"Obliquity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if ever have or pronounce an opinion, or pass a judgment—unless with a playful obliquity of judgment, and on things in general. They assume an air of knowing what they are talking about, and of having probed the vanity of all human effort before they have ever attempted or approached it; and even this indifference, this disdain, this apparent dislike to the responsibility ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... a refutation and an apology. It takes up a goodly list of zealous calumniators and cheerful prevaricators and tacks their pelts on the barn-door of obliquity. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... faintly under the bushy beard; but Bickersteth saw that the look in the face was much the same as it had been before. The struggle had been too great, the fight for the other lost self had exhausted him, mind and body, and only a deep obliquity and a great weariness filled the countenance. He had come back to the verge, he had almost again discovered himself; but the opening door had shut fast suddenly, and he was back again in the night, the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the earth tends to increase the effect of obliquity, since a slanting ray has to travel further through it and is robbed of more ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... disappointment when the young officer appeared, and after the initial thirty-six hours under the commander's roof, rarely went thither at all. She knew her brother disapproved of him, and thought it to be because of moral, not military, obliquity. She saw with instant apprehension his quick interest in Angela and the child's almost unconscious response. With the solemn conviction of the maiden who, until past the meridian, had never loved, she looked on Angela as far too young ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... surprise with the cool and deliberate patrons of vice, and especially with many, who, though they were often covered with a garb of outward morality, were full of rottenness within. Some, who pass for moral and religious persons, have in this thing exhibited a moral obliquity that ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... you! said I.—If you are a man of honour, what need of all this strange obliquity? You delight in crooked ways—let me know, since I must stay in your company (for he held my hand), let me know all you have said to the people below.—Indeed, indeed, Mr. Lovelace, you are a ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... state of hopeless melancholia; and it was rather a relief to us all to feel that we had judged her too severely, and that her unreasonableness and her extraordinary caprices had been born of mental disorder more than of moral obliquity. Gerald gave up everything to nurse her and rouse her from her apathy; but she faded away without ever once coming back to a more normal self, and that was the end of it all. Gerald's father had died ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the image is partly due to the obliquity of the pencils which form parts of the image, and partly to what is termed spherical aberration. The first cause cannot be modified by the optician's skill, and is not important when the field of view is small. Spherical aberration causes those parts of a pencil which fall ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... for a few moments. The distance between the projectile and the moon diminished visibly; its velocity was considerably less than its initial velocity, but eight or nine times greater than that of our express trains. The oblique direction of the bullet, from its very obliquity, left Michel Ardan some hope of touching the lunar disc at some point or other. He could not believe that he should not get to it. No, he could not believe it, and this he often repeated. But Barbicane, who was a better judge, always answered him ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... in favour of the morals of too many of the pieces represented here. In this particular there is a strange obliquity of reason, arising out of habitual exaggeration of feeling, that really seems to disqualify most of the women, even from perceiving what is monstrous, provided it be sentimental and touching. I was particularly advised to go to the Theatre Madame to see a certain ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... doing wrong at moments or under certain circumstances. This man will lie under given conditions of temptations. Another will bribe, if the inducement is strong enough. A third will merely trick. Almost every man has a weak spot somewhere. Yet why let this one weakness—a partial moral obliquity or imperfection—make us cast him aside as useless and evil. As soon say that man physically is spoiled, because he is near-sighted, lame or stupid. If we had our choice between a new, bright, keen tool, or a worn, dull one, of poor material, we should not hesitate which to use. ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... smooth yellowish skin, the long dark thick hair of the scalp, and the scantiness of the hair on the cheeks, chin, and lips; the rather broad cheek-bones, the prevailing slight obliquity of the eyes, the rather narrow palpebral aperture, and the presence of a slight Mongolian fold — these characters (all of which are found in a considerable proportion of these peoples) are features that point ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... the devil do you want?" exclaimed Vanslyperken, rather alarmed; while Snarleyyow walked round and round the thick calves of the man's legs, growling, and in more than two minds to have a bite through his blue worsted stockings; and the peculiar obliquity with which he carried his head, now that he surveyed with only one eye, was by no ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... on the other hand, is not personally well-favoured. She is-twenty-nine; her face is much pitted with the small-pox. She has a halt in her gait, red hair, and a trifling obliquity of vision. Both ladies are endowed with EVERY MORAL AND RELIGIOUS VIRTUE. Their terms, of course, are such as their accomplishments merit. With my most grateful respects to the Reverend Bute Crawley, I have ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... resembled the tusks of a boar. The woman was long-faced, high cheek-boned, red-haired, and freckled all over like a toad. The boy resembled his hideous mother, but with the addition of a villanous obliquity of vision which rendered him the most disgusting object ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... succeeding age has repudiated. They determined the circumference of the earth by a method identical with that which would be employed by modern astronomers. They ascertained the position of the stars by right ascension and declination. They knew the obliquity of the ecliptic, and determined the place of the sun's apogee as well as its mean motion. Their calculations on the eccentricity of the moon prove that they had a rectilinear trigonometry and tables of chords. They had an approximate ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... may have magnified, or the expedient boldness of the romancer too voluptuously emblazoned, but which more than one grave annalist has calmly commemorated.[4] We shall not, however, venture to decide the nice question which oscillates between an obliquity and a loss of vision. The Spanish word "tuerto" means, ordinarily, "blind of one eye." And there is an answer which M. Mignet probably considers apocryphal, as he does not allude to it, said to have been made by Perez to Henry IV. of France, who expressed surprise ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... the Declaration of Independence; that the Rembrandt was an heirloom, sole remnant of disbanded treasures; that for years its possessor had been unwilling to part with it, and that even now the question of its disposal must be approached with the most diplomatic obliquity. ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... just one cent in my pocket, and put up at a boarding-house where the charge was one dollar a day. In this no moral obliquity was involved. I had simply reached the goal for which I had sacrificed all, and felt sure that the French people or the Danish Consul would do the rest quickly. But there was evidently something wrong somewhere. The Danish Consul could only register my demand to be returned to Denmark in ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... mind's material obliquity I gazed, and stood abashed. Blanched was the cheek of pride. My heart bent low before the omnipotence of Spirit, and a tint of humility, soft as the heart of a moonbeam, mantled the earth. Bethlehem and Bethany, Gethsemane and Calvary, spoke to my chastened sense as ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... that the line of the eaves, if continued, would intersect the top of the gable chimney. The dwelling and the tree then form a focus for the converging lines of sidewalk and roof, thus qualifying the vertical effect of the building on the right. As the obliquity of the composition is still objectionable, we decide to introduce a foreground figure which will break up the line of the long sidewalk, and place it so that it will increase the influence of some contrary line, see Fig. 59. We find that by putting it a little to the ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... Riquet, was impossible, illness had made him additionally lean and sallow, and his keen eyes, under their black contracted brows and dark lashes, showed all the more the curious variation in their tints, and with an obliquity that varied according to the state of the nerves. There was a satirical mischievous cast in the mould of the face, though individually the features were not amiss except for their thinness, and in fact the ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... down slowly into the water, but drawn cautiously and rapidly up again, when a red drop at 42 deg. indicated that the fluid had risen to that point or above it. At this period the daily visits of the sun were very short, and owing to the obliquity of his rays, afforded us little warmth or light. It is half past eleven before he peeps over a small ridge of hills opposite to the house, and he sinks in the horizon at half past two. On the 28th Mr. Hood, in order ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... of his congregation who had profited spiritually by his sermons. If he had suspected the existence of Judy's passion, it would undoubtedly have distressed him—but he did not suspect it, owing to a natural obliquity of vision, which kept him looking away from the world as it is in the direction of a mental image of the world as he imagined it. So, with an amiable word or two of regret that Providence had arranged his removal to wider fields, he drove on, sitting very erect ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... that we're neither of us creatures of mere rash impulse. There was a time in fact, wasn't there? when we rather enjoyed each other's dim depths. If I wanted to fawn on you," she went on, "I might say that, with such a comrade in obliquity to wind and double about with, I'd risk losing myself in the mine. But why retort or recriminate? Let us not, for God's sake, be vulgar—we haven't yet, bad as it is, come to THAT. I CAN be, no doubt—I some day MUST be: I feel it looming at me out of the ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... harmless enough to him, I suppose, but I had been distinctly snubbed, and the Member of the Haouse thought I must defend myself, as is customary in the deliberative body to which he belongs, when one gentleman accuses another gentleman of mental weakness or obliquity. I could not make up my mind to oblige him at that moment by showing fight. I suppose that would have pleased my assailant, as I don't think he has a great deal to lose, and might have made a little capital out of me if he could have ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... single epoch in the annals of Europe since the rise of Christianity, for which no good word could be found, was the epoch of Voltaire. The hideousness of the Christian church in the ninth and tenth centuries was passed lightly over by men who had only eyes for the moral obliquity of the church of the Encyclopaedia. The brilliant but profoundly inadequate essays on Voltaire and Diderot were the outcome in Mr. Carlyle of the same reactionary spirit. Nobody now, we may suppose, who is competent to judge, thinks that that estimate ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... in the ranks of a ruffian soldiery. A countenance that I cannot describe better than by saying that its features forcibly reminded me of those of a fox. I am not in jest. I observed this resemblance plainly. I observed the same obliquity of eyes, the same sharp quick glance that betokened the presence of deep dissimulation, of ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... crouch to power wherever its shifting standard appears, and willing to curry favour with all parties, and ready to betray any out of sheer weakness and servility. I do not think they mean any harm: at least, I can look at this obliquity with indifference in my own particular case. I have been more disposed to resent it as I have seen it practised upon others, where I have been better able to judge of the extent of the mischief, and the heartlessness ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... which the Ruler of the universe has implanted in every system and in every government. Yet we concede the right of others to think differently on these points, without being suspected of moral obtuseness or obliquity. Especially can we comprehend how a patriotic Frenchman should choose to accept all the conditions of his epoch, and embrace every opportunity of aiding in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the subject-matter pumped into them by recitations, etc., and to merely accept, while boys are more inspired by being told to do things and make tests and experiments. In this, girls are often quite at sea. One writer speaks of a certain feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that singing classes the voices of each sex are better in quality for the presence of the other. In many topics of all kinds ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... wonderful power of secreting adjectives that they cannot speak the truth when they try. There is no moral obliquity in the case. It is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... granted that bad and beautiful were often one; that the pleasures of the world owed their delight to a touch, a wash, a tincture of the wicked in them. Such have so many crooked lines in themselves that they fancy nature laid down on lines of crookedness. They think the obliquity the beauty of the campanile, the blurring the charm of ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... us. I could hardly keep my eyes off him while we were at table. He put me in mind of the devil disguised as an angel of light, so ill did that horrible obliquity of vision harmonise with the dark tranquil features of his face, resembling that of our Saviour in Italian pictures, with the hair carefully arranged in the same manner. There was much real or affected simplicity in the manner in which he spoke. He rather ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... they said, "arise from the moral obliquity of the fastidious, and the cupidity of the avaricious. They consist in an illiberal opinion of the worth and rights of the laboring classes, an unjust estimation of their moral, physical, and intellectual powers, and unwise ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... another, and the discrepancy increased as the church advanced westward. When the builders got clear of the intervening building, in the western bays of the nave, they were able to rectify their mistake slightly; but the effect is unpleasantly noticeable in the obliquity of the transverse ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... Devils, The impure extract of a world of Evils; Natures great Errour, the Obliquity Of the Gods Wisdom; and th'Anomaly From all that's good; Ile curse you all below The Center, and if I could, then further throw Your cursed heads, and if any should gain A place in Heaven, Ile rhyme 'em down again To ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... students thronged the city, learned Greeks and Jews taught in the schools, and a number of advances on the scientific work done by the Greeks were made. A degree of the earth's surface [3] was measured on the shores of the Red Sea; the obliquity of the ecliptic was determined (c. 830); astronomical tables were calculated; algebra and trigonometry were perfected; discoveries in chemistry not known in Europe until toward the end of the eighteenth century, and advances in physics for which western Europe waited for Newton (1642-1727), ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... than that of NEWTON. That great philosopher announced the true law governing the relation between the color and the thickness of the film. HERSCHEL did not recognize such a relation. NEWTON showed exactly how the phenomenon depended upon the obliquity at which it was viewed. HERSCHEL found no place in his theory ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... and not by that of their tails as in fish. The bird is supported in an element so much lighter than itself by the resistance of the air as it moves horizontally against the oblique plain made by its breast, expanded tail and wings, when they are at rest; the change of this obliquity also assists it to rise, and even directs its descent, though this is owing principally to its specific gravity, but it is in all situations kept upright or ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... wonder and approbation in an exclamation of "Add's zooks! what a glorious galley!" and the misanthrope's visage was instantly metamorphosed into the face of a mountain goat. He licked his lips instinctively, snuffed the air, and squinted with a most horrible obliquity of vision. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... provided with weak walls that are readily compressed. This explains why on the radial surface of the test blocks the plane of rupture passes in a direction nearly following a medullary ray, whereas on the tangential surface the direction of the plane of rupture is oblique—but with an obliquity varying with the species and determined by the pitch of the spirals along which the medullary rays are distributed in the stem." See Jaccard, op. cit., ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... arching, proportion, obliquity, and position of the skull, or bone of the forehead, show the propensity of thought, power of thought, and sensibility of man. The position, colour, wrinkles, tension of the skin of the forehead, show the passions and present ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... benefited self-interest, gaining the amplest reciprocity, both as to service and serviceableness, with the disinterested spontaneity of America's elevation of Mr. Douglass, is but another proof of the obliquity of the moral medium through [143] which he is wont to ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... telling a tale directly and in straightforward order. In speaking of Hallam, Macaulay complained that Gibbon had brought into fashion an unpleasant trick of telling a story by implication and allusion. This provoking obliquity has certainly increased rather than declined since Hallam's day. Mr. Froude, it is true, whatever may be his shortcomings on the side of sound moral and political judgment, has admirable gifts in the way of straightforward narration, and Mr. Freeman, when he does not press ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... sportmanship overcame the contempt with which grooms and gamekeepers, to say nothing of their less fine and more tolerant masters, were wont to regard poor Jesse's ragged garments, the sunburnt hair and skin, the want of words to express even his simple meaning, and most of all, the strange obliquity of taste which led him to prefer Kennett water to Kennett ale. Sportsmanship, sheer ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... obliquity of vision, what inscrutable perversity possessed him, he asked himself, as he looked up at the slight elegant figure, clad in costly camel's-hair garments, with Russian sables wrapped about her delicate throat, with a ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... primitive Roman was essentially different from that of the contemporary Greek, and as his struggle for existence was severe in the extreme, there was little moral obliquity during the first two hundred and fifty years. The "coelibes prohibeto" of the Twelve Tables was also a powerful influence in preserving chastity. By the time of Plautus, however, the practice of paederasty was much more general, as is clearly proved by the many references ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... shall now no longer mourne nor vex For th' obliquity of a cross-grain'd sex; Nor beauty swell above her bankes, (and made For ornament) the universe invade So fiercely, that 'tis question'd in our bookes, Whether kils most the Amazon's sword or lookes. Lucasta in loves ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... features it presents to the faithful companion of man. So close indeed is the analogy, that some of the ablest zoologists, the celebrated John Hunter included, have entertained the opinion that dogs, in all their varieties, and wolves, have descended from a common stock. With the exception of an obliquity in the position of the eyes, there is no appreciable anatomical difference between these animals. The question is one of difficulty; but we believe we are correct in stating that the majority of the highest authorities agree in the belief that these animals are not derived ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... even the little world of Newbern. He was to take up an entirely new study, with the whole-hearted enthusiasm that had made him an adept at linotypes, gas engines, and the sport of kings. Not yet, in Winona's view, had he actually gone down into the depths of social obliquity; but she soon knew he had ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... curve. Whence it appears, that, when any curve is broken in upon by a building composed of simple vertical and horizontal lines, the eye is furnished, by the interruption, with the equation to that part of the curve which is interrupted. If, instead of square forms, we take obliquity, as r s t (fig. C), we have one line, s t, an absolute break, and the other r s, in false proportion. If we take another curve, we have an infinite number of lines, only two of which are where they ought to be. And this is ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... little obliquity about the direction of the spout that made me hopeful, for the cachalot alone sends his spout diagonally upward, all the others spout vertically. It was but a school of kogia, or "short-headed" cachalots; but as ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... complete. I made experiments on the graduations of the Circle. I detected and was annoyed by the R—D. I determined the latitude. I exhibited the separate results for N.P.D. of stars in ledger, and their means in Catalogue. I investigated from my observations the place of equinox and the obliquity of the ecliptic. I made another series of observations of Jupiter's 4th Satellite, for the mass of Jupiter. I observed the solar eclipse with the Equatoreal, by a method then first introduced, which I have since used several times at Cambridge and Greenwich with ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... hardly discernible. But whatever had been the defects in the character of Wheelwright, or the errors which, for the most part, were the consequence, the wide contrast between his present and past condition was truly affecting. For his indiscretions, never involving moral obliquity, he had most grievously answered. And, besides, was he not "a man and a brother!" There is no more charitable people in the world than those of New-York. Let any case of distress be presented—any call of real suffering—which has actually been ascertained, and is vouched for ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... "Jeune-Hardie" towards Cape Brewster. They were already approaching the regions where the temperature is excessively cold, for the sun's rays, owing to their obliquity when they ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... found in the story of the volume of Tacitus, which by chance suggested the sleeping potion for Frau v. L., or that Tobias's inability to take off his hat with his right hand was influential on the boy's future life. This is a reminder of Tristram's obliquity in his manner of setting up his top. As in Shandy, there is a discussion about the location of the soul. The character of Selmann is a compound of Yorick and the elder Shandy, with a tinge of satiric exaggeration, meant to chastise the thirst for "originals" and ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... for those who could but wield the pen. He would, we may be sure, have rejoiced to know that many more have visited the tomb of Tom Sayers in Highgate Cemetery than have visited the tomb of George Eliot in the same burial-ground. A curious moral obliquity this, you may say. But to recognise it is to understand one side of Borrow, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... embodiment of the wealth and intelligence (which are generally the ruling factors world-wide), and would have at an early date derived a just "power from the consent of the governed," did not history record the unnecessary and inhuman means resorted to to extort it, the obliquity of which can be erased only by according him the rights of an American citizen. Mutual hostility, opposition on the one hand to the assumption and exercise of these rights, and consequent distrust by the freedman, often fostered by unscrupulous leaders, have been alike detrimental to both classes, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... over-refining in words, an excess of qualifying propositions, a disproportionate impressiveness in verbal shadings without real difference. Nothing irritated opponents more. They insisted on taking literary sin for moral obliquity, and because men could not understand, they assumed that he wished to mislead. Yet if we remember how carelessness in words, how the slovenly combination under the same name of things entirely different, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... ocean-stream of popularity, in which he "lies floating many a rood;"—but to these he adds uncommon height, a graceful figure and action, a clear and powerful voice, a striking, if not a fine face, a bold and fiery spirit, and a most portentous obliquity of vision, which throw him to an immeasurable distance beyond all competition, and effectually relieve whatever there might be of common-place or bombast in his style of composition. Put the case that Mr. Irving had been five feet ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... which, because it was absolutely impossible to handle it fitly in the proper place, shall be briefly adverted to, here. I proceed to describe it not without indignation; for I am profoundly struck by the intellectual perversity, not to say the moral obliquity, which has so entirely made ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... the conduct of the preliminaries we may assign to Edward the credit of superior insight, more resolute policy, and a more clearly perceived goal, the intellectual superiority, which he possessed over his rival, was hardly balanced by any special moral obliquity on his part; though to Philip, with all his weakness, must always be given the sympathy provoked by the defence of his land against the foreign invader. It is useless to refine the issue further. The situation had become impossible, and fighting was the only way out of the difficulty. When in ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... or, as it is usually styled, the "Leaning Tower," is on the other side of the Cathedral. It is 188 feet high, 53 feet round the base, and about 14 feet out of the perpendicular. It is now, I believe, generally understood that this obliquity was occasioned by the imperfect state of the foundations and the sinking of the soil, which is light and sandy, and which caused it to settle down on one side while the building was still uncompleted; and this defect was afterwards provided for by its architect. This is evident from the staircase, ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... author to fall back into his easy chair in a condition of profound emotion. It appeared to have corrected a certain dimness or obliquity in his vision, of the existence of which its cure rendered him for the first time conscious. The appearance of the little country girl (whose very introduction into the romance the author had looked upon with misgivings) had afforded the first ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... viewed from the side, the profile of the teeth shows a very noticeable increase in the obliquity with which they meet. The posterior borders of the corners show considerable wear. The notch in the superior corners is still present, but as the teeth come more nearly in apposition it may begin to disappear. All of the inferior ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... clever boys did not catch fire from him so much as from the fourth-form master. But he was a far truer and deeper Christian; and, with no less scrupulous a sense of honour and detestation of every form of moral obliquity, he never yielded to those storms of passionate indignation which Mr Gordon found it impossible to control. Disappointed in early life, subjected to the deepest and most painful trials, Mr Rose's fine character had come out like gold from the flame. He ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... and disheartening complications was this part of the process completed. This was, after all, the real tug of war. Many unknown quantities existed: its mass, its distance, its eccentricity, the obliquity of its orbit, its position—nothing was known, in fact, about the planet except the microscopic disturbance it caused in Uranus, several thousand million miles away from it. Without going into further ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... type with a jackknife—one of them a picture of Higgins wading out into the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water with a walking-stick. I thought it was desperately funny, and was densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a publication. Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece of gratuitous ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... tints with the utmost skill, something gives way at the last moment, and without completely ruining him prevents him from attaining his object. Why? Very likely, just because his nose is crooked. I assure you, that sort of crookedness is nearly always the sign of a twist in the intellect, an obliquity in the character. The helm's not ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... procession in his own honour; and again, that one might read in his eyes a keenly sensuous enjoyment in the tones of his own voice; that he coloured these with a certain unction corresponding to the flourishes with which people of a certain obliquity of mind love to ornament their chirography; still again that he, Reeves, was "ready to lay a bet that the fellow would continue to pose even at the foot of the ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... it was considerate on my part: I was allowing for the angle of obliquity in your vision. You would have ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... when I cry to thee? I am a child lost in a mighty forest; The air is thick with voices, and strange hands Reach through the dusk and pluck me by the skirts. There is a voice which sounds like words from home, But, as I stumble on to reach it, seems To leap from rock to rock. Oh! if it is Willing obliquity of sense, descend, Heal all my wanderings, take me by the hand, And lead me homeward through the shadows. Let me not by my wilful acts of pride Block up the windows of thy truth, and grow A wasted, withered thing, that stumbles ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... task before him in endeavoring to reconcile the traditional enmities of the tribes one against another. He succeeded well. He got the confidence of the natives, and kept it; from fearing his power, most of them came to revere the man. When all is said of the Indians,—of their savage craft, their obliquity of moral vision, their unsparing cruelty, and their utter remissness in most matters of behavior, the fact remains that they know how to appreciate candor and honor, and will respond to it as well as they are able. They are slow to believe in wordy protestations: ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... Ecliptic as stated before, and in the illustration the Ecliptic is represented by the curved line, C V T. The plane of the Ecliptic is inclined to that of the Equinoctial at an angle of 23 deg. 27-1/2', and this inclination is called the obliquity ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... should think, considering his temper. Ah!" Here Creedle threw grieved remembrance into physical form by slowly resigning his head to obliquity and letting his eyes water. "That man! 'Not if the angels of heaven come down, Creedle,' he said, 'shall you do another day's work for me!' Yes—he'd say anything—anything; and would as soon take a winged creature's name in vain as ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... like a sweet familiar face encountered in the midst of wild and unearthly scenery. The auditor paid much attention to these romances and sometimes interrupted them by brief remarks upon the incidents, displaying shrewdness above his years, mingled with a moral obliquity which grated very harshly against Ilbrahim's instinctive rectitude. Nothing, however, could arrest the progress of the latter's affection, and there were many proofs that it met with a response from the dark and stubborn nature on which it was lavished. The boy's parents ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the history was taken from the letters, nor the letters from the history. And the undesignedness of the agreements (which undesignedness is gathered from their latency, their minuteness, their obliquity, the suitableness of the circumstances in which they consist to the places in which those circumstances occur, and the circuitous references by which they are traced out) demonstrates that they have not been produced by meditation, or by any fraudulent contrivance. ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... many qualities suited to the turbulent times in which he lived. He was vigorous and prompt in action, and naturally of a high and generous spirit. Still, however, he exhibited glimpses, even in his last hours, of an obliquity, not to say ferocity of temper, which characterized many of his line, and which led to ominous conjectures as to what would have ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... numerous family of "the Smalls," who, according to Christopher North, form the predominant portion of mankind. In appearance, the doctor was short-necked and puffy, with a sodden, pasty face, wherein were set eyes whose obliquity of vision was, in some measure, redeemed by their expression of humor. He was accounted a man of parts and erudition, and had obtained high honors at his university. Rigidly orthodox, he abominated the very names of Papists and Jacobites, amongst which heretical herd he classed his companion, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was a tall, thin, fair, rather faded woman, with a perfectly amiable disposition, a high standard of gentility, a taste for light literature, and a certain foolish indirectness and obliquity of character. She was romantic, she was sentimental, she had a passion for little secrets and mysteries—a very innocent passion, for her secrets had hitherto always been as unpractical as addled eggs. She was not absolutely veracious; but this defect was of no great consequence, ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... that you had a kind of complicity in the spots upon the sun, had he not one day condensed his doctrine into an epigram which made it instantly ludicrous. "I consider myself," exclaimed he, "personally responsible for the obliquity of the earth's axis." A prominent Come-outer once told me, with a look of indescribable satisfaction, that he had just been kicked out of a Quaker meeting. "I have had," he said, "Calvinistic kicks and Unitarian kicks, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian kicks, but ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... very broad noses, and enormous ears"(57. Quoted by Prichard, 'Physical History of Mankind,' 3rd ed. vol. iv. 1844, p. 519; Vogt, 'Lectures on Man,' Eng. translat. p. 129. On the opinion of the Chinese on the Cingalese, E. Tennent, 'Ceylon,' 1859, vol. ii. p. 107.); and Vogt remarks that the obliquity of the eye, which is proper to the Chinese and Japanese, is exaggerated in their pictures for the purpose, as it "seems, of exhibiting its beauty, as contrasted with the eye of the red-haired barbarians." It is well known, as Huc repeatedly remarks, that the Chinese of the interior ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... leaders along the Rio Grande during this period there sprang up many factional differences from various causes, some personal, others political, and some, I regret to say, from downright moral obliquity—as, for example, those between Cortinas and Canales —who, though generally hostile to the Imperialists, were freebooters enough to take a shy at each other frequently, and now and then even to join forces against Escobedo, unless we prevented them by coaxing or threats. ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan
... it proper for him to interpose; and undertook, not indeed to vindicate the action, for breach of trust has always something criminal, but to extenuate it by an apology. Having advanced what cannot be denied, that moral obliquity is made more or less excusable by the motives that produce it, he inquires what evil purpose could have induced Pope to break his promise. He could not delight his vanity by usurping the work, which, though not sold in shops, had been shown to a number more than sufficient to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... "Into mortal mind's material obliquity I gazed and stood abashed. Blanched was the cheek of pride. My heart bent low before the omnipotence of Spirit, and a tint of humility soft as the heart of a moonbeam mantled the earth. Bethlehem and Bethany, Gethsemane and Calvary, spoke to my chastened sense as by the tearful ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... strange passage. What did Shakespeare mean us to feel? One is astonished that Othello should not be startled, nay thunder-struck, when he hears such dying words coming from the lips of an obdurate adulteress. One is shocked by the moral blindness or obliquity which takes them only as a further sign of her worthlessness. Here alone, I think, in the scene sympathy with Othello quite disappears. Did Shakespeare mean us to feel thus, and to realise how completely confused and perverted Othello's mind has become? I suppose so: and yet Othello's words ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... angles to the axis of the rod, as they should be, to produce the effect required by the theory, but slightly oblique, and therefore each tended to develop a separate magnetism not coincident with the axis of the bar. But in winding the wire over itself, the obliquity of the several turns compensated each other, and the resultant action was at right angles to the bar. The arrangement then introduced by myself was superior to those of Arago and Sturgeon, first ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... never been done, either in his own day or in any after age, to a poet of real genius and original powers, it will generally be presumed, with more or less fairness or unfairness, that this is in great part his own fault. Some perversity or obliquity will be suspected, even if no positive infirmity or deformity can be detected, in his intelligence or in his temperament: some taint or some flaw will be assumed to affect and to vitiate his creative instinct or his spiritual reason. And in the case of John Marston, the friend and foe of Ben ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... phenomena in question, however, it cannot be said that they have been fairly or fully investigated by scientists. They have been set down as the work of charlatans, and their apparent results ascribed to fraud, collusion, credulity, and mental obliquity in general. The fact, that of the scientists who have exhaustively investigated the spiritistic phenomena, a considerable number have accepted them as valid, has had no effect upon scientists as a body, who, in this particular, occupy the position ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... say, we have hardly entered upon this stage. We have to deal with things as they are, with many natures tainted by moral feebleness, by obliquity of vision, by lack of proportion. The hope at present lies in the endeavour to find some source of inspiration, in a determination not to let men and women grow up with fine emotions atrophied; and here the whole system of education is at fault. It is all on the lines of an intellectual ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... picked the paper up a second time, and there, sure enough, was the same passage. In vain did I seek for any sane explanation, and at last I somehow got it into my head that the appearance of the printed characters must be due to a kind of mental obliquity, and that I must be rapidly going mad! Even Yamba could not sympathise with me, because the matter was one which I never could have made her understand. I tried to put this strange puzzle out of my head, but again and again the accursed and torturing ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... apt to acquire peculiar notions of things too, which plain ordinary people, unblessed with a poetical obliquity of vision, would suppose to be rather distorted. For instance, when the sickening murder and mangling of a wretched woman was affording delicious food wherewithal to gorge the insatiable curiosity of the public, our friend the poetical young gentleman was in ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... themselves, even where they did wrong, there was a wide difference in the moral obliquity indicated by the wrongdoer. There was a wide distinction between the offenses committed in the case of the Northern Securities Company, and the offenses because of which the Sugar Trust, the Tobacco ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... but the Swedes, like the Russians, have gutta-percha stomachs. The same system, it is true, prevails in San Francisco, only in a different form, and the same consequences generally ensue. People are very apt to get up from the table with a rush of blood to the head, a general obliquity of vision, and a peculiar weakness in the knees. I tried it myself by way of experiment, and was sick of a headache for three days after. Somehow I can travel a long distance on foot without getting tired, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... whittle, clean his nails in company and never out of it, swear things are good enough for him without having known any other state of society, squander dollars on discomfort, and refuse cents to elegance and convenience, because he knows no better, and call the obliquity of taste patriotism, without enjoying a walk in a wood by the side of a murmuring rill! He may, beyond dispute, if such be his sovereign pleasure, do all this, and so may an Esquimaux maintain that ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... it, of funnel-shaped elongations from the several inguinal layers continued over the cord as far as the testicle, renders the adult male especially liable to hernial protrusions at this part. The oblique direction of the canal is, in some measure, a safeguard against these accidents; but this obliquity is not of the same degree in all bodies, and hence some are naturally more prone to herniae ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... years, and indeed was only displaced by the immortal "Principia" of Newton. It commences with the doctrine that the earth is globular and fixed in space, it describes the construction of a table of chords, and instruments for observing the solstices, it deduces the obliquity of the ecliptic, it finds terrestrial latitudes by the gnomon, describes climates, shows how ordinary may be converted into sidereal time, gives reasons for preferring the tropical to the sidereal year, furnishes the solar theory ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... Yet one is shocked at the unnatural parent who instructs his daughter to read, in the event of his death in the duel with Hamilton, the confidential letters which came to him in the course of his love intrigues and affairs of gallantry. It imports a moral obliquity that, happily for society, is found in few human beings. As he lived, so he died, a strange, lonely, unhappy man, out of tune with the beautiful world in which he was permitted to exist upward of four score years. He had done ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... axes less and the other greater than the vertical axis, the instantaneous pole will separate from the axis of the instrument, and the axis will incline more and more till the spinning can no longer go on, on account of the obliquity. It is easy to see that, by attending to the laws of motion, we may produce any of the above effects at pleasure, and illustrate many different propositions by means of the ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... (Figure 19) is still more aberrant; its very long toes and short tarsus, short great toe, short and raised heel, great obliquity of articulation in the leg, and absence of a long flexor tendon to the great toe, separating it far more widely from the foot of the Gorilla than the latter is separated ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... have been opened, the principal passage preserves the same inclination of 26 degrees to the horizon, being directed toward the polar star.... Their obliquity being so adjusted as to make the north side coincide with the obliquity of the sun's rays at the summer's solstice, has, combined with the former particulars, led some to suppose they were solely intended for astronomical uses; and certainly, if not altogether true, ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... necessary to social life. This means putting new wine into old bottles, and wine that is much too strong for the bottles. Everybody can see why some particular law might be violated without a sense of guilt, but they cannot see how a law they believe in can be violated without serious obliquity. ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... attain anything difficult, he cannot afford to indulge in vanity or self-satisfaction; for action can be kept true to its end only when the least obliquity is marked and corrected. Hence the strong man does not attribute his failure to fortune or to his amiable virtues, but to his folly; for he knows that to be the crucial fault which it lies within his power to remedy. On the other hand, if the purpose be one ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... during the act of screaming an uncomfortable sensation in their eyeballs. Again, some highly expressive movements result from the endeavor to check or prevent other expressive movements; thus the obliquity of the eyebrows and the drawing down of the corners of the mouth follow from the endeavor to prevent a screaming-fit from coming on or to check it after it has come on. Here it is obvious that the consciousness and will must at first have come into play; not that we are conscious in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... embodiment of the joy of life, the perfect immoralist. There was no cynicism in his nature, no cruelty, no obliquity, no remorse; nothing but sunshine with a few clouds sailing across the fathomless blue spaces—the sky of Hellas. Nihil humani alienum; and as I listened to those glad tales, I marvelled at the many-tinted experiences that could be crammed into seventeen short years; what a document ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... aroused, tremendously aroused, by the unaccountable actions of Muriel's father. It flashed upon him that Wilton, in his deep hatred of his rival collector, was about to set fire to Talbot's house, and incendiarism was a crime which The Hopper, with all his moral obliquity, greatly abhorred. ...
— A Reversible Santa Claus • Meredith Nicholson
... language is often tortured by more elliptical phrases.[22] This power of charging lines with great fulness of meaning enables Pope to soar for brief periods into genuine and impressive poetry. Whatever his philosophical weakness and his moral obliquity, he is often moved by genuine emotion. He has a vein of generous sympathy for human sufferings and of righteous indignation against bigots, and if he only half understands his own optimism, that "whatever is is right," the vision, rather poetical than philosophical, of a harmonious ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... the reason for a noteworthy accident which happens in this refraction: which is this, that after a certain obliquity of the incident ray DA, it begins to be quite unable to penetrate into the other transparent substance. For if the angle DAQ or CBA is such that in the triangle ACB, CB is equal to 2/3 of AB, or is greater, then AN cannot form one side ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... the moral qualities of other nations by the yards of cotton or tons of manufactured iron which they consume for the benefit of Manchester and Sheffield, are certainly as comic as anything in Aristophanes. The madness of the philosopher who deemed himself personally answerable for the obliquity of the ecliptic has more than its match in the sense of responsibility shown by British journalists for the good conduct of the rest of mankind. All other kingdoms, potentates, and powers would seem ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... at the end, and is usually hollowed instead of arched. The eyes are small and black in color, set somewhat obliquely, and the upper lid is drawn down over the eye at its inner corner so as to make the obliquity still more marked. The teeth are larger than those of the Caucasian. Finally, the Mongol is below the average of all men as regards height, being usually about five feet four ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... by a hidden operator, evidently from his voice, occasionally overheard, a mere boy; and an old man, like a broken-down clergyman, whose dirty white neckcloth seemed adjusted on a secret understanding of moral obliquity, its knot suggesting a gradual approach to the last position a knot on the neck can assume, kept walking up and down the parti-colored gloom, flaunting a pretense of lecture on the scenes presented. Whether he was a little drunk or greatly in his dotage, it was impossible ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... was caught (that was poor sport compared to the pig). Nor will I tell you a word of all that was said and done to the intrepid hunters of the Black and Learned. I have told you all the interesting part. Seek not to know the rest. It is better buried in obliquity. ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... event seems to come out wrong, we should never wish that we had decided otherwise. For it is the same as wishing that we had not followed the dictates of judgement and conscience. As this is a world designed for discipline and trial, untoward events are never to be construed as indications of the obliquity of ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... . . lozenge . . . trapezoid: all four-sided forms, but differing as to the parallel arrangement of their sides and the obliquity of their angles. ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... gateway of the Long Wall without stooping, or so strong as to try to lift a house, or to attempt any other obvious impossibility, is a madman according to them; but in the popular sense he is not mad, if his obliquity is confined to small matters. In fact, just as strong desire goes by the name of passion in popular parlance, so mental obliquity on a ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... the north star six degrees high; and when in six hours the bear came to the west the north star was then eleven degrees high; when the bear was quite depresssed and could not be seen because of the obliquity of the pole, the north star was six degrees high, so that the difference was ten degrees, and the north star described a circle having a diameter of ten degrees; whereas, in other places, it made but five, and in a different position as ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... symmetry of this town-plan, is ascribed to the influence of a small natural depression along which it runs, while a small area east of the Forum, which also breaks loose from the general scheme, is thought to have been laid out abnormally in order to remedy the effect of this obliquity.[48] ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... theatre is only to be associated with a "make-up," in that it substituted a fictitious facial expression for the actor's own. Roscius is said to have always played in a vizard, on account of a disfiguring obliquity of vision with which he was afflicted. It was an especial tribute to his histrionic merits that the Romans, disregarding this defect, required him to relinquish his mask, that they might the better appreciate his exquisite ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... these latter he thought it expedient, the year after his marriage, to withdraw to Hungary, from whence he sent short treatises to Tuebingen, "On the magnet" (following the ideas of Gilbert of Colchester), "On the cause of the obliquity of the ecliptic" and "On the Divine wisdom as shown in the Creation". His next important step makes it desirable to devote a chapter to a short notice of ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... of belief in the supernatural—one theory respecting the origin and government of the universe—stands wholly clear both of intellectual contradiction and of moral obliquity. It is that which, resigning irrevocably the idea of an omnipotent creator, regards Nature and Life not as the expression throughout of the moral character and purpose of the Deity, but as the product of a struggle between contriving goodness ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... legs so that the serum may be solidified at any desired "slant," and is heated from below by a Bunsen burner controlled by a thermo-regulator. The more elaborate forms resemble the hot-air oven (Fig. 26) in shape and are provided with adjustable shelves so that any desired obliquity of the serum ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... bid for them. And there are "Delijahs" who will break any confidence and risk any fortune, nay, their own lives, to show a rival she has been eclipsed. There are also women, even girls, who are of such pure eyes they cannot discern obliquity anywhere. And there are others just as pure—the lily's own heart isn't purer—who, nevertheless—but why waste time or type. In short, Johanna first, and then Barbara, had seen how easily Daphne Jane's tittle-tattle might be serious news to John ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... towards its expenses. Walpole had reduced the duties on colonial produce and had winked at the systematic evasion of the Navigation Acts by the colonists. Grenville was incapable of such statesmanlike obliquity. He tried to stop smuggling; he asserted the right of the home government to control the vast hinterland from which the colonists thought that the French had been evicted for their particular benefit; and he passed the Stamp Act, levying internal taxation ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... of importance that the claim set up by Lenine and Trotzky and many of their followers that they are guided by the principles of Marxian Socialism is itself demonstrably an evidence of moral or intellectual obliquity, which makes them very dangerous guides to follow. It is of importance, too, that the claim they make allures many Socialists of trusting and uncritical minds ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... generally followed by ill consequences to the parents themselves. They may cast a gloom over their children's lives for many years without having to suffer anything that will hurt them. I should say, then, that it shows no great moral obliquity on the part of parents if within certain limits they make their children's lives ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... becomes communicative to his next neighbour, a butcher from Whitechapel, and they exchange their sentiments about kidneys and music in general, and the kidneys and music now offered to them in particular. In a few minutes, a gentleman with a strange obliquity in his vision, seated in the middle of the coffee-room, takes off his hat, and after a thump on the table from the landlord's hammer, commences a song so intensely comic, that when it is over, the orders for supper and drink are almost unanimous. The house is now ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... so great, that Mr. Rae and I were glad to take shelter in the water while the crews were engaged on the portages. The irritability of the human frame is either greater in these Northern latitudes, or the sun, notwithstanding its obliquity, acts more powerfully upon it than near the Equator; for I have never felt its direct rays so oppressive within the Tropics as I have experienced them to be on some occasions in the high latitudes. The luxury of bathing at such times is not without alloy; for, if ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... teachers frequently find employment. I refer not to teachers whose literary qualifications are insufficient, although, as we have already seen, there are quite too many such. I refer now more particularly to those who are disqualified for the office because of moral obliquity. ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... the Transitional buttresses, where it stops with a jagged edge. This unfinished work has a considerable projection from the Transitional walling, the intention having been, perhaps, to correct externally the obliquity in the ground plan of Roger's tower;[49] it is also corbelled away at the bottom, probably to afford freer passage along the parapet walk and to avoid the necessity of a squinch. Originally the tower had perhaps a low pyramidal roof without a parapet, and then came ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... the arguments which seem so overwhelmingly convincing to Protestant thinkers? In either case, is there not something of distortion or exaggeration? Certainly it cannot be due to intentional and perverse obliquity of mental vision. As a rule reasonable men endeavour to be just and fair. Now and then, in the heat of controversy, a tendency to overstatement or exaggeration may be evident, especially where great issues appear to be involved; but the purpose can be reconciled with honesty. Is ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... the exceeding subtlety of his transitional links. Upon this point it is very happily, though, according to my observation, too generally, remarked, by one whose powers and opportunities of judging were so eminent that the obliquity of his testimony in other respects is the more unpardonable;—"Coleridge, to many people—and often I have heard the complaint—seemed to wander; and he seemed then to wander the most, when, in fact, his resistance to the ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... of a certain obliquity, to take pleasure in caricatures and monstrous faces, and pigmies. I have to thank our kind Assistant that I have never been vexed with natural history; I could never make myself at ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... another truth that this word 'till' preaches to us—viz. the possibility of bringing back those that have gone furthest away and have been longest away. The world has a great deal to say about incurable cases of moral obliquity and deformity. Christ knows nothing about 'incurable cases.' If there is a worst man in the world—and perhaps there is—there is nothing but his own disinclination to prevent his being brought back, and made as pure ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the hair being jet-black, coarse and rather inclined to be frizzy. Projecting jaws and teeth, thick lips, low narrow foreheads, and broad flat noses are the features characteristic of the tribe. The eyes are often bright and full, and no obliquity is observable in ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... had just entered into his eighteenth year, when he met at the table of a certain Anglo-Germanist an individual, apparently somewhat under thirty, of middle stature, a thin and weaselly figure, a sallow complexion, a certain obliquity of vision, and a large pair of spectacles. This person, who had lately come from abroad, and had published a volume of translations, had attracted some slight notice in the literary world, and was looked upon as a kind of lion in a small provincial capital. After dinner ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... suddenly obumbrated by the sequel of his explanation; insomuch, that, when the merchant understood the nature of the security, his visage was involved in a most disagreeable gloom, and his eyes distorted into a most hideous obliquity of vision; indeed, he squinted so horribly, that Renaldo was amazed and almost affrighted at his looks, until he perceived that this distortion proceeded from concern for a silver tobacco box which he had laid ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... before the apple-woman's stall, and was glancing now at the fruit, now at the old woman and myself; he wore a blue mantle, and had a kind of fur cap on his head; he was somewhat above the middle stature; his features were keen, but rather hard; there was a slight obliquity in his vision. Selecting a small apple, he gave the old woman a penny; then, after looking at me scrutinizingly for a moment, he moved from the booth in ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... then, has done its work when it deters from evil; in other words when it works repentance. In the sorrow of the world, the obliquity of the heart towards evil is not cured; it seems as if nothing cured it: heartache and trials come in vain; the history of life at last is what it was at first. The man is found erring where he erred before. The same course, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... over-honest and over-honourable; but let that be. To please a whim, a caprice, you set yourself to flout him, as is the way of your sex when you behold a man your utter slave. From this—being all unversed in the obliquity of woman—he conceives, poor boy, that he no longer finds favour in your eyes, and to win back this, the only thing that in the world he values, he behaves foolishly. You flout him anew, and because of it. He is as jealous with you as a ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... of Euripides is a singular example of poetic, or rather unpoetic obliquity; we should never have done were we to attempt to point out all its absurdities and contradictions. Why, for instance, does Orestes fruitlessly torment his sister by maintaining his incognito so long? The poet too, makes it a light matter ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... consideration of the high and mighty of this world than the high and mighty had for her. Slowly and by insensible degrees, since she was too young to mark the phenomena in any case, she had been forged and hammered into a living piece of moral obliquity,—and yet the very first contact with an innocent mind and kindly sympathy awoke in her childish breast a subtle ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... we have before us the Pantheon, the strangest and the least easy to name of the edifices of Pompeii. It is not parallel to the Forum, but its obliquity was adroitly masked by shops in which many pieces of coin have been found. Hence the conclusion that these were tabernae argentariae, the money-changers' offices, and I cannot prove the contrary. The two entrance doors are separated by two Corinthian columns, between which ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... the court, contrary, as it unquestionably was, both to liberty and law, had high authorities for its justification, and was supported by the unanimous opinion of the judges who sat at his side. Posterity will acquit the otherwise upright judge of the moral obliquity of which his living enemies, with regard to this proceeding, pronounced him guilty, and for which Junius would have crushed the Chief Justice, had his ability been equal ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... shall show, was not primarily with the maxim: that was but a secondary purpose. His direct and real object lay in one or two of the illustrative cases under the maxim. With this particular obliquity impressed upon the movement of his own essay, we can have no right to quarrel. Kant had an author's right to deal with the question as best suited his own views. But with one feature of his treatment we quarrel determinately. He speaks of this ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the trial is before a higher court, and the punishment is more severe. Such control is necessary for the preservation of order because there are always social delinquents ready to take advantage of too great freedom. A certain class of offenses seems to require different handling. Moral obliquity such as the maintenance of disorderly houses is a corrupting influence, and the police departments of cities have frequently been charged with conniving at immoral practices. Police officials have been found to have their price, and graft ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Look on this miserable world, Whoe'er Thou art, that from above Dost in such order all things move! And let not man—of divine art Not the least, nor vilest part— By casual evils thus bandied, be The sport of Fate's obliquity. But with that faith Thou guid'st the heaven Settle this earth, and make ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... received a continuous spiral groove cut into its surface. It was then in the condition of a rudimentary screw; the pitch, or interval between the threads, being determined by the greater or less angle of obliquity at which the knife-edged instrument was set with respect to the axis of the cylindrical bars ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... Greeks, or the Romans, or the Middle Ages, or the eighteenth century, or anything but themselves. Well, I can only say I'm very sorry for them, and very glad I'm not one of them. Why, just think of the extraordinary obliquity, or rather blindness of it! Because you don't agree with Plato, or Marcus Aurelius, or Saint Francis, you think they're only fit for the ash-heap. You might as well say you wouldn't drink any wine except what was made to-day! The literature and art of the past can ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... some standing pool of vice, as filmy, very nearly as fleeting, and quite as poisonous? It struck him as he watched—not the girl in particular, but a whole genus centred in her—as really extraordinary, as an obliquity of Providence, that such ephemerids must abound, predestined to misery; must come and sin, and wail and go, with souls inside them to be saved, which nobody could save, and bodies fair enough to be loved, which nobody could stoop to love. Had the scheme of our Redemption ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... summary of it round the households of England. Everybody began to talk of Reineke; and now, at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see whether we are alone in our liking—whether others share in this strange sympathy, or whether it be some unique and monstrous moral obliquity in ourselves. ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... much faded, and both ragged and dirty. Her large mutch with its broad frills formed a sort of glory round her head, setting off to no advantage her pock-marked, flabby face, wide mouth and yellow projecting teeth. She had a comical, good-natured obliquity of vision in her prominent light-grey eyes, which were very red about the rims; and Flora thought, as she read with an inquiring eye the countenance of their landlady, that without being positively disgusting, she was the most ordinary, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... Ioan Bratianu when speaking on the Transylvanian question, 'it is no affair of mine; but when he raises a knife against his wife, it is not merely my right to intervene, it is my duty.' It is difficult to account for the obliquity of vision shown by so many Rumanian politicians. 'The whole policy of such a state [having a large compatriot population living in close proximity under foreign domination] must be primarily influenced by anxiety as to the fate of their brothers, and by the duty of emancipating ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... he inferred from Analogy that the sun turned on its axis, long before Galileo was able to direct his telescope to the solar spots and so determine this rotation as an actual fact. He anticipated a planet between Mars and Jupiter too small to be seen; and his inference that the obliquity of the ecliptic was decreasing, but would, after a long-continued diminution, stop, and then increase again, afterwards acquired the sanction of demonstration. A like instance of anticipation is afforded in the beautiful experiment of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... this great Lord took it so much in indignation, and esteem'd it such a Lordly Prelacy, that he declaimed against it, and became (if possible) more enemy both to him and the Church, than he was before. The rectitude of his nature therefore made him not a fitt instrument to struggle with the obliquity of those times; and he had this infirmity likewise, that he beleived those forward instruments, which he employed, followed the zeal of their own natures, when they did but observe that of his: for as soon as difficulty or danger appeared, his petty instruments shrunk to nothing, and shewed, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... cattle that have eaten the loco. Any one who acts queerly, talks strangely, is visionary without being actually a lunatic, who is what would be called elsewhere a "crank," is said to be locoed. It is a term describing a shade of mental obliquity and queerness something short of irresponsible madness, and something more than temporarily "rattled" or bewildered for the moment. It is a good word, and needed to apply to many people who have gone off ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... abasement of the other. All my inherited traditions, prejudices, predilections, all my training ranged me on the side of Eleanor. I was clamouring for the real. Was she not the incarnation of the real? Her very directness piqued me to a perverse and delicious obliquity. And I knew, as I knew when I parted from her months before, that it was only for me to awaken things that lay virginally dormant. On the other hand stood Lola, with her magnetic seduction, her rich atmosphere, her great wide simplicity of heart, holding out ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... villains. In a word, we have learnt the Secret of Oxford. All the time that we were fighting and fuming, the higher and subtler influences of the place were moulding us, unconscious though we were, to a more gracious ideal. We had really learnt to distinguish between intellectual error and moral obliquity. We could differ from another on every point of the political and theological compass, and yet in our hearts acknowledge him to be the best of all good fellows. Without surrendering a single conviction, we came to see the virtue of so stating our beliefs as to persuade and propitiate, instead of ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... the greatest dramatists of the nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest realistic French dramatist, died at the close of the century in all the odour of obliquity. His work is now the chief literary topic in Paris; it has indeed rivalled the Portuguese revolution and the French railway strike as a subject of conversation among people who talk like sheep run. This dizzy popularity ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... table at which he was writing when Sadie entered the room. He was, on the whole, a handsome man, but was rather fat, and his black eyes were unusually close together. This perhaps accounted for the obliquity of his glance, which, some believed, conveyed a useful hint about his character. He was neatly dressed in light, summer clothes, although the farmers generally wore brown overalls. As he got up his look indicated that he was trying to hide ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... words appear obviously false, but he would make them fasten upon her a malicious intent to injure the man who had undertaken her husband's defense; and somehow he would be able, she felt, to divert the obliquity and cause it to ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... self-parallelism of the earth's axis is undoubtedly a very important factor in climate. Practically it more than doubles the width of the belts of ordinary food-stuffs by lengthening the summer day in the temperate zone. Beyond the tropics the obliquity of the sun's rays are more than balanced by the increased length of time ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... daughter! No! God never would have ordained such a thing. There was nothing ever heard of like it; it could not be; she was ill,—she would outgrow all these singularities; he had had an aunt who was peculiar; he had heard that hysteric girls showed the strangest forms of moral obliquity for a time, but came right at last. She would change all at once, when her health got more firmly settled in the course of her growth. Are there not rough buds that open into sweet flowers? Are there not fruits, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... obliquity of vision whereby any one is enabled, standing in this metropolis, to anticipate the subversion of the Republic and the restoration of Monarchy. Such prophets must belong essentially to that school which teaches the omnipotence of paper Constitutions ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... to be on some footing, you had to feel some confidence, pretty different from his own up to now. He had never not enjoyed passing his show on the other side of the street and taking it in thence with a casual obliquity; but he had never held optical commerce with the drawn blind for a moment longer than he could help. It always looked horribly final and as if it never would come up again. Big and bare, with his name staring at him from ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... banqueted with the grace, animation, and commanding eloquence of the unrivalled advocate of the british bar; who, when he retires from the laborious duties of the crowded, and admiring forum, where his acute sagacity has so often unfolded the dark compact involutions of human obliquity, where his wit and fancy have covered with the choicest flowers, the dreary barrenness of technical pleading; will leave behind him that lasting, and honourable respect and remembrance, which faculties so extensively beneficial, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr |
