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adjective
Virile  adj.  Having the nature, properties, or qualities, of an adult man; characteristic of developed manhood; hence, masterful; forceful; specifically, capable of begetting; opposed to womanly, feminine, and puerile; as, virile age, virile power, virile organs.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Virile" Quotes from Famous Books



... was nothing in him of the courtier-like grace employed in the good-humored reproof of unimportant vices, of the indulgent, condescending admonition to the "gentle reader," particularly of the fair sex. In Hazlitt's hands the essay was an instrument for the expression of serious thought and virile passion. He lacked indeed the temperamental balance of Lamb. His insight into human nature was intellectual rather than sympathetic. Though as a philosopher he understood that the web of life is of a mingled yarn, he has given us none of those rare glimpses of laughter ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... and conscience to the undivided care of one who had no other refuge in life save that offered by his devotion? The horror of this self-probing was still upon him as he followed Hazen's slight and virile figure across the rocks, but it fled as he felt the spray of the tossing waters dash its chilling ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... presented to the Legislature. The movement did not gain much impetus until the Nashville League was organized in the fall of this year and Chattanooga and Morrison soon followed. On Jan. 10-12, 1912, the association with its five virile infant leagues met in Nashville and plans for state-wide organization began. Miss Sarah Barnwell Elliott, an eminent writer, was unanimously chosen president. In October, 1913, the State convention met in Morristown and eight ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various

... the Good Man to teach and redeem them,—to sacrifice his life, if need be, in the work of enlightenment. They seem to have thought even of women and children as hardly partaking of Reason; their ideally good man was virtuous in a strictly virile way,[801] and it never occurred to them that training in goodness must begin from the earliest years, and be gradually developed with infinite sympathy and tenderness. If a man is to learn that there is something ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... not an uncommon phenomenon, and want of virile power in the male part of the community is also often the subject of complaint; many quaint drugs and methods being adopted to make up for the want of it, and to stimulate the sexual desire. A good many of the remedies resorted to by the Corean ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... the distant door of his study open and close and his steps advance along the hall. With what a splendid swing and tramp he brought himself toward her!—with what self-unconsciousness and virile strength in his feet! His steps entered and crossed his bedroom, entered and crossed her bedroom; and then he stood there before her in the parlor doorway, a few yards off—stopped and regarded her ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen

... remembered what he had in charge to do, . . TO REDEEM HIS PAST. To use and expend whatever force was in him for the good, the help, the consolement, and the love of others, ... NOT to benefit himself! This was his task, . . and the very comprehension of it gave him a rush of vigor and virile energy that at once lifted the cloud of love-loneliness ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... the hunters of other countries. Then a sacred thrill (heiliger Schauer) of deep understanding will come over your heart." For the German sportsman "takes more pleasure in the life that surrounds him and which he protects, than in the shot which only the last hot virile craving (Mannesgier) wrings from him, and which he fires only when he knows that he will kill, painlessly kill. For this is the root principle of German sportsmanship: 'God grant me one day such an end as I strive to bestow upon the game.' ... And if, by mischance, the German ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various

... these forces; for they are far more dangerous than mercenaries, seeing that in them the cause of ruin is ready made—they are united together, and inclined to obey their own masters. Machiavelli enforces this moral by one of those rare but energetic figures which add virile dignity to his discourse. He compares auxiliary troops to the armor of Saul, which David refused, preferring to fight Goliath with his stone and sling. 'In one word, arms borrowed from another either fall from your back, or weigh you down, or impede your action.' It remains for ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... is an embroglio. That conclusion is necessary and inexorable. It would not appear at all until, or if, numerical weakness imposed on the enemy a gradual concentration of the defensive; but once that numerical weakness has come, the fatal choices must be made. It may be that a strict, silent, and virile resolution, such as saved France this summer, a preparedness for particular sacrifices calculated beforehand, will determine first some one retirement and then another. It may be—though it is not in the modern Prussian temperament—that a defensive as prolonged as possible will be attempted ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc

... tradesman, and retain in their manners the virtues and simplicity of the people, whilst they already participate in the lights of society. The period in which aristocracies fall is that in which nations regenerate. The sap of the people is there. In this was born Jean Jacques Rousseau, the virile type of Madame Roland. A portrait of her when a child represents a young girl in her father's workshop, holding in one hand a book, and in the other an engraving tool. This picture is the symbolic definition of the social condition in which Madame ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... had written. It was lifeless. It was not fiction. The least of Helena's letters was more virile ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... suspended for a golden time in false tranquillity and independence. The princes who shared his culture and his love of art were gradually passing into modern noblemen, abandoning the savage feuds and passions of more virile centuries, yielding to luxury and scholarly enjoyments. The castles were becoming courts, and despotisms won by force ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... entertaining characters, and some very unconventional situations. Her people were virile; her hero was strong if not always grammatical; her heroine did and said things not common in real life, and yet that were quite reasonable when her peculiar nature and ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter

... that he had given right advice. Well! Without that power to decide and hold to decision in spite of misgiving, one would never have been fit for one's position at the Bar, never have been fit for anything. The longer he lived, the more certain he became of the prime necessity of virile and decisive action in all the affairs of life. A word and a blow—and the blow first! Doubts, hesitations, sentiment the muling and puking of this twilight age—! And there welled up on his handsome face a smile that was almost devilish—the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... in them. The legend on the banner had annoyed him. Its blatant message had penetrated the armor of youth, high spirits, and abounding good health. It expressed his own case, with a crude vigor. The "unemployed" genius who railed at society in that virile line must have felt as he, Dick Royson, had begun to feel during the past fortnight, and the knowledge that this was so was exceedingly distasteful. It was monstrous that he should rate himself on a ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy

... omen of good or evil fortune with a mysterious parentage. Its roots strike deep in that strange element in human nature which dreads whatsoever is weird and uncanny in common experiences, and sees strange portents and dire chimeras in all that is unexplainable to the senses. It is made most virile in the desire for knowledge of the invisible and intangible, that must ever elude the keenest inquiry, a phase of thought always to be reckoned with when imagination runs riot, and potent in its effect, though evanescent as a vision the brain sometimes ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor

... premise that we shall notice the unmentionable trews, femoralia, or periscelemata—as the Greeks would probably have called them, only they wore them not, but like Highland laddies preferred their own hides—of the virile portion of the community only. As for those tantalizing appendages of the better portion of her Majesty's subjects, we leave them in their proper concealment. We could easily write a volume or two to show that the custom came on Ormus, or Ind, or Araby the Blest; but criticism ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... until he had to give up all that was his and all that was dear to him—to make himself over or die. He would not yield. He died. He would not receive his salvation by surrender; rather would he choose oblivion, unknown darkness—the melting fires of extermination. It is hard to think this virile, untamed creation has been swept like hurrying leaves by angry autumn gusts across the sunlit plains into ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon

... rush of enthusiasm and questions, and the conversation began on a natural footing. He looked at Rantoul, aware of the social change that had taken place in him. The old aggressiveness, the look of the wolf, had gone; about him was an enthusiastic urbanity. He seemed clean cut, virile, overflowing with vitality, only it was a different vitality, the snap and decision of a man-of-affairs, not the untamed ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... them, but there are large numbers of people who rarely read anything but the newspaper, and who attend only cheap entertainments. These people need a spur to high thoughts and noble action, but they do not move in the world of culture. They need a stronger stimulant, the tang of virile debate about questions that touch closely their daily concerns, discussions in which they can share if they feel disposed. In large circles of the city's population there is a lack of facilities for such public discussion, and for that reason the ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... love affair; even that healthier and happier Bohemian, Peacock. With these, in one sense at least, goes De Quincey. He was, unlike most of these embers of the revolutionary age in letters, a Tory; and was attached to the political army which is best represented in letters by the virile laughter and leisure of Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae. But he had nothing in common with that environment. It remained for some time as a Tory tradition, which balanced the cold and brilliant aristocracy of the Whigs. It lived on the legend of Trafalgar; the ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... taboo or forbidden in many educational institutions, was still a part of Marshallton Tech, by reason of the belief that a high mentality and virile spirit demanded the extreme mental and physical show-down which hazing is wrongly supposed to bring out. Though severe enough, perhaps the initiations were not so terrible as ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple

... his own account of himself he used the word "tramp" with a shocking lack of pride—led him inevitably into the far Northwest. Men were doing things up there. The country fairly seethed with the activity of live, virile men who were taking the first staunch grip upon the tricky wheel of fortune and were turning it to their own account. Every man was building; no man complained of conditions, for conditions were so new and so ready to hand that he who found fault was merely lessening ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon

... laughed. "Silly little thing!" he said, with a fascinating tone of virile condescension. "An author's business is to write books, not to read them. If he reads, he grows intelligent and thoughtful and careful about his work. Those old books spoil him for the modern market. But if he just goes ahead and writes whatever comes into his head, he can do it with a bang, ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke

... Everybody goes, cynic philosopher, virile boy, women, and priests—all go. So sure am I of what you will do that I assume to advise you. Do not take quarters in the city—that will be loss of time; but go at once to the village in the edge of the grove. The way is through a garden, under the spray ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... lappeth in solitude a quantity of clarified butter that it hath obtained. O Janarddana, this is really no insult offered unto the monarchs; on the other hand it is thou whom the Kurus have insulted. Indeed, O slayer of Madhu, as a wife is to one that is without virile power, as a fine show is to one that is blind, so is this royal worship to thee who art no king. What Yudhishthira is, hath been seen; what Bhishma is, hath been seen; and what this Vasudeva is hath been seen. Indeed, all these have been seen ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... for the youth and virile middle age that dealt with them on the rare occasions when a timely blow was loosed. Then they had proof that from that strange, mad country overseas there came men who could lead men—men who could strike, and who knew enough to hold their hands when the sudden blow had told—just ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... Lyre, your duty now you know! If one would sing with grace and glow Songs of Society, One must not dream of fire, or length, Or vivid touch, or virile strength, Or ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various

... vignette worthy of Smollett. Alfred Yule, the worn-out veteran, whose literary ideals are those of the eighteenth century, is a most extraordinary study of an arriere—certainly one of the most crusted and individual personalities Gissing ever portrayed. He never wrote with such a virile pen: phrase after phrase bites and snaps with a singular crispness and energy; material used before is now brought to a finer literary issue. It is by far the most tenacious of Gissing's novels. It shows that on the more conventional lines of fictitious intrigue, acting ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... already been spoken of. He took himself very seriously, moving through life with a sunny-faced self-complacency so inoffensive and sincere as to be positively delightful. He was too good-natured and in all respects of character too little virile to meet Irons with anything but kindness, but as he was a trifle less sure of his social standing than Hubbard, he was naturally more annoyed at the choice of the third member of the committee. He made not a few protests to his friends, and gently represented himself ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... Pintados, especially the women, are very vicious and sensual. Their perverseness has discovered lascivious methods of communication between men and women; and there is one to which they are accustomed from their youth. The men skilfully make a hole in their virile member near its head, and insert therein a serpent's head, either of metal or ivory, and fasten it with a peg of the same material passed through the hole, so that it cannot become unfastened. With this device, they have communication with their wives, and are unable to withdraw until a long ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair

... figure. Looking back for more than a century we may very well appreciate to the full Fox's great qualities and yet be aware of his weaknesses and his vices, in which he showed the strength of a passionate and virile character in contact with certain characteristics of the society of the age. Instead, therefore, of blaming Selwyn for repeating to correspondents the minor incidents of the time, we ought to be thankful to him for enabling us to picture so many of the leading personages of that day as they ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue

... "What do you know of what the North will be? You know it only as it has been—as it is, perhaps. But, of its future you know nothing. I tell you the North will change! It is a hard land—cruel—elemental—raw! But it is big! And, when it awakens, its very bigness, the virile force and strength of it, will turn against its savagery, its cruelty, its brutishness; and above all other lands it will stand for the protection of the weak and for the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... other house is Squerryes Court, belonging then and now to the Warde family, the Wolfes' closest friends. Wolfe and George Warde were chums from the first day they met. Both wished to go into the Army; and both, of course, 'played soldiers,' like other virile boys. Warde lived to be an old man and actually did become a famous cavalry leader. Perhaps when he charged a real enemy, sword in hand, at the head of thundering squadrons, it may have flashed through his mind how he and Wolfe had waved their whips and cheered like mad when ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood

... the Duke of Guise, after Constable Montmorency's disastrous defeat at St. Quentin. Her answer to the remonstrance of her servants against this excessive drain upon her slender resources bore witness at once to the sincerity of her patriotism and to a virile spirit which no Salic law ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... Jerusalem to-day! Did Jews really conceive it as a contemporary possibility? Barstein went hot and cold. The idea was absolutely novel to him; evidently as a boy he had not understood his own prayers or his own people. All his imagination was inflamed. He conjured up a Zion built up by such virile hands as Sir Asher's, and peopled by such beautiful mothers as his daughter: the great Empire that would spring from the unity and liberty of a race which even under dispersion and oppression was one of the most potent peoples on the planet. And thus, when the ladies at last rose, he was in ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... end of everything, the Revolution, had so formed her character as to lead her to disdain human suffering. And this old woman, who had nothing left of life save breath, had risen to a serene philosophy, to a virile, haughty, almost satirical stoicism. Sometimes she would begin to declaim against a sorrow that seemed a little too keen; but, in the midst of her tirade, she would suddenly hurl an angry, mocking word at herself, upon which her face would at once become calm. She was cheerful with the ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... fine kind of virile peasantry in the willing hands, white enough, but occasionally broken at the nails from eight hours of this box in and that box out in ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... it is presented as on the subject itself. One writer will make it attractive, another repulsive. For instance take a passage in history. Treated by one historian it is like a desiccated mummy, dry, dull, disgusting, while under the spell of another it is, as it were, galvanized into a virile living thing which not only pleases but ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin

... follow and answer the desire of the bright dark eyes of girls in love;—in love, where love and the beauty that inspires it are the gifts of nature most guarded and most honoured, from which are expected the utmost that is conceived of delicacy in delight by a virile and healthy race. "A pure and skilful man." Patient already has this life become, for a jeweller can scarcely be made of impatient stuff; patient even before the admixture of German blood when Albert the elder ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... Connor's 'Black Rock' was good, but 'The Sky Pilot' is better. The matter which he gives us is real life; virile, true, tender, humorous, pathetic, spiritual, wholesome. His style, fresh, crisp and terse, accords with the Western life, which he understands. Henceforth the foothills of the Canadian Rockies will probably ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles

... suffice. No man of letters has given a nobler witness to the truth of his patriotism than Colonel Patrice Mahon, known in letters as Art Roe. His novels, which dealt largely with modern Russian life, in relation with the French army, were virile and elevated productions, but he was a man of fifty at the time of his heroic death at the head of his troops, in the battle of Wisembach (August 22, 1914), and his tone was not that of such young men as Camille Violand and Marcel Drouet. To read again the "Pingot et moi" of ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse

... Bach would be dead; Beethoven, middle-aged; Mozart, senile. What, instead, is the health of these three composers? Have you a gayer, blither, more youthful scapegrace writing today than Mozart? Is there a man among the moderns more virile, more passionately earnest or noble than Beethoven? Bach, of the three, seems the oldest; yet his C-sharp major Prelude belies his years. On the contrary, the Well-tempered Clavichord grows younger with time. It is ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... master of circumstances. Like the younger generation, he was clean shaven; hence there was no mask for the deeply graven lines of determination about the mouth and along the angle of the strong, leonine jaw. In the region traversed by the great railway system the virile face with the massive jaw was as familiar as the illegible signature on the Inter-Mountain's guest-book. Though he figured only as the first vice-president of the Transcontinental Company, Hardwick McVickar was really the active head of its affairs and the dictator ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... abstract and in the concrete of strolling and lounging about the June meadows; of lying in pickle for half a day or more in this pastoral sea, laved by the great tide, shone upon by the virile sun, drenched to the very marrow of your being with the warm and wooing influences ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... MacDonald took his place at the head of the table, where he had sat ever since the father left it. Uncle Neil was very much beloved, but he was in no sense the head of the family. He was a gay, easy-going body, given to singing songs and playing the fiddle, and not at all calculated to keep a virile group of boys and girls in order. So, John, the eldest son at home, was the real head of the family, and his mother's support. For John was wise and strong and many, many years ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith

... of improving the feminine strain of the race also," he told her, but almost as though he spoke to himself, "but I realized that it mattered little the stature of the mothers of the race as long as the fathers were made virile. But if all women were like yourself, Miss Estabrook, the race would not require the improvement it is now my duty to bestow ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks

... will write it as a song and put it in italics, so that even you will know that it is a song; So listen, listen, Camerados! for I am about to spout and my song shall be masculine and virile. A bas your metre, a la lanterne your rhyme, conspuez your ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)

... powerful advocate, but an exceptionally accomplished scholar. His knowledge of Greek, Latin, French, and German rendered their literature a perennial source upon which to draw for the illumination and embellishment of the pure and virile English of which he was master. It was from him that Eugene inherited his delight in queer and rare objects of vertu and that "rich, strong, musical and sympathetic voice" which would have been invaluable on the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... "Gom!" said the virile little woman to me, "a wesh'll do him no harm. I've got the biggest gorby of a mon," she went on, "between Mow Cop and the Cocklow o' Leek. He's gone trapesing off, with our young Ted on his shoulders, to see yow chaps march ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... Kaas had been laid out, the face shaved, and the eyes closed, the distortion was less apparent. They could trace signs of suffering, but the expression was still virile. It seemed a handsome face to ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... Cain, thou hast ranged through the depths of solitude! But thou art more ferocious, more savage, more inconsolable than they, because thou hast never found a man's heart sufficiently feminine to love thee as they were loved, to pay the homage of a confiding and blind submission to thy virile charms, to offer thee a mute yet ardent devotion, to suffer its obedience to be protected by thy Amazonian force! Woman-hero! Like the Amazons, thou hast been valiant and eager for combats; like them thou hast not feared to expose the exquisite loveliness ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt

... little lines of the doings of men; unnamed adventurers whose deeds were virile deeds; rough men, from whose contaminating touch society gathers up her silken skirts and passes by upon the other side; unlovely men, rolled-sleeved and open-throated, deep-seamed of face, and richly weather-tanned of arm, ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... vanquished men. It has been the practice from time immemorial for a victor to carry off some portion of the body of his victim or defeated enemy, as a mark or testimony of his prowess; it was either a hand, head or scalp, lower jaw, or finger. The carrying off of the phallus or virile member was considered the most conclusive proof of the nature of the vanquished, and, as it established the sex, it conferred a greater title to bravery and skill than a mere collection of hands or scalps, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... and virile and brutal in him seemed to harden and stiffen in the moment after he had seen the beach-comber collapse limply on the sand under the last strong knife-blow; and a sense of triumph, of boundless self-confidence, leaped within him, so that he shouted aloud in a ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... only a conspicuous officer connected with important events throughout his life, and especially during the Great Conflict, but he was a singularly virile and independent character who exerted great influence over all with whom he came in contact. He was strong, self-contained and deliberate in speech, and having been an industrious student and an acute ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson

... training-system in the gymnasia usually occurs before the nineteenth or twentieth year. With the reception of the certificate of maturity the youth may be said to have donned the virile toga. He enjoys during his university years a degree of liberty such as he never enjoyed before, never will enjoy again when his student-days are over. Having taken out his matriculation-papers, and given the Handschlag ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... book it is different. Through these reeds and pipes blows the very breath of life. It seems as if one could put one's hand upon the singer's heart and count its pulsations. There is something wholesome, virile and sane about the man's soul. Anybody can be reasonable, but to be sane is not common; and sane poets are as rare as blue lilies, though they may not ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... JOSEPH—A virile, bearded man of about fifty. Sandals. Long black cassock, easily obtained from an Episcopal choir. Striped couch cover may serve as mantle. This should be draped about head ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare

... his own taste in later life—too finely spun, and perhaps more elegant than healthful. She encouraged him besides in drawing-room interests. But in other points her influence was manlike. Filled with the spirit of thoroughness, she taught him to make of the least of these accomplishments a virile task; and the teaching lasted him through life. Immersed as she was in the day's movements, and buzzed about by leading Liberals, she handed on to him her creed in politics: an enduring kindness for Italy, and a loyalty, like that of many clever women, to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... try and avoid the tendency to set down a mere catalogue of abnormal human specimens; I had rather ramble with the reader through the now shadowy thickets of a vivid and virile past, following a payable memory "lead," and examining such nuggets of interesting experience as we may pick up on the way. For the period I write of has passed, leaving scarcely a recognizable sign. The individual digger, the ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... insidious power of poisoning the clear springs of life; because people who grow to depend upon the stimulus of success sink into dreariness and dulness when that stimulus is withdrawn. Here my critics have found fault with me for not being more strenuous, more virile, more energetic. It is strange to me that my object can have been so singularly misunderstood. I believe, with all my heart, that happiness depends upon strenuous energy; but I think that this energy ought to be expended upon work, and ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... in the virile voice of the fourth reformer; "what you want is to take people away from the slums, to bring them back to the country. Land nationalization is what we need—a free, healthy life, far removed from the factories that kill soul and body ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... and policemen, who clubbed them so severely that many had to be taken to hospital. The incident produced such universal fury that there was nearly a revolution, and the Government hastened to come to terms with the teachers with all possible speed. The modern teachers have behind them all that is virile, energetic, and public-spirited in China; the gang of bandits which controls the Government has behind it Japanese money and European intrigue. America occupies an intermediate position. One may say broadly that the old traditional education, with the military governors ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell

... indications as they are in their manifestations. One man is a painter, another a sculptor, another an architect. One man paints flowers, another landscapes, another portraits, another allegorical scenes, and still another the rough, virile, vigorous, or even horrible and gruesome aspects of life. One musician sings, another plays the violin, still another the piano, and another the pipe organ. One conducts a grand opera, another conducts a choir. One musician composes lyrics, another ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... in grandly upon the sea. Bedient was early below, and overtook Miss Mallory in the gardens. She seemed particularly virile. A pair of Senora Rey's toy-spaniels ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, before the Renaissance had grown powerful enough to influence European life. Even during those palmy days he exercised a power that for the most part was not virile, but crushing and inhuman. It has been set forth in Dr. Paul Carus's History of the Devil. In the light of such a history as that I doubt much whether even Professor Stanley Hall himself would lift a finger to bring the Devil back ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... he replied. "If then you wish to keep your vow of eclecticism, you should be willing to express certain virile ideas on the subject of love which I will communicate to you, and I will not grudge you the benefit of them, if benefit there be; I wish to bequeath my property to you, but this will be all that you ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac

... But the men whose brains Find fuel in their blood, the men whose minds Hold sympathetic converse with their hearts, Such men are never neutral. That word stands Unsexed and impotent in Realms of Speech. When mighty problems face a startled world No virile man is neutral. Right or wrong His thoughts go forth, assertive, unafraid To stand by his convictions, and to do Their part in shaping issues to an end. Silence may guard the door of useless words, At dictate of Discretion; but to stand Without opinions in a world which ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... later "Amelia"; journalism and his duties as a justice of the peace occupied him till 1754, when ill-health forced him abroad to Lisbon, where he died and was buried. Fielding is a master of a fluent, virile, and attractive style; his stories move with an easy and natural vigour, and are brimful of humour and kindly satire, while his characters in their lifelike humanness, with all their foibles and frailties, are a marked contrast to the buckram ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... be a Scot yet his palate is pleasantly tickled by Lamb's description of his national character—Lamb and the Scots did not agree through an incompatibility of humour—and near by he keeps his Hazlitt, whom he sometimes considers the most virile writer of the century: nor would he be quite happy unless he could find in the dark The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. He is much indebted to a London publisher for a very careful edition of the Spectator, and still more to that good bookman, Mr. Austin Dobson, for his admirable introduction. ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren

... social ostracism. But I don't accept this classification, for my part, and I imagine that, as the chief party in interest, I have a right to my opinion. People who belong by half or more of their blood to the most virile and progressive race of modern times have as much right to call themselves white as others have ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt

... Government. It would be futile, as all knew, trying to succeed with a staff of native teachers. Tribal relations and other causes stood in the way, and unless the college was to be doomed to failure it would have to be launched and conducted by virile European professors. Much if not all of the food required for the staff and scholars could be purchased cheaply or might be raised in the college grounds by the pupils themselves. Technical training would be taught hand in hand with the ordinary courses. These were ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... master's pupils did, the grasp on nature; and while, therefore, his works, seen as they are through the glamour of the antique, never lack an intimate relation to existing life, it is impossible to resist the feeling before them that it is life beautified, of exquisite yet virile choice, but of life arrested. The reproach of his opponents of the romantic school that he was an "embalmer" has a foundation ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various

... watched the craft gather way, a trifle shocked, her breath coming a little faster. The most deadly blows she had ever seen struck were delivered in a more subtle, less virile mode, a curl of the lip, an inflection of the voice. These were a different order of beings. This, she sensed was man in a more primitive aspect, man with the conventional bark stripped clean off him. And she scarcely knew whether to be amused or frightened when she reflected that among such ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... to hear her call, and, dropping his sack and implement, he hurried across the tilled ground, sending up puffs of dust. He vaulted the rude fence of poles, and upon sight of her called out lustily. How big and virile he looked! Yet he was gaunt and strained. It struck Carley that he had not looked so upon her arrival at Oak Creek. Had she worried him? The query gave ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... This is Socialism, the most pregnant actuality in the palpitating life all about us. But, as Engels pointed out, Socialism also has its ideological side. In this sense it may correctly be called a theory, if we bear in mind that it is the virile force of class-feeling, and not the theory, that is going to effect the Social Revolution. Now, every individual socialist does in his development conform to the biogenetic law; but the bourgeois socialist is more apt to epitomize ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... unnaturally to the postponement of social development until the pioneer farmers had settled down to the new life. The third cause was immunity from the danger of foreign invasion, which eliminated the military reasons for maintaining a numerous, virile, and progressive rural population. ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett

... visibly swelling with pride at having made the journey, and the little woman in the green shirt-waist quivering with exquisite fears and mentally clinging with both arms to the personal conductor of her party, who looks becomingly virile, and exchanges a surreptitious wink with ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke

... wrecked body and blighted mind, and saw his future turn to decay before his manhood was well begun. Where was the old buoyant spirit he had brought with him into the fight? Gone forever, and in its place he found his maimed and trembling hands, and limbs weakened by starvation as by long fever. His virile youth was wasted in the slow struggle, his energy was sapped drop by drop; and at the last he saw himself burned out like the battle-fields, where the armies had closed and opened, leaving an impoverished and ruined soil. He had given himself for four years, ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... the room sent a shock to her heart at the first glance. Very different was this one from that tall, strong man who but lately, in all the pride of manly beauty and matured strength, overawed her by his presence. What was he now? Where now was all that virile force, and strong, resistless nature, whose overmastering power she had experienced? Alas! but little of it could be seen in this wasted and emaciated figure that now lay before her, seemingly at the last verge of life. His features had grown thin and ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... worker in his best days, but the indecision of his lines was that of inexperience, not of failing ability. Gradually he improved. His colours were clearer and ground more smoothly; his gold showed a more glassy surface. The book ended as it had begun, a virile work of art; but in the course of its making, one man had grown old, lost his skill, and died, and another had started in his immaturity, gained his education, and devoted his best years to ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... Eno, who left two millions to the Institute of Mechanics and Tradesmen, is "worth a damn." We Americans abhor any affectation of learning; hence our weakness for slang. I should apologize for the word "weakness." On the contrary it is a token of our virile independence, our scorn for the delicatessen of education, mere dilettanteism. And this has its practical side, for if we don't know how to pronounce the words "evanescent persiflage" we can call it "bunk" or "rot." We suspect all college graduates. We don't want them in our business. ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... My virile food taketh effect, my strong and savoury sayings: and verily, I did not nourish them with flatulent vegetables! But with warrior-food, with conqueror-food: new desires ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... founding in France the 'Conservative Republic' of M. Thiers, he thought that outlook for the future completely and hopelessly closed; and as it was neither in the traditions of Netherlandish liberty nor in his own virile and courageous temper to acquiesce in the domination of a political oligarchy ready, like Carrier and the Jacobins of 1792, to 'make France one vast cemetery rather than not regenerate it after their own minds!' M. Cornelis de Witt looked about him ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... men. The Soudanese are of many tribes, but two main races can be clearly distinguished: the aboriginal natives, and the Arab settlers. The indigenous inhabitants of the country were negroes as black as coal. Strong, virile, and simple-minded savages, they lived as we may imagine prehistoric men—hunting, fighting, marrying, and dying, with no ideas beyond the gratification of their physical desires, and no fears save those engendered by ghosts, witchcraft, the worship of ancestors, and other forms of superstition ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill

... sudden death, and the crisis was past. When Berrington came to himself again he was lying on a bed in a small room; there was a lamp on a table by his side. He had no feeling whatever that he had suffered from violence of any kind, his head was clear and bright, his limbs felt as elastic and virile as ever. He was like a man who had suddenly awakened from a long sleep; he was just as fresh and vigorous. The bed on which he was lying ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White

... batrachians, and might have been borrowed, one would say, from the 'Comedy of the Frogs,' by one Aristophanes, an Athenian poet, contain the very pith and marrow of all theories of love and lovemaking; they would make a capital rule to regulate everybody's conduct—of the virile as well as of ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier

... only conjectural, of this difficult passage (see Zeitschrift fuer Deutsches Alterthum und Deutsche Litteratur, Bd. xxxii, 1888, S. 275). The idea is probably more clearly expressed in Stowe, H. 1. 13 and YBL. 43a, 41, and may be rendered, 'membrum virile ejus coram viros Hiberniae et ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown

... first touch. Vision and contact prolonged removed you so many degrees from the reality; and what you saw that way was not a bit of use to you. He denied perversely that genius was two-sexed, or that it was even essentially a virile thing. The fruitful genius was feminine, rather, humble and passive in its attitude to life. It yearned perpetually for the embrace, the momentary embrace of the real. But no more. All that it wanted, all that it could deal ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... in every age when the drama is a bit more virile than in the years that have immediately preceded it, there is a tendency to break away from conventions and to cavil at definitions. This is a sign of health, and has in the past often been the first faint stirring which betokened ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... fated. I suppose there are some men who are quite good when they are bachelors. But I don't believe they are the best men. They are either archangels upon earth—young Gladstones and Newmans—or else they are cold, calculating, timid, un-virile creatures, who will never do any good. The first class must be splendid. I never met one except in memoirs. The others I don't want ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle

... lucky the smith had an iron hot," he said. "Black Steve's a dangerous man and we know something about the Metis temper. Drummond, of course, is hardly a Metis, but he has a drop of Indian blood that must be reckoned on. It's a remarkably virile strain." ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss

... him towards the panelling, but she did not see by what trick he opened again the door by which they had entered. She only saw, with a wild leap of the heart, Dick Green, upright, virile, standing against the dark ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell

... offered a curious contrast as they talked; he, big, virile, muddied with his day in the saddle, an aroma of mingled damp and leather exuding from his clothes as they steamed in front of the fire—she, slim, silken-clad, delicately wrought by nature and over-finely strung by reason of the high-pitched ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... a tremendously virile and yet sinister face which was turned towards us. With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil. But one could not look upon his cruel blue eyes, with their drooping, cynical lids, or ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Flinders-Chappell wedding, young John Franklin was serving on the Polyphemus, and had only a few days previously (April 1) taken part in the battle of Copenhagen. In the ordinary course of things he would, there can hardly be a doubt, have followed his profession along normal lines. His virile intellect and resourceful courage would probably have won him eminence, but it is not likely that he would have entered upon that career of exploration which shed so much lustre on his name, and in the end found him a grave beneath the immemorial snows ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... regard to the wife of his bosom, if he can trust her as well as love her. When I hear jocose proverbs spoken as to men, such as that in this house the grey mare is the better horse, or that in that house the wife wears that garment which is supposed to denote virile command, knowing that the joke is easy, and that meekness in a man is more truly noble than a habit of stern authority, I do not allow them to go far with ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... the minute sparkling of darkness Which vibrates untouched and virile through the grandeur of night, But which, when dawn crows challenge, assaulting the vivid motes Of living darkness, ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... old-fashioned American household. Something too much of iron there may have been in the Puritan's temper; something too little of sunlight may have come in through the narrow windows of his house. But that house had foundations, and the virile virtues lived in it. There were plenty of red corpuscles in his blood, and his heart beat in time with the eternal laws of right, even though its pulsations sometimes seemed a little slow and heavy. It would be well for us if we could get back ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke

... strongest manifestations of this intoxication motive. Something analogous to these conditions we see in the lives of individuals, in the phenomena of intemperance, which belong in general to the virile years. Social ecstasy is produced in times when there is already a free expression of energy, but also under conditions that cause pain, disorder and repression. Under the latter conditions we think of it not as desire for relief from strain but desire to be released from obstacles that impede ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... The past was a dream, and an evil dream. We had moved in a world of bad enchantment, like phantoms, barely conscious of ourselves. We had now recovered proprietorship in our own lives. Work, that had been a curse, was a blessing. Life, that had gone on maimed feet, was now virile in every part. This mere fulness of health was in itself ample compensation for the loss of a hundred artificial pleasures which we had once thought necessary to existence. We knew that we had found a delight in mere living which must remain wholly ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... lives as it pleases; requiring more than one hundred thousand men per annum, which, including those which the Convention has squandered, makes nearly nine hundred thousand in eight years.[51128] At this moment the five Directors and their minions are completing the mowing down of the virile, adult strength of the nation,[51129] and we have seen through what motives and for what object. I do not believe that any civilized nation was ever sacrificed in the same way, for such a purpose and by such rulers: ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine



Words linked to "Virile" :   manly, manful, male, manlike



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