. In fact, though he was reckoned among Lucas's party, because of his abstinence from all cult of saints or images, and the persecution he had suffered, he did not join in their general opinions, and held aloof from their meetings. And Tibble Steelman, as has been before said, lived two lives, and that as foreman at the Dragon court, being habitual to him, and requiring much ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of peace there lurks the danger that methods of training may deviate after false ideals, lose themselves in the cult of imposing appearances, and in the clash of individual opinions fail to distinguish the essential—i.e., what is really practicable under ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... the cult of John Bull take him as the symbol of that which has been most vital and successful in the island story. England has had more than its share of men of genius. It has had its artists, its wits, its men of quick imagination. ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... of the animal merged in the goddess, or to the horns of the crescent moon, with which she was to some extent identified. Possibly there was always a confusion between the two in the minds of her worshippers. The cult of Ashtoreth was spread not only among the Hebrews, but throughout the whole plain of Mesopotamia. In the times of the Judges, and in the days of Samuel, we find continually the statement that the people "served ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... anything connected with this stupid catastrophe can be amusing, to see the secretly crestfallen attitude of technicians. They are the high priests of the modern cult of perfected material and of mechanical appliances, and would fain forbid the profane from inquiring into its mysteries. We are the masters of progress, they say, and you should remain respectfully silent. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... on. Only here and there does he take a classic subject or introduce classic references. The truth of the matter is, that with all his fervid enthusiasm for Hellenic ideals, and with all his Greek cult, Hoelderlin was not the genuine Hellenist he thought himself to be. This is due to the fact that his turning to Greece was in its final analysis attributable rather to selfish than to altruistic motives. He wanted ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... betrothal or matrimony." Lastly: "The laws apply to the aforenamed Catholics whenever they enter into betrothal or matrimony with non-Catholics, baptized or not, even when they have obtained a dispensation from the obstacle of a mixed religion or of a disparity of cult; except the Holy See decrees otherwise for a certain ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... of a movement, and the Metropolitan had become the temple of a cult. When he could be induced to cross the Atlantic, the opera season in New York was successful; when he could not, the management lost money; so much everyone knew. It was understood, too, that his superb art had disproportionately little to do with his peculiar position. Women swayed the balance ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... from the beginning for dignity, for manners, for the essence of social culture which places art at the service of life. Always they had sought to preserve the finer lessons of the past; always they had struggled against the tyranny of mediocrity, the increasing cult of the second best. From this source, from the inherited instinct for selection, for elimination, from the inbred tendency toward order and suavity of living, Corinna had derived her clear-eyed acceptance of life, her nobility ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... that a growing multitude of men and women outwear the ancient ways. The bloodstained organised jealousies of religious intolerance, the delusions of nationality and cult and race, that black hatred which simple people, and young people and common people cherish against all that is not in the likeness of themselves cease to be the undisputed ruling forces of our collective life. We want to emancipate our lives from this slavery and these stupidities, ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... nursery of this particular art-cult, and 'twould relieve some of us to talk freely about it. The Repertory Theatre has already become fashionable, and is quite rapidly become a nuisance. Men are making songs and plays and lectures ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... Fashion you make war, With querulous Book, and quaint Bazaar, Good Ladies of the Higher Light! A Turkish Tea-gown, loose or tight, Won't win us to the Rational Cult; Japanese skirts do but insult Our elder instincts, to which Reason Is nothing more nor less than treason. Your "muddy weather costume" moves us No more than satire, which reproves us Ad nauseam, and for whose rebuff We never care one pinch of snuff. No, Ladies ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... humanity. They have invented an esthetic system for the use of the rich, and they have killed the Revolution. The chic put an end to the Revolution. And now everything is coming back; enthusiasm for the aristocracy, for the Church; the cult of kings. People look backward and the Revolutionary movement is paralysed. The people that irritate me most are those esthetes of the Ruskin school, for whom everything is religious: having money, buying jewels, blowing one's nose... everything is ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... worshipers, her beauty was beyond imagination or description: she was far fairer than any woman of the modern age could hope to be. At last Innocent VIII. feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight variations. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... was a Greek city always filled with Oriental trading folk, and these carried with them the language of subject races. It is at Pompeii that the earliest inscriptions on Italian soil have been found which recognize the imperial cult, and it is at Cumae that the best instance of a cult calendar has come to light. It is a note, one of the very few in the great poet's work, that grates upon us, but when he wrote as he did he was probably not aware that his years of residence ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... met on these occasions as well as he did many of the older ones; the serious ones would not waste their time on society, and there were too many of the sort who were asked everywhere because they had made a cult of fashion, whether they could afford it or not. A few were the sons of wealthy parents, and were more dissipated than those obliged to "hold down" a job that provided them with money enough above their bare living expenses to make ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... strangest because they did not seem to be actors. They did not refine living into a cult, with every pleasure and pain classified and weighed out and valued. No, they actually lived. It was hard to realize this, but in the end she did, and with ever increasing wonder, with also a beginning of envy ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the Captain's entrance. He was a fine specimen of the true Brahmin, the intellectual cult, that through successive generations of mental sway and homage from the millions of untutored ones had become conscious of its power. Tall, spare of form, with wide high forehead and full expressive eyes, almost olive skin, Barlow felt that the Swami was quite unlike ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... Reaching the shores of South Europe he sat down to write his autobiography—the great literary success of its year. This book was followed by other books written with the declared purpose of elevating humanity. In these works he preached generally the cult of the woman. For his own part he practised it under the rites of special devotion to the transcendental merits of a certain Madame de S—, a lady of advanced views, no longer very young, once upon ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Roman Empire, see Roman Life from Nero to Aurelius, by Dill (bk. iv, chaps. v-vi). Franz Cumont is the great authority on Mithra, and his Mysteries of Mithra and Oriental Religions trace the origin and influence of that cult with accuracy, insight, and charm. W.W. Reade, brother of Charles Reade the novelist, left a study of The Veil of Isis, or Mysteries of the Druids, finding in the vestiges of Druidism "the ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... peninsula. The evidence for this view is derived partly from English and Danish traditions dealing with persons and events of the 4th century (see below), and partly from the fact that striking affinities to the cult of Nerthus as described by Tacitus are to be found in Scandinavian, especially Swedish and Danish, religion. Investigations in this subject have rendered it very probable that the island of Nerthus was Sjaelland (Zealand), ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... The Tired Hedonists, of course. It is a club to which I belong. We are supposed to wear faded roses in our button-holes when we meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian. I am afraid you are not eligible. You are too fond ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... without evincing any undue squeamishness. . . . I spoke of AEschylus. I am sorry, Philip, that you are not familiar with ancient Greek life. There is so much I could tell you of, in that event, of the quaint cult of Kore, or Pherephatta, and of the swine of Eubouleus, and of certain ambiguous maidens, whom those old Grecians fabled—oh, very ignorantly fabled, my lad, of course—to rule in a more quietly lit and more tranquil world than we blunder about. I think I could explain much which now ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... surprised," said the Major with assumed carelessness. "They're ready to deify anything. They will see a god in a stone or a tree. You know they looked on the famous John Nicholson during the Mutiny as a god, and made a cult of him. There are ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... qualities and the special attributes of each branch. The particular spirit which we seek to encourage is different for each arm. Were we to seek to endow cavalry with the tenacity and stiffness of infantry, or to take from the mounted arm the mobility and the cult of the offensive which are the breath of its life, we should ruin not only the cavalry, but the Army besides. Those who scoff at the spirit, whether of cavalry, of artillery, or of infantry, are people who have had no practical experience of the actual training of troops in ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... are cathedrals, parish churches, temples and chapels, sumptuous and admired, where they adore the same God of the Sinai and Golgotha, where severs and ostensive cult is rendered to Immaculate Virgin Mary and to the Saints you have on your altars and none dare to destroy, attack ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... forms in which Greek genius enshrined her divinities. From Greece the stream reached Italy in Magna Graecia, and later by the adoption through Roman assimilation of the gods of the Greek Pantheon. The worship of Isis and Osiris came from Egypt to Rome, and became an influential cult there, as witness the abounding symbols of that worship still preserved in ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... follows that to fall behind in the idle conflict is a cardinal sin. A simple man might think that when a manufacturer had made sufficient for the wants of himself and his family for all time he might, without a criminal intent, relax his efforts. The simple man does not understand the cult. A millionaire, oppressed beneath a mountain of gold, would deem it a dishonour to himself and his colleagues if he lost a chance of adding to the weight ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... of the world," Selingman admitted. "I enjoy myself as I go, but I have my eyes always fixed upon the future. I make many friends, and I do not lose them. I set my face towards the pleasant places, and I keep it in that direction. It is the cult of some to be miserable; it is mine to be happy. The person who does most good in the world is the person who reflects the greatest amount of happiness. Therefore, I am a philanthropist. You shall learn from me, my young friend, how to banish ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... being scraped so feverishly from the door-posts a few minutes ago. Red sashes and rusty swords lay on the ground also. Here there could be absolutely no mistake; it was a headquarters of that evil cult which had brought such ruin and destruction in its train. The Boxers had been in ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... of a people, whatever its content, or its purpose, is an awe-inspiring spectacle. There can be no greater display of the sources of human power. In this particular time of exaltation we can see in action religious ecstasy, the cult of valor, and the stirring of more fundamental and more primitive feelings. This exaltation has its imaginative side. There is a dream of empire in it. There is an exhibition of the forms of royalty, its display, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... sorry because Tim Mooney's loss to the team may mean the loss of the game—or games. You are sorry only for Mr. Mooney and the limelight his playing might reflect upon you. Pardon my frankness but I know your type well. You are a disciple of this individual freedom cult which has swept the world. You have regarded rules as being made only for the thrill and pleasure of breaking. It has pleased your vanity that Mr. Mooney should have chosen your company rather than ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... grey city threw the spell of its fascination about her. Each time she returned to Barrington the town dwindled in her estimation. It was picturesque, but lamentably narrow. The life was barren, the "New England spirit" prevailed in all its severity; and this spirit seemed to her a veritable cult, a sort of religion, wherein the Old Maid was the priestess, the Spinster the officiating devotee, the thing worshipped the Great Unbeautiful, and the ritual unremitting, unrelenting ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... Dryad cult With leaf-like locks she'll haunt the trees, Securing this superb result ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... Le Cousin Pons, render the book an intensely gloomy one; it ends on a note of poignant misery, which gives a certain colour for once to the oft-repeated charge of morbidity and pessimism. Gissing understood the theory of compensation, but was unable to exhibit it in action. He elevates the cult of refinement to such a pitch that the consolations of temperament, of habit, and of humdrum ideals which are common to the coarsest of mankind, appear to elude his observation. He does not represent ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... of Poitiers, defender of the Nicean faith, the Athanasius of the Occident, as he has been called; Ambrosius, author of the indigestible homelies, the wearisome Christian Cicero; Damasus, maker of lapidary epigrams; Jerome, translator of the Vulgate, and his adversary Vigilantius, who attacks the cult of saints and the abuse of miracles and fastings, and already preaches, with arguments which future ages were to repeat, against the monastic vows and ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... were executed from time to time, but the government, whose policy is always to respect religious customs of the Hindus, administered as little punishment as possible, and "rounding up" all of the members of this cult, as ranchmen would say, "corralled" them at the Town of Jabal-pur, near the City of Allahabad, in northeastern India, where they have since been under surveillance. Originally there were 2,500, but now only about half of that number remain, who up to this date are not allowed to leave without ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... hair. The rain of these ladies' interruption was incessant; but the cure was a man of firm mind; their efforts to recapture his attention were futile. For the music of Charm's foreign voice was in his ear. Worship of the cloth is not a national, it is a more or less universal cult, I take it. It is in the blood of certain women. Opposite the two fussy, jealous bourgeoises, were others as importunate and aggressive. They were of fair, lean, lank English build, with the shifting eyes and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... by the merits of this glorious Saint, thou freest us all who assist to this cult and to all the Catholics of the Kingdom of Spain and of these Islands of all pestilential diseases which might take away our lives" (p. 13). Since the Catholics of the United States are not included here, the Bureau of Health ought to remember that such citizens together ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... I.—Positive statement of Life, corroborated by Lives of SS. Ciaran and Ailbhe. II.—Patrick's apparent avoidance of the Principality of Decies. III.—The peculiar Declan cult and the strong local hold which Declan ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... the masses against the classes was making him a master spirit of the modern mob that has humbled king, emperor and pope, at whose breath statesmen tremble, and at whose feet coward and sycophant of every cult cringe ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon |
