Chastity

Chastity refers to the sexual behavior of a man or woman acceptable to the moral standards and guidelines of a culture, civilization, or religion. In the western world, the term has become closely associated (and is often used interchangeably) with sexual abstinence, especially before marriage. However, the term remains applicable to persons in all states, single or married, clerical or lay, and has implications beyond sexual temperance.

Sourced

• CHASTITY. Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring; Never to Dulness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another's Peace or Reputation.
  • Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography (1817), Part II, page 75.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 108-09.

• There's a woman like a dew-drop,
  She's so purer than the purest.
  • Robert Browning, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, Act I, scene 3.

• That chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound.
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

• As pure as a pearl,
  And as perfect: a noble and innocent girl.
  • Owen Meredith (Lord Lytton), Lucile (1860), Part II, Canto VI, Stanza 16.

• 'Tis chastity, my brother, chastity;
  She that has that is clad in complete steel,
  And, like a quiver'd nymph with arrows keen,
  May trace huge forests, and unharbour'd heaths,
  Infamous hills, and sandy perilous wilds;
  Where, through the sacred rays of chastity,
  No savage fierce, bandite, or mountaineer,
  Will dare to soil her virgin purity.
  • John Milton, Comus (1637), line 420.

• So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity,
  That, when a soul is found sincerely so,
  A thousand liveried angels lacky her,
  Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt.
  • John Milton, Comus (1637), line 453.

• Like the stain'd web that whitens in the sun,
  Grow pure by being purely shone upon.
  • Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), "The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan".

• If she seem not chaste to me.
  What care I how chaste she be?
  • Sir Walter Raleigh, wWritten the night before his death.

• My chastity's the jewel of our house,
  Bequeathed down from many ancestors.
  • William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well (1600s), Act IV, scene 2, line 46.

• The very ice of chastity is in them.
  • William Shakespeare, As You Like It (c.1599-1600), Act III, scene 4, line 18.

• Chaste as the icicle
  That's curded by the frost from purest snow
  And hangs on Dian's temple.
  • William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (c. 1607-08), Act V, scene 3, line 66.

• As chaste as unsunn'd snow.
  • William Shakespeare, Cymbeline (1611), Act II, scene 5, line 14.

• A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.
  • Jonathan Swift, preface to one of Bishop Burnet's Introductions to History of the Reformation.

• Neque femina amissa pudicitia alia abnuerit.
  • When a woman has lost her chastity, she will shrink from no crime.
  • Tacitus, Annales (AD 117), IV. 3.

• Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity:
  The deep air listen'd round her as she rode,
  And all the low wind hardly breathed for fear.
  • Alfred Tennyson, Godiva, line 53.

• Even from the body's purity, the mind
  Receives a secret sympathetic aid.
  • James Thomson, The Seasons, Summer (1727), line 1,269.