Is it not a serious thing to enter the maelstrom of interests, passions, and pleasures which make Paris a dangerous ocean for chaste love and purity of conscience?
After brief encounters during his bourgeois upbringing in Lubeck and Munich, Mann's taste for younger men settles into chaste flirtations, private diaries, or just " the secret energy in a gaze" .
" Your lady may prefer this. It's a superior article, a most desirable color, quite chaste and genteel, " he said, shaking out a comfortable gray shawl, and throwing it over Jo's shoulders.
And I must be allowed to call her a modest woman, before I dismiss this part of the subject, by saying, that till men are more chaste, women will be immodest.
I could live tranquil if not happy-I have found strength in my chaste solitude, I admit it; but if I am deprived of this negative happiness I too shall become insane.
Inwardly you condemn me for having had a part in it, and you fancy you defend the principle of chaste living when you do nothing except from the prompting of your passions.