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Licentiousness

noun
1.
The quality of being lewd and lascivious.  Synonym: wantonness.
2.
Dissolute indulgence in sensual pleasure.  Synonyms: dissipation, dissolution, looseness, profligacy.






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"Licentiousness" Quotes from Famous Books



... enigmatic gesture. Very well; thus Saint Augustine and other holy men who had spent their early lives in licentiousness, changed their ways and had become luminaries of ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... soon take place. As Diderot seemed to think all this very proper, and did not doubt of the success of the measure, and as I had besides to speak to him upon too many other subjects to touch upon that article, I made him no answer: but scandalized at these preparatives to corruption and licentiousness in my country, I waited with impatience for the volume of the 'Encyclopedie', in which the article was inserted; to see whether or not it would be possible to give an answer which might ward off the blow. I received the volume soon after my establishment at Mont Louis, and found the articles ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... obtained. For the anemic and the florid vices need very different treatment. An excess or a deficiency of iron in the body is liable to result in criminality. A chemical system of morals might be developed on this basis. Among the ferruginous sins would be placed murder, violence and licentiousness. Among the non-ferruginous, cowardice, sloth and lying. The former would be mostly sins of commission, the latter, sins of omission. The virtues could, of course, be similarly classified; the ferruginous virtues ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... learning popular, it created a passion for culture, it aroused and stimulated widespread desire for greater enlightenment. Some of the leaders in the movement, however, merited opposition because of their efforts to introduce not only the beauties of pagan art and literature, but likewise some of their licentiousness. ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley

... how could he be other than lives behind Robert? For the latter had ancestors—that is, he came of people with a mental and spiritual history; while the former had been born the birth of an animal; of a noble sire, whose family had for generations filled the earth with fire, famine, slaughter, and licentiousness; and of a wandering outcast mother, who blindly loved the fields and woods, but retained her affection for her offspring scarcely beyond the period while she suckled them. The love of freedom and of wild ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... place, maintained the reputation of the Roman arms in the East; but his supposed death by lightning, by delivering the sceptre into the hands of his sons Carinus and Numerian (December 25, 283), once more placed the Roman world at the mercy of profligacy and licentiousness. A year later, the election of the Emperor Diocletian (September 17, 284) founded a new era in the history and fortunes of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... Of the brilliant roll of the "young men of 1830," in Paris,—Balzac, Soulie, De Musset, De Bernard, Sue, and their compeers,—it is said that nearly every one has already perished, in the prime of life. What is the explanation? A stern one: opium, tobacco, wine, and licentiousness. "All died of softening of the brain or spinal marrow, or swelling of the heart." No doubt, many of the noble and the pure were dying prematurely at the same time; but it proceeded from the same essential cause: physical laws disobeyed and bodies exhausted. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... which he was banished to the mountains, and died. Bekt[a]sh Kh[o]ja, the next Dey, was murdered on his judgment-seat in the third year of his reign. A fifth Dey, Ibrah[i]m Deli, or "the Fool," made himself so hated by his unconscionable licentiousness that he was assassinated, and his mutilated body exposed in the street, within a few months, and 'Ali, who succeeded in 1710, by murdering some three thousand Turks, contrived to reign eight years, and by some mistake died in ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole

... character of the girl, who, not content with a prosaic intrigue, had trampled underfoot all social prejudices and proprieties, and plunged at once into unmeasured and unrestrained dissipation; the singular mingling in her nature of the vices of both sexes; the unbridled licentiousness of the courtesan coupled with the devotion of a man for horses, wine, and fencing; in short, her eccentric character, as it would now be called, kept a passion alive which would else have quickly died away in his blase heart. Nothing would induce him to follow Jeannin's ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... distinguished, even by an English alien, from the western dialects of Ayrshire, &c.! And I have heard it said, by Scottish purists in this matter, that even Sir Walter Scott is chargeable with considerable licentiousness in the management of his colloquial Scotch. Yet, generally speaking, it bears the strongest impress of truthfulness. But, on the other hand, how false and powerless does this same Sir Walter become, when ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... afflicting to a parent's mind. The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this. And it is the more to be lamented because there is reason to suppose, as my dear Charlotte informs me, that this licentiousness of behavior in your daughter has proceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence; though at the same time, for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet, I am inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she could not be guilty of such an enormity at so early an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... promised them the most spoil or power. Rivals among them often fought battles of their own, in which hundreds were killed and towns and temples burned. So great were their authority, their insolence, and their licentiousness that their existence had become an evil in the land, and Nobunaga determined to teach them a lesson they would ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... whether Plautus did not exceed his models in licentiousness, as he certainly fell below them in elegance. The drama has always been found to exercise a decided influence on public morals; and at Rome, where there was no authoritative teaching on the subject, and no independent investigation of the foundations of moral truth, a series of brilliant ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... manager had been in nowise wrong. Peter Gee was that rare creature, a good as well as clever Eurasian. In fact, it was the stolid integrity of the Chinese blood that toned the recklessness and licentiousness of the English blood which had run in his father's veins. Also, he was better educated than any man there, spoke better English as well as several other tongues, and knew and lived more of their own ideals of gentlemanness than they did themselves. And, finally, he was ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London

... Johnson was, at the age of fifteen, removed to the school of Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, of which Mr. Wentworth was then master. This step was taken by the advice of his cousin, the Reverend Mr. Ford, a man in whom both talents and good dispositions were disgraced by licentiousness, but who was a very able judge of what was right. At this school he did not receive so much benefit as was expected. It has been said, that he acted in the capacity of an assistant to Mr. Wentworth, in teaching the younger boys. 'Mr. Wentworth (he told me) was a very able man, but ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... Bliss, a worthy and respectable old gentleman, Butler called out in a loud voice: "I should like to knife that old cuss." That utterance was quoted not only all over the Union, but in foreign countries, in England, and on the continent, and in the West Indies, as a proof of the degradation and licentiousness of popular governments. It is a singular fact that a like question as to the authority of the presiding officer of a joint convention of two legislative bodies came up in Congress when the electoral vote was counted, at the time of the election of General Grant in ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... idolatry—an aid to worship which is quite innocent and natural in some peoples, but which the Jews never understood; that he spoke much of judgment to come; and especially that he contrasted the pure and affectionate social life of the Christian brotherhood with the licentiousness, cruelty, injustice, oppression, and mutual suspicion of Pagan society. This argument probably struck home in very many 'Gentile' hearts. The old civilisation, with all the brilliant qualities which make many moderns regret its destruction, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... doctrine of the Reformation, which he here distinguishes by the name of Lutheranism. This was owing to the artifices of the Romish clergy in those days, by whom the reformed religion was misinterpreted, as introductive of licentiousness ...
— Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life • Lewis Cornaro

... from all candid and intelligent minds. It was quite natural that such a view should be taken of their terrible enemy by the royalists of the Restoration, hating his memory with a most cordial hatred, and accustomed, in their blinding licentiousness, to look upon all religion as little better than cant and hypocrisy. It was quite natural that such a portrait of him should be drawn by the men who unearthed his bones, and vented their rage upon a senseless corpse. We see it was quite inevitable that some such coarse caricature should ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... ambition, convenience and pleasure, is counted by millions. Navies and armies have their millions; railroads and canals have their millions; colleges and schools have their millions; silks, carpets and mirrors, have their millions; parties of pleasure and licentiousness in high life and in low life have their millions; and what has the treasury of God and the Lamb, to redeem a world of souls from the pains of eternal damnation, and to fill them with joys unspeakable? The sum is so ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble

... gospel so prone to licentiousness? is a question often asked, and is often answered thus—Because they are a set of hypocritical libertines. But we say, may not we see the reason in this: the female members of a church are apt to regard their minister with the highest degree of affectionate admiration—as an idol worthy to ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn

... the city of Mexico, we chanced upon the Hotel del Jardin, a cheerful, sunny hostelry, occupying a building which was once a famous convent, leading our companion to remark that "the shameful record of wickedness, licentiousness, and cruelty, practiced in these Mexican institutions before their suppression, could it be made public, would astonish the world." The present Hotel del Jardin nearly surrounds a garden full of ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou

... or called in question for any differences of opinion in matters of religion; but that all persons at all times should have full liberty of conscience, so long as they behaved themselves peaceably and did not misuse this liberty in licentiousness or profaneness, nor to the injury or disturbance of others.[82] Thus a colony was granted that which in the mother-country at the time was contested to the utmost. Similar principles are found for the first time in Europe in the Practice of Frederick the ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek

... principles, and thereby become regardless of their parents. The number of apostates from Christianity is on the increase, at least in the rising generation. Current literature is penetrated with the spirit of licentiousness, from the pretentious quarterly to the arrogant and flippant daily newspaper, and the weekly and monthly publications are mostly heathen or maudlin. They express and inculcate, on the one hand, stoical, cold, and polished pride of mere intellect, or on the other, ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... art, is its disorder in design—you see the locks of hair cannot be counted any longer—they are entirely disheveled and irregular. Now the individual character may, or may not, be a sign of decline; but the licentiousness, the casting loose of the masses in the design, is an infallible one. The effort at portraiture is good for art if the men to be portrayed are good men, not otherwise. In the instance before you, the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... ages, and which must always continue while we see but in part. He calls it a Free Enquiry, and, indeed, his freedom is, I think, greater than his modesty. Though he is far from the contemptible arrogance, or the impious licentiousness of Bolingbroke, yet he decides, too easily, upon questions out of the reach of human determination, with too little consideration of mortal weakness, and with too much ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson

... so far as was possible, might always preside: formerly some of the common people had also joined with them in rendering decisions. The expenditures, moreover, of men of means which had been rendered enormous by their licentiousness he not only controlled by law but put a strong check upon them by practical measures. There was, on account of the numbers of warriors that had perished, a dangerous scarcity of population, as was proved both from the censuses (which he attended to, among other things, ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio

... of the sacraments, impeached the regulations in regard to marriage, scorned and vilified the pope, despised the priesthood and stirred up the laity to dip their hands in the blood of the clergy, denied free will, taught licentiousness, despised authority, advocated a brutish existence, and was a menace to Church and State alike. Every one was forbidden to give the heretic food, drink, or shelter, and required to seize him and ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... was occupied by ambition or covetousness. Venality reigned throughout every department of the public administration. Those domestic virtues, which are at once the ornaments and the strength of the community, were comparatively rare; and the prevalence of luxury and licentiousness proclaimed the unsafe state of the social fabric. There was a growing disposition to evade the responsibilities of marriage, and a large portion of the citizens of Rome deliberately preferred the system ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... too, is the impression we receive of the social life of the sixteenth century; of its violence and licentiousness, of its zeal for fine craftsmanship, of its abounding vitality, its versatility and its idealism. For Cellini himself is an epitome of that century. This man who tells here the story of his life was a murderer and a braggart, insolent, sensual, ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... his household. He—on the other hand—who reads a book, reads it in privacy. True; but the wielder of this argument has clasped his fingers round a two-edged blade. The very fact that the book has no mixed audience removes from Literature an element which is ever the greatest check on licentiousness in Drama. No manager of a theatre,—a man of the world engaged in the acquisition of his livelihood, unless guaranteed by the license of the Censor, dare risk the presentment before a mixed audience of that which might ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... which he entertained for the Spanish throne, he appears to have fallen into a deadly snare—the failure to appreciate how strong and lively was the popular passion for nationality in Spain, a feeling so long eclipsed by the failures of Spanish government, the licentiousness of the Spanish court, and the turbulence of personal ambitions indifferent to the public welfare. The measures he devised and ordered taken were ruthless in their purpose to cow officials and monarch, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... laboratory and no such experience, has always chanced it, and insisted, when he was unlucky, that the results were not due to the inoculation, but to some other cause: a favorite and not very tactful one being the drunkenness or licentiousness of the patient. But though a few doctors have now learnt the danger of inoculating without any reference to the patient's "opsonic index" at the moment of inoculation, and though those other doctors who are denouncing ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw

... fondest affections and the disruption of the tenderest ties; which snatches the clinging wife from the agonized husband, and the child from the breast of its fainting mother; which leaves the young and innocent female a helpless and almost inevitable victim of a licentiousness controlled by no law and checked by no public opinion,—it is surely as feminine as it is Christian to sympathize with her in her perilous task, and to rejoice that she has shed such a vivid light on enormities which can exist only while unknown or unbelieved. We acknowledge with regret and ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... accused of forsaking his liberal principles in his latter days, simply and solely from his denunciations of the terrible excesses of the French Revolution. Such reprobation was rather a proof that he understood the difference between liberty and licentiousness, and that his accusers had neither the intellect nor the true nobility to discriminate between the frantic deeds of men, whose bad passions, long indulged, had led them on to commit the crimes of demons, ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... Scottish judge of strong Jacobite leanings, was known by his Lady to be concerned in a plot, along with Lovat, Mar, and others, to bring back the Pretender. This was in the year 1730. Stung in her wifely pride by her husband's ill-treatment and licentiousness, she openly threatened to expose his treason. To prevent such exposure, Grange caused his wife to be kidnapped and clandestinely conveyed first to a small island off North Uist, and subsequently to St. Kilda. In the latter island, no one could speak any English except ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... these amusements, which took place once a month, no instance occurred of anything that could interfere with the regular discipline, or at all weaken the respect of the men towards their superiors. Ours were masquerades without licentiousness; carnivals ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... stomach, and nerves; and this belief serves [20] to uncover and kill this lurking serpent, intemperance, that hides itself under the false pretense of human need, innocent enjoyment, and a medical prescription. The belief in venereal diseases tears the black mask from the shameless brow of licentiousness, torments its victim, and [25] thus may save him from ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... been deceiving me? A woman's name escaped you constantly, when your delirium was at its worst. You used some very strange expressions about her, which it was impossible altogether to comprehend; but you said enough to show that her character was one of the most abandoned; that her licentiousness—it is too revolting to speak of her—I return to you. I insist on knowing how far your vices have compromised you with that ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins

... practically to universal conscription. Only two generations later universal suffrage was introduced. The nation has been sternly trained by its history in the ways of discipline and self-restraint. Germans are very far from mistaking freedom for license and independence for licentiousness. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... eyes of pure men and women, and now that he is dead, let us hope that they too will perish. In later years, M. Sue has endeavored to advocate the cause of the poor, and with great eloquence, in his fictions. But he has probably caused as much harm by the licentiousness of his style, as he has accomplished good by his pleas for the poor. It is stated that he has given very liberally to the poor, and in practice exemplified his doctrine. His books give an indication of the present fashionable morality of Paris and France, and though they have sold largely ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett

... God punishes sin by Pangs of Conscience; [Matt. 26:75, Matt. 27:3-4] Pains and Sufferings which are the results of wrong-doing, [Jer. 17:10] e.g., the results of drunkenness and licentiousness; Legal Penalties which the State, as God's servant to punish crime, inflicts by fines, imprisonment and hanging; [Rom. 13:4] Special Judgments upon individuals [1 Cor. 10:5] in the form of sickness, accidents and reverses, though we must ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump

... the "laying on of hands" in the most conspicuous as in the divinest order; and thus might he be truly called a child of prayer and consecration. What pity that his biographer should have been compelled to record, "The most remarkable feature of his character was his unbridled licentiousness"! But we cannot drop the curtain here. We would relieve the picture by this somewhat lighter shade. "His intellectual energies were gigantic. As a pleader and a determined and artful advocate, he had few equals. Hence, as a lawyer, he scarcely ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster

... natural feeling (compare Shakespeare, Henry V, act iii. sc. 2). In Book vii., the Lacedaemonian expresses a momentary irritation at the accusation which the Athenian brings against the Spartan institutions, of encouraging licentiousness in their women, but he is reminded by the Cretan that the permission to criticize them freely has been given, and cannot be retracted. His only criterion of truth is the authority of the Spartan lawgiver; he is 'interested,' in the novel speculations of the Athenian, but inclines ...
— Laws • Plato

... of Naples; even the brilliant Borso, the first Duke of Ferrara, was the illegitimate brother of his successor, Ercole. Lucretia, however, was the daughter of a Pope, the child of a priest, and this, in the eyes of the Este, constituted her disgrace. Neither her father's licentiousness nor Caesar's crimes could have greatly affected the moral sense of the court of Ferrara, but not one of the princely houses of that age was so depraved that it was indifferent to the reputation of a woman destined to become one of ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius

... by any one who will sacrifice a sufficient number of wild horses. To abstract one's self from matter, to renounce all the gratification of the senses, to macerate the body, is thought the true road to felicity; and nowhere in the world are luxury, licentiousness and the gratification of the appetites carried so far. Every civil right and privilege of ruler and subject is fixed in a code of laws, and a body of jurisprudence older far than the Christian era, and the object of universal ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... iron despotism which existed for three centuries, Quito passed to a state of unbridled licentiousness. Without any political experience whatever, the people attempted to lay the foundation of a new system of government and society. With head and hearts perverted by monkish superstition and Spanish tyranny, yet set on fire ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... still that of the modern journalist. He was always an impressionist, a writer of personal sketches. His character sketches of the Plantagenet princes - of King Henry with his large round head and fat round belly, his fierce eyes, his tigerish temper, his learning, his licentiousness, his duplicity, and of Eleanor of Aquitaine, his vixenish and revengeful wife, the murderess of "Fair Rosamond" (who must have been known to Gerald, being the daughter of Walter of Clifford-on-the-Wye), and of the fierce brood that ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis

... will operate upon the seamen and soldiers, who are daily expecting to be paid off, and who, God knows, do not seem to want so strong an inducement to mutiny as must be afforded them by the total want of money. The licentiousness of the people, already arrived at a pitch never known in this country, is daily inflamed by newspapers and pamphlets, while there is no Government whatever to restrain its effects. These considerations hold out little encouragement to any man; ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... security; and it, is forbidden to sin, or the reward is death. O if there be any one willing to remove our impious slaughters, and civil rage; if he be desirous to be written FATHER OF THE STATE, on statues [erected to him], let him dare to curb insuperable licentiousness, and be eminent to posterity; since we (O injustice!) detest virtue while living, but invidiously seek for her after she is taken out of our view. To what purpose are our woeful complaints, if sin is not cut off with punishment? ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... 'Nature Philosophy' of Giordano Bruno. The echoes of Luther's bugle still pierced the mountain-fastnesses of Northern Italy and the gorges of Spain. In the church, Bruno found only skepticism and licentiousness, ignorance and tyranny. Before him four centuries had been swallowed up in debate on the fruitless question of Nominalism, and others equally insignificant, but were visible to him by the light of a logic so shallow, futile, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... that; they will go where the devil cannot, which is between the oak and the rind; opportunity given, they would sneak the breeches off a highlander: they divide their time between commercialism and a licentiousness of which, sordid as it is, they habitually beat down the price. And yet Genoa is Italy, and has the feeling of Italy—the golden atmosphere, the clean outlines, the amplitude of its public spaces, the very shadows ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... understand that the inextricable and utter embarrassment of the French finances, the selfish and insolent luxury of the nobles, the desperate wretchedness of the lower orders of the people, and the profligate licentiousness of the Court, were the causes and the only causes of that great event. If the finances of that country had been in order, the nobles moderate, the poor unoppressed, and any public spirit in the Government, Voltaire, and Helvetius, and Rousseau, might have racked ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper

... (48), and again deputy-governor of Italy while Caesar was in Africa (47), Antony was now inferior in power only to the dictator himself, and eagerly seized the opportunity of indulging in the most extravagant excesses of luxurious licentiousness—excesses which Cicero depicted in the "Philippics" with all the elaborate eloquence of political hatred. In 46 he seems to have taken offence at Caesar, because he insisted on payment for the property of Pompey which ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... the reception and inspection of that plant before it is permitted to be exported. On entering into conversation with an inspector, as he was employed in looking over a parcel of tobacco, he lamented the licentiousness which he remarked so generally prevailed in this town. He said that in his remembrance, the principal part of the inhabitants were emigrants from Scotland, and that it was considered so reproachful to the white inhabitants, if they ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... tell whether it is from the number of our penal laws, or the licentiousness of our people, that this country should shew more convicts in a year, than half the dominions of Europe united. Perhaps it is owing to both; for they mutually produce each other. When by indiscriminate penal laws a nation ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith

... and luxury; and above all, a spacious drawing-room, where a select revelling band usually met, in general parties of pleasure; the girls supping with their sparks, and acting their wanton pranks with unbounded licentiousness; whilst a defiance of awe, modesty or jealousy were their standing rules, by which, according to the principles of their society, whatever pleasure was lost on the side of sentiment, was abundantly made up to the senses in the poignancy of variety, and the charms of ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland

... libation and the blood were made to flow. They began with thanking God with having given them life, and providing them necessary food; and then praised him for the good examples they had been favoured with. From these melancholy rites were banished all licentiousness and levity, and while other customs changed, these continued the same. They roasted the flesh of the victim they had offered, and eat it in common, discoursing on the virtues of ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... was the extraordinary person who framed this project for bringing rapine into method, and bounding even the practice of licentiousness with some kind of order. It may seem reasonable therefore, to begin his life preferable to the rest, and in so doing we must inform our readers that his father was by trade a painter, though so low in his circumstances as to be able to afford his son but a very ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward

... seed had been germinating for a long time past under the forced and frequently hypocritical decency of the old court; it burst out under the easy-going regency of an indolent and indulgent prince, himself wholly given to the licentiousness which he excused and authorized by his own example. From the court the evil soon spread to the nation; religious faith still struggled within the soul, but it had for a long while been tossed about between contrary and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... Perfect Tenses and Supines. Others there are, who in Epigrams, or other compositions in numbers, use all that low ribaldry we read of in the Ancients; attacking their school-masters, but without mentioning names, with the old Fescennine licentiousness, and discharging their scoffs and sarcasms against them; touching the foibles of their school-fellows, or perhaps of greater personages, with true Socratic wit, or biting them more keenly with a Theonine tooth: The ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various

... of this book was prodigious; it was read universally and with the utmost avidity. All who envied Leicester's power and grandeur; all who had smarted under his insolence, or felt the gripe of his rapacity; all who had been scandalized, or wounded in family honor, by his unbridled licentiousness; all who still cherished in their hearts the image of the unfortunate duke of Norfolk, whom he was believed to have entangled in a deadly snare; all who knew him for the foe and suspected him for the murderer of the gallant and lamented earl of Essex;—finally, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... understanding. It might be that he knew the vices of men better than their virtues; yet he was no shallow disbeliever in the latter: he read the heart too accurately not to know that it is guided as often by its affections as its interests. In his early life he had incurred, not without truth, the charge of licentiousness; but even in pursuit of pleasure, he had been neither weak on the one hand, nor gross on the other;—neither the headlong dupe, nor the callous sensualist: but his graces, his rank, his wealth, had made his conquests ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Indra—Was originally the beneficent god of heaven, giver of rain, etc., but in the later Hindu mythology he took only second rank as ruler of the celestial beings who form the Court of Indra (Indar kâ akhârâ or Indrâsan Sabhâ), synonymous with gaiety of life and licentiousness. ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel

... father-in-law. Besides, he looked on Lord Kilcullen's faults as a father is generally inclined to look on those of a son, whom he had not entirely given up—whom he is still striving to redeem. He called his iniquitous vices, follies—his licentiousness, love of pleasure—his unprincipled expenditure and extravagance, a want of the knowledge of what money was: and his worst sin of all, because the one least likely to be abandoned, his positive, unyielding damning selfishness, ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... education, sharpened by a subsequent taste for reading, very much heightened in certain items the standard by which my comrades regulated their conduct. Mere intelligence formed no guard amongst them against intemperance or licentiousness; but it did form a not ineffectual protection against what are peculiarly the mean vices—such as theft, and the grosser and more creeping forms of untruthfulness and dishonesty. Of course, exceptional cases occur in all grades of society: there have been accomplished ladies of wealth ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... rite so performed would be binding by any law of God or man. Without her consent she cannot be the wife of King Marke. The point would not be of any real importance did it not seem to lend colour to the absurd charge of licentiousness and sensuality which has so often been brought ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight

... erection of an altar on which she might worship herself, and only herself—who has even afforded cause, by the frequently extreme levity of her expressions, for the charge of lending countenance to licentiousness and impiety—whose writings, in fine, are calculated to inflict serious injury upon the tastes, the understandings, and the hearts of her youthful female readers, by accustoming them to a vicious ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... and indignation of the severe Puritans of New Plymouth at this outbreak of licentiousness, was great indeed. In their eyes almost every amusement was looked upon as a sin; and the most innocent village dance round a maypole was regarded as nearly allied to the heathenish games in honor of the Goddess Flora. The conduct, therefore, of the disorderly ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... Inquisition, its principles were his, and it was with fire and sword that his fraternal, loving heart waged war on schism. Living like his monks, in poverty, chastity, and obedience—the great virtues of those times of pride and licentiousness—he went from city to city, exhorting the impious, striving to bring them back to the Church and arraigning them before the ecclesiastical courts when his preachings did not suffice. He also laid ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... life appears to have been compounded of an almost brutal licentiousness, a strong love of power, and a strange, freakish longing for something new. Her political ambitions were checked by the rising discontent of her people, who began to look down upon her and to feel ashamed of her ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... princes, we find hardly any parallel to the atrocities of Caligula and Nero; nor indeed was Tiberius much (if at all) behind them, though otherwise so wary and cautious in his conduct. The same tenor of licentiousness beyond the needs of the individual, the same craving after the marvellous and the stupendous in guilt, is continually emerging in succeeding emperors—in Vitellius, in Domitian, in Commodus, in Caracalla—every where, in short, where it was not overruled by one ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... his conduct became so irregular and profligate that his father, the admiral, though a good-natured man, discarded him long before his death. In 1778 he acquired extraordinary eclat by the seduction of the Marchioness of Caermarthen, under circumstances which have few parallels in the licentiousness of fashionable life. The meanness with which he obliged his wretched victim to supply him with money would have been disgraceful to the basest adulteries of the cellar or garret. A divorce ensued, the guilty parties married; but, within two years after, such was the brutal and vicious conduct ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... not understand, as they might dim and disdain the amulet whose secret was unknown to them. They are children their whole life through, who leave life with empty hands after having talked about love, about pleasure, about licentiousness and virtue as slaves talk about liberty. Almost all of them married with the most profound ignorance of women and of love. They commenced by breaking in the door of a strange house and expected to be welcomed in this drawing-room. But the rudest artist knows that between him and his instrument, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... twelve. There are various opinions of the use and value of this institution in the primitive polity of Africa. By some writers it is treated as a religious cloister for the protection of female chastity, while by others it is regarded as a school of licentiousness. From my own examination of the establishment, I am quite satisfied that a line drawn between these extremes will, most probably, characterize the "bush" with accuracy, and that what was originally a conservative seclusion, has degenerated greatly under ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... her sex. On more than one occasion did Ralph, in the course of the dinner, remark the indignant fire flashing from her intelligent eye, when the rude speech of some untaught boor assailed a sense finely-wrought to appreciate the proper boundaries to the always adventurous footstep of unbridled licentiousness. The youth felt assured, from these occasional glimpses, that her education had been derived from a different influence, and that her spirit deeply felt and deplored the humiliation of her present condition ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... allow Tetzel to enter his dominions, he got to a place within four miles of Wittemburg, and many people purchased indulgences. While Dr Martin was seated in the confessional, many of these poor dupes came to him and acknowledged themselves guilty of excesses. 'Adultery, licentiousness, usury, ill-gotten gains'—still they would not promise to abandon their crimes, but trusting to their letters of indulgence obtained from Tetzel, showed them, and maintained their virtue. Dr Martin replied, 'Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.' This circumstance ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston

... royalty is carried quicker than the clouds adown the road which palsied hunger scarce can cross for lack of strength—where lovely forms, and faces pure as angels' in their innocent expression, are met and tainted on the path by unwomanly immodesty and bare licentiousness—amongst such common sights you have not dwelt, and not observed some face pale and wasted from disease, and want, and sorrow, not one, but all, and all uniting to assail the weakly citadel of flesh, and to reduce it to the earth from which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... a poor tailor, of China, "obstinate, disobedent, and mischievous," wholly abandoned "to indolence and licentiousness." One day an African magician accosted him, pretending to be his uncle, and sent him to bring up the "wonderful lamp," at the same time giving him a "ring of safety." Aladdin secured the lamp, but would not hand it to the magician till ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... heroism, every prodigy of valour, which the love of liberty and of country ever produced, there displayed themselves in spite of a thousand contrary and fatal passions: discords between the cities, discords in the cities, enterprises of the nobles against the people, licentiousness of democracy, hereditary enmities of race. What men were those Bitunyes who in one day burned twenty of their towns! What men were those Camutes, fugitives, pursued by the sword, by famine, by winter, and whom nothing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... is no denying that. If he had been proven guilty of theft, arson, licentiousness, infanticide, and defiling graves, I believe they would have suspended him ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... sex, when European ships visit the islands in the Pacific ocean;[O] and we are unwilling to give credit to all we read, because we, Americans, never fail to annex the idea of modesty to that of a woman; for female licentiousness is very rarely witnessed in the new world. This has rendered the accounts of navigators, in a degree, incredible; but we see the same thing in the ports of England—a land of Christians—renowned ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse

... find Seneca, a usurer of seven millions, writing on moderate desires on a table of gold. SALLUST, who so eloquently declaims against the licentiousness of the age, was repeatedly accused in the senate of public and habitual debaucheries; and when this inveigher against the spoilers of provinces attained to a remote government, he pillaged like Verres. That "DEMOSTHENES was ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... endeavoring to prog for you; I am your bribe-pander, your factor of corruption, exposing myself to every kind of scorn and ignominy, to insults even from you. I have been preying and plundering for you; I have gone through every stage of licentiousness and lewdness, wading through every species of dirt and corruption, for your advantage. I am now sinking into the extremity of private want; do give me this—what? money? no, this bribe; rob me the man who gave me this ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... may be licentiousness, that sin which makes men lower than the beasts of the field, from which one can scarcely break away. I do not know what the sin may be that clutches your life, but if you have given way to it and rejected ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman

... the genus bard. For they, too, had their motor-cars from France and England;—they, too, had their gambling-dens secreted in private houses of high repute,— they, too, had their country-seats specially indicated as free to such house-parties as wished to indulge in low intrigue and unbridled licentiousness; they, too, weary of simple Christianity, had their own special 'religions' of palmistry, crystal-gazing, fortune-telling by cards, and Esoteric 'faith-healing.' The days were passing with them— as it passes with many of their 'set' in other countries,—in complete forgetfulness of all the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... ministers, with his, the Resident's, concurrence; and afterwards, in his instructions to the Resident Bristow, desiring him to pursue the same object, he declared his opinion, "that the want of such courts, and the extreme licentiousness occasioned thereby, is one of the most disreputable defects in his Highness the Nabob's government, and that, while they do not exist, every man knows the hazard which he incurs in lending his money "; but he did give him, the said Resident, no positive instruction concerning ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... Royal Family, and second, North America, drank to "The restoration of harmony between Great Britain and the Colonies," "Prosperity and perpetuity to the British Empire in all parts of the world," and "Liberty without licentiousness to all parts of the world." The House thus testified their loyalty to country; but, as the Governor refused to remove the troops, they—the "Boston Gazette" of June 12th said—"had for thirteen days past made a solemn and expressive pause ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... took the bread out of the mouths of native craftsmen. He returned to Florence some time in 1495. The city was now quiet again, under the rule of Savonarola. Its burghers, in obedience to the friar's preaching, began to assume that air of pietistic sobriety which contrasted strangely with the gay licentiousness encouraged by their former master. Though the reigning branch of the Medici remained in exile, their distant cousins, who were descended from Lorenzo, the brother of Cosimo, Pater Patriae, kept their place in the republic. They thought it prudent, however, at this time, to exchange the hated name ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... surface. He that runs may read them; nor have there been wanting attentive and malicious observers to point them out. For many years after the Restoration, they were the theme of unmeasured invective and derision. They were exposed to the utmost licentiousness of the press and of the stage, when the press and the stage were most licentious. They were not men of letters; they were, as a body, unpopular; they could not defend themselves; and the public would not take ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... received the last honour of canonisation from the hands of Pius II., AEneas Sylvius, her countryman. AEeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was perhaps the most remarkable man that Siena has produced. Like S. Catherine, he was one of a large family; twenty of his brothers and sisters perished in a plague. The licentiousness of his early life, the astuteness of his intellect, and the worldliness of his aims, contrast with the singularly disinterested character of the saint on whom he conferred the highest honours of the Church. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... a tyrant, as the history of this, as well as other countries, furnishes abundant examples. It has, therefore, been thought necessary to add another, and perhaps a more effectual check, to curb any disposition to licentiousness or tyranny that might arise in the breast of the monarch. This is the appointment of the Censorate, an office filled by two persons, who have the power of remonstrating freely against any illegal or unconstitutional act about to be committed, or sanctioned ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... liquors? I know this would be pronounced an infringement on English liberty! The worst of men would raise this outcry against the measure. But surely it should rather be called a preventive of English licentiousness. All good men would consider it as such. I would not rob the labourer of his daily allowance of a beverage which is believed by many to be of essential service, when taken in moderation; but I would have him drink it at home, that his wife and children may ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin

... monstrous and disgraceful, though the law should, as in some of the States, recognize them. One sentiment in respect to them pervades the whole community, and that a sentiment of aversion. Those half-breeds which spring from licentiousness, or even from the very few lawful marriages which have occurred, are not accepted as standing in any nearer relations to the white man than the pure-blooded African. In those States where slavery has been longest extinct, and the colored man has been ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... man ventured on his own part and on that of eight others to prosecute an offender who had destroyed their property. All nine were murdered in one night. It was not safe to travel along the high road within six miles of Dublin. The militia had, from their misbehaviour in the field, and their extreme licentiousness, fallen into universal contempt and abhorrence; officers of English regiments declared that it would be impossible to maintain discipline amongst their troops if they remained in such a country. It was discovered ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous

... Eastern costume: a sort of Iago, spiriting up the willing Nero to all varieties of wickedness, getting him deified, and otherwise mystifying the poor besotted prince with all kinds of pleasure and glory, to subserve certain selfish ends of rapine, power, and licentiousness, and to avenge, perhaps, the misfortunes of his own country on the chief of her destroyers. Marcus Manlius—(who better than Charles Kean?—supposing these artistic combinations not to be quite impossible,)—a fine young soldier, of course loving the heroine, captain ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... annulling the Proprietary's Act of Toleration. Professors of the religion of Rome should "be restrained from the exercise thereof." The hand of the law was to fall heavily upon "popery, prelacy, or licentiousness of opinion." Thus was intolerance alive again in the only land where she ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston

... Complete Angler, which is found in all the later editions. The companion of Walton in his fishing excursions on the river Dove, Cotton addressed many of his poems to his "Adopted Father." He made travesties upon Virgil and Lucian, which are characterized by great licentiousness; and wrote a gossiping and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... doubt that true dangers are near wherever the dancing habit is prominent. The dance is a bodily movement which aims at no practical purpose and is thus not bound by outer necessities. It is simply self-expression: and this gives to the dancing impulse the liberty which easily becomes licentiousness. Two mental conditions help in that direction; the mere movement as such produces increased excitement, and the excitement reenforces the movement, and so the dance has in itself the tendency to become quicker and wilder ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... pleasure to revolt or to regale his readers with grossness. He had too much of the Neapolitan's frank self-abandonment to nature for broad indecency in art to afford him special satisfaction; and the taste of his age demanded innuendo. The laureate of Courts and cities saturated with licentiousness knew well that Coan vestments are more provocative than nudity. It was his object to flatter the senses and seduce the understanding rather than to stimulate coarse appetite. Refinement was the aphrodisiac of a sated society, and millinery formed a main ingredient ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... of age when he settled at Avignon, a scene of licentiousness and profligacy. The luxury of the cardinals, and the pomp and riches of the papal court, were displayed in an extravagant profusion of feasts and ceremonies, which attracted to Avignon women of all ranks, among whom intrigue and gallantry were generally countenanced. Petrarch was by nature of a warm ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... present. When a nation becomes corrupt, liberty degenerates into parties and factions until the stubborn necessity of the strong arm of despotism makes its appearance to control the passions of men. If pride, selfishness, love of gold, thirst for power and licentiousness, are not controlled liberty will die. It may be truthfully said that the high-toned principles of Bible morality are necessary to the good of all classes. These, and only these, will unite a people in one grand national brotherhood, wiping out its factions and hatred, extinguishing party spirit ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880

... Elizabethan age, and embodying the highest ideals of life to which the race has yet attained. We can account, to some extent, for this interregnum or spiritual life, but only to some extent. The brutal heartlessness and licentiousness of the court which the exiled Charles brought back with him, and the release from Puritan restraint, explain partly the state of things, or rather the degree to which the ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... relaxations to-day; but—hem!—I mane to give the boys a holiday for the sake of this honest and respectable gintleman in the frize jock, who is not entirely ignorant, you persave, of litherature; and we had a small taste, gintlemen, among ourselves, of Sathurnalian licentiousness, ut ita dicam, in regard of—hem!—in regard of this lad here, who was dancing a hornpipe upon the door, and we, in absence of betther music, had to supply him with the harmony; but, as your honors know, gintlemen, the greatest ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton

... in Oceanica is due to the murder of female infants, too early child-bearing, overwork, privation, licentiousness, and the violence of the men.[1004] The imminence of famine dictates certain positive checks to population, among which infanticide and abortion are widespread in Oceanica. In some parts of the New Hebrides and the Solomon groups it is ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... where obedience was dissipated into superstition; where sin was expiated by the vicarious virtues of other men; where, instead of leading a holy life, men were taught that their souls might be saved through masses said for them, at a money rate, by priests whose licentiousness disgraced the nation which endured it; a system in which, amidst all the trickery of the pardons, pilgrimages, indulgences,—double-faced as these inventions are, wearing one meaning in the apologies of theologians, and quite another to the multitude who live and suffer ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... under cover of night, and carried off Kamco and her daughter Chainitza captives to Kardiki. It was proposed to put them to death; and sufficient evidence to justify their execution was not wanting, but their beauty saved their lives; their captors preferred to revenge themselves by licentiousness rather than by murder. Shut up all day in prison, they only emerged at night to pass into the arms of the men who had won them by lot the previous morning. This state of things lasted for a month, at the end of which a Greek of Argyro-Castron, named G. Malicovo, moved by compassion ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... presentation of the circumstances. She is a splendid power for as long as we confine her between the banks: but she has a passion to discover cracks; and if we give her headway, she will find one, and drive at it, and be through, uproarious in her primitive licentiousness, unless we labour body and soul like Dutchmen at the dam. Here she was, and not desired, almost detested! Nature detested! It had come about through the battle for Nataly; chiefly through Mrs. Burman's tenacious hold of the filmy thread she took for life and was enabled to use as a means ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... and, of its two hundred tales, he has omitted about half and by far the more characteristic half: the work was intended for "the drawing room table;" and, consequently, the workman was compelled to avoid the "objectionable" and aught "approaching to licentiousness." He converts the Arabian Nights into the Arabian Chapters, arbitrarily changing the division and, worse still, he converts some chapters into notes. He renders poetry by prose and apologises for not omitting it altogether: he neglects assonance and he is at once too ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... facts, for generally speaking, as has been pointed out, all these attractions are the same in both sexes.... But, Daphnaeus, let us combat those views which Zeuxippus lately advanced, making Love to be only irregular desire carrying the soul away to licentiousness, not that this was so much his own view as what he had often heard from morose men who knew nothing of love: some of whom marry unfortunate women for their dowries, and force on them economy and illiberal saving, and quarrel ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch

... there been so great a difference between the ideals created by the popular imagination and the realities that are recognised by history. Few wars have been accompanied by more cruelty, more outrage, and more licentiousness than the Crusades or have brought a blacker cloud of disasters in their train. Yet the idea that inspired them was a lofty one, and they were so speedily transfigured by the imaginations of men that in combination with ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... must slaveholders expect us to listen to their horror of amalgamation in prospect, while they are well aware that we know how calmly and quietly they contemplate the present state of licentiousness their own wicked laws have created, not only as it regards the slave, but as it regards the more privileged portion of the population of ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth

... danger of assassination, and, apart from the hardships inevitable to wilderness life, their lot was not an unpleasant one. Perhaps their worst enemy was the brandy traffic carried on by the coureurs de bois, which brought in its wake drunkenness, disease, licentiousness, and crime. The missionaries fought this evil, with the wholehearted support of Laval, the great bishop of Quebec, and of his successors. But for their opposition it is probable that the Indians in contact ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis

... edition. The play was written in the blank verse of Oehlenschlaeger's romantic dramas. Ibsen's portrayal of the Roman politician is not in accord with tradition; Catiline is not an out-and-out reprobate, but an unfortunate and highly sensitive individual in whom idealism and licentiousness struggle for mastery. Vasenius, in his study of the poet (Ibsens Dramatiska Diktning in dess Forsta Skede, Helsingfors, 1879), insists that Ibsen thus intuitively hit upon the real Catiline revealed by later nineteenth century research. The poet seems not ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen

... thousands were, in the course of a few weeks, admitted into the bosom of the Church. But this result was brought about by no sober moral convictions; as an almost instantaneous relapse into every kind of licentiousness soon after testified. It was the legitimate effect of a morbid feeling, engendered by the sense of severe physical wants, preying upon minds excessively prone to superstition; and, by fanatical preaching, inflamed into the belief that the gods of the missionaries were taking ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... king and his nobles had not only been led by years of proscription and exile to hate on principle everything that bore the name of Puritan, but had spent their exile at the French Court, where utterly cynical and selfish pursuit of pleasure and licentiousness of conduct were merely masked by conventionally polished manners. The upshot was that the quarter century of the renewed Stuart rule was in almost all respects the most disgraceful period of English history and life. In everything, so far as possible, the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... before the people, ripe for the change, had sufficient spirit to support him when struggling in their behalf. Such indeed was the asperity sharpened against her that I have heard her, even after so many years have elapsed, charged with licentiousness, not only for endeavouring to render the public amusements more elegant, but for her very charities, because she erected, amongst other institutions, a hospital to receive foundlings. Disgusted with ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... teaching, and which the school caught from him, told upon the boys' minds. The direct and indirect effect of Arnold's school of thought may indeed, now, we think, be traced in the general distrust of hitherto received opinions, which, but little tinged in England it is true with either licentiousness or irreverence, is nevertheless characteristic of ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... of spirit introduced by the profligate destroyer into the humble abode of peace and innocence is an awful thing to contemplate. In our chapter headed "The Wake of a Murderer" we have attempted to give a picture of it. The age, indeed, was one of licentiousness and profligacy. The reigning monarch, Charles the Second, of infamous memory, had set the iniquitous example to his subjects, and surrounded his court by an aristocratic crew, who had scarcely anything to recommend them ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... sensuality and passion, and where it cuts through the Line of Life it indicates death, but one usually brought about in connection with the licentiousness that it denotes. ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro

... established. "The elect shall be saved, do what they will; the reprobate shall be damned, do what they can." It is plain from these reasonings that this doctrine tends to spiritual inactivity, and countenances licentiousness. ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson

... love of preaching the gospel, or zeal for the conversion of souls. If that love, if that zeal, were the motives of their conduct, they might offer their own depravity as an argument in favor of the truths of the gospel. Wantonness, licentiousness, avarice, and the other vices which stained their conduct, discovered their secret intentions. Their anxiety for enriching themselves, their vanity, the authority which they exercised over the poor Indians, are the motives which actuate them, and not the love of God ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... dignified that ceremonious demeanour which was too frequently but the show of probity and the elegance of vice. Entering the army at an early age, he acquired nothing of military habits except a love of licentiousness and play. The hand of his father was constantly extended not to aid him in rising, but to depress him still lower under the consequences of his errors: his youth was passed in the prisons of the state; his passions, becoming envenomed by solitude, and his intellect ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... condition to perceive that the Horrors of San Domingo were those of suicide. Bloody licentiousness lays violent hands upon its life. Its weaknesses were full of fatal vigor, lust poisoned the humanity which it inspired, the soil of the buccaneer could raise nothing which was not exuberant with vengeance. Slave-Insurrection ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various

... in the Gospels, of which the copies are so numerous as has been said, the case is far otherwise. We are there able to convince ourselves in a moment that the supposed 'various reading' is nothing else but an instance of licentiousness or inattention on the part of a previous scribe or scribes, and we can afford to neglect it accordingly[14]. It follows therefore,—and this is the point to which I desire to bring the reader and to urge upon his consideration,—that the number of 'various ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon

... that even women lightly forgive them, and I believe they make a mistake. Forgiveness is indeed always a divine operation, but light forgiveness implies that nothing serious has happened. What then is so serious about licentiousness? ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray

... men and women are the marked exception in every community among us. The vile and degraded are more segregated into a class by themselves, and are therefore more conspicuous and obtrusive than ever before. Licentiousness may have been more prevalent formerly than now, as I believe it was; but less prominent and less noticed, because of its greater diffusion. It was not so concentrated into relief. The unstainedly honorable and virtuous are the vast majority, and will, when a few evil ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... and advanced knowledge, and yet whose lives were disgraced not merely by the most offensive intellectual pride, but the most disgraceful vices; men who confounded all the principles of moral obligation, and who polluted even the atmosphere of Rome by downright Pagan licentiousness. He had no patience with these false philosophers, and he had no mercy. He even complained of them to the emperor, as Calvin did of Servetus to the civil authorities of Geneva (which I grant was not to his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... accuse the protestants of this crime. The probable death of this general produced a small degree of relaxation on the part of their enemies, and some calm; but the mass of the people had been indulged in licentiousness too long to be restrained even by the murder of the representative of their king. In the evening they again repaired to the temple, and with hatchets broke open the door; the dismal noise of their blows carried terror into the bosom of the protestant families sitting in their houses in tears. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... of excommunication should no longer have any strength. What! Shall the church draw and put up again the spiritual sword at the pleasure of princes? Or because princes will perhaps cast holy things to dogs, must others do so likewise? O prodigious licentiousness, and hellish misorder, worthy to be drowned in the lake of Lethe! But what, then, is the part of the prince, after that the church hath given judgment? Surely, whensoever need is, he ought, by the private judgment of Christian discretion, to try and examine whether this discipline be ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie

... of so singular a nature, that, though the pride commonly called honour has, and I trust ever will, prevent me from disgracing my name by a mean or cowardly action, I have been already held up as the votary of licentiousness, and the disciple of infidelity. How far justice may have dictated this accusation, I cannot pretend to say; but, like the gentleman to whom my religious friends, in the warmth of their charity, have already devoted me, I am made worse than I really am. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero

... Hume has spent no small labour in maintaining: But, on the other hand, it is clear, that violence is more easily guarded against, in almost any state of society, than the artifices of dishonesty and the pollution of licentiousness; and, besides, it never will be found that any fecundity of nature can keep pace, with the accelerating increase of vicious desires and propensities, consequent on indulgence. Restraint from the operation of fear, and better ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... had not allowed them to make profession of science, had read or reflected more: that as she could discern the presumption of many, in curiously canvassing the Scriptures, and starting innovations, she would no longer endure this licentiousness; but meant to guide her people by God's rule in the just mean between the corruptions of Rome and the errors of modern sectaries: and that as the Romanists were the inveterate enemies of her person, so the other innovators ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... which were strictly and exclusively within her own province; and in them she at once began to exert her authority most beneficially. Her first desire was to purify the court where licentiousness in either sex had long been the surest road to royal favor. She began by making a regulation, that she would receive no lady who was separated from her husband; and she abolished a senseless and inexplicable rule of etiquette which had hitherto ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... to conversation of a more agreeable kind; or better, lastly, with regard to himself. I will end this particular with two reflections of the Wise Man; one of which, in the strongest manner, exposes the ridiculous part of this licentiousness of the tongue; and the other, the great danger and viciousness of it. When he that is a fool walketh by the way side, his wisdom faileth him, and he saith to every one that he is a fool. {10} The other is, In the multitude of words ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler

... wrote to please the multitude, at a time when the licentiousness of the Athenians was boundless, his pleasantries are coarse and impolite, his characters extravagantly forced, and distorted with unnatural deformity, like the monstrous caricaturas of Callot. He is full of the grossest obscenity, indecency, and inurbanity; and as the populace always delight ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton

... bold, but not vulgar; they took their pleasure in a delicately wanton fashion that was infinitely more dangerous in its influence on the mind than would have been the gross mirth and broad jesting of a similar number of uneducated plebeians. The rude licentiousness of an uncultivated boor has its safety-valve in disgust and satiety, . . but the soft, enervating sensualism of a trained and cultured epicurean aristocrat is a moral poison whose effects are so insidious ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... early life, both in their homely imagery and in the wholesome indignation and contempt for the silken-robed vice of Israel. No sterner picture of an utterly rotten social state was ever drawn than this book gives of the luxury, licentiousness, and oppressiveness of the ruling classes. This passage deals rather with the religious declension underlying the moral filth, and sets forth the self-willed idolatry of the people (vs. 4, 5), their obstinate resistance to God's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... Warwickshire esquire, once so rich and mighty, is now known only as the block over which the Warwickshire peasant stumbled into immortality." Referring to those purists who regard words more than things in their strictures on licentiousness, he calls them persons "whose morality seems to be all in their ears." Speaking of Hume, "an exquisite voluptuary among political and metaphysical abstractions," he puts him in a class of men who "study art as they study nature, only in the process of dissection—a process which, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various

... must, in some degree, take in hand, as the best writers have, in my opinion, failed fundamentally in these researches. Many, in the wantonness of their fancy, have yielded to the most idle surmises; and this to a degree of licentiousness, for which no learning nor ingenuity can atone. It is therefore so far from being injurious, that it appears absolutely necessary to point out the path they took, and the nature of their failure; and this, that their authority may not give a sanction to their mistakes; ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant

... enquiry had an excellent indirect effect. It seemed to some extent, to have secured the liberty of the press. From the time, says Mr. Ryland, that the Assembly began its attacks on the Courts of Justice, the licentiousness of a press, (the Gazette,) recently established at Montreal, has appeared to have no bounds. Every odium that can be imagined, is attempted in that publication, to be thrown on the memory of the late Governor-in-Chief, on the principal officers ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger

... so also in our studies, it is most becoming and most wise, so to temper gravity with cheerfulness, that the former may not imbue our minds with melancholy, nor the latter degenerate into licentiousness.—PLINY. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burthens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of society; to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness—cherishing the first, avoiding the last—and uniting a speedy but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson

... is kidnapped, to the last hour he draws his miserable breath, the white man's influence directly cherishes ignorance, fraud, treachery, theft, licentiousness, revenge, hatred and murder. It cannot be denied that human nature thus operated upon, must necessarily yield, more or less, to all these evils.—And thus do we dare to treat beings, who, like ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... could dictate. Not unfrequently, says an unsuspicious witness, I have seen the Spaniards, long after the Conquest, amuse themselves by hunting down the natives with bloodhounds for mere sport, or in order to train their dogs to the game! *1 The most unbounded scope was given to licentiousness. The young maiden was torn without remorse from the arms of her family to gratify the passion of her brutal conqueror. *2 The sacred houses of the Virgins of the Sun were broken open and violated, and the cavalier swelled his harem with a troop of Indian girls, making it seem ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott

... Rush quite all. In his work "On the Diseases of the Mind," he speaks often of the evils of eating high-seasoned food, and especially animal food. And in stating what were the proper remedies for debility in young men, when induced by certain forms of licentiousness, he expressly insists on a diet consisting simply of vegetables, and prepared without condiments; and he even encourages the disuse of salt. Had Dr. Rush lived to this day, he would, ere now, in all probability, have fully adopted and defended the vegetable system. ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott

... and still living in the Temple, came the sad and decisive crisis of his life. He went mad and attempted suicide. What was the source of his madness? There is a vague tradition that it arose from licentiousness, which, no doubt is sometimes the cause of insanity. Hut in Cowper's case there is no proof of anything of the kind; his confessions, after his conversion, of his own past sinfulness point to nothing worse than general ungodliness and ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... cries the doctor, "to find the age is grown to so scandalous a degree of licentiousness, that we have thrown off not only virtue, but decency. How abandoned must be the manners of any nation where such insults upon religion and morality can be committed with impunity! No man is fonder of ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding



Words linked to "Licentiousness" :   intemperateness, intemperance, immorality, self-indulgence, licentious



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