"Obscene" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aspiration, and that a gross physical cause, such as the fall of a spicule of bone from the inner table of his skull on to the surface of the membrane which covers his brain, may have the ultimate effect of turning him into an obscene creature with every bestial attribute! That a man's individuality should swing round from pole to pole, and yet that one life should contain these two contradictory personalities—is it not ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... Beza became a Protestant, and it was desirable to find means to sully his reputation. The discovery of the hidden depths of iniquity in the reformer's youthful productions it was reserved for the same prurient imaginations to make that afterward fancied that they had detected obscene allusions in the most innocent lines of the Huguenot psalter. At the age of forty-two years, Beza, after having successively discharged with great ability the functions of professor of Greek in the Academie of Lausanne, and of professor of theology in that of Geneva, was, next to Calvin, the most ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... a farce. The King affected not to see him, let him kneel on. Richard did kneel on, as stiff as a rod. The King talked with obscene jocosity, every snap betraying his humour, to Prince John; he scandalised even his bishops, he abashed even his barons. He infinitely degraded himself, yet seemed to wallow in disgrace. So Richard's gorge (a tender organ) rose to hear him. 'God, what wast Thou about, to let such a hog be made?' ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... bright scarlet sentries walking smartly to and fro before the Mint. He envied them their places in the scheme of world's labour. And he envied also the miserable sallow, thin-faced loafers blinking their obscene eyes and rubbing their greasy shoulders against the doorjambs of the Black Horse pub, because they were too far gone to ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... chiefly under the attribute or property of fecundity; the symbols of the reproductive power being those under which its prolific potencies were exhibited. It is not because modern fastidiousness affects to consider those symbols as indecent, and even obscene, that we should therefore suppose them to have been so regarded by the ancients: on the contrary, the view of them awakened no impure ideas in the minds of the latter, being regarded by them as the most sacred objects of worship. The ancients, indeed, did not look upon the pleasures ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... publicly proclaimed. What, then, were the secret good offices? In one version of the legend the hosts of Demeter were not Celeus and Metaneira, but Dusaules and Baubo. The part of Baubo was to relieve the gloom of the Goddess, not by the harmless pleasantries of Iambe, in the Hymn, but by obscene gestures. The Christian Fathers, Clemens of Alexandria at least, make this a part of their attack on the Mysteries; but it may be said that they were prejudiced or misinformed. {87a} But, says M. Foucart, an inscription has been found in Paros, wherein there ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... comparison. But the Lords were in a humor to regard no violence against Wilkes as excessive; and, submitting to the guidance of the minister and the prelate, resolved that the "Essay on Woman,"[10] as also another poem by the same writer, a paraphrase of the "Veni Creator," was "a most scandalous, obscene, and impious libel," and presented an address to the King, requesting his Majesty "to give the most effectual orders for the immediate prosecution of the author." And, in the course of the next few ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... and no misborn Brazilians can stop us," snarled Francisco. To which he added obscene epithets directed against Brazilians in general and the men of Coronel Nunes ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... the ways Of doctors now, and those of ancient days! Theirs taught the truth in academic shades, Ours in lewd hops and midnight masquerades. So changed the times! say, philosophic sage, Whose genius suits so well this tasteful age, Is the Pantheon, late a sink obscene, Become the fountain of chaste Hippocrene? Or do thy moral numbers quaintly flow, Inspired by th' Aganippe of Soho? Do wisdom's sons gorge cates and vermicelli, Like beastly Bickerstaffe or bothering Kelly? Or art thou tired ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... and evidently much used. It was hung with ex-voto limbs and with many gifts. It was a centre of worship, of a sort of almost obscene worship. Afterwards the black pine-trees and the river of that valley seemed unclean, as if an unclean spirit lived there. The very flowers seemed unnatural, and the white gleam on the mountain-tops was a ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... untainted. It was Jinny's great merit, after all, that she had not married a man who had the taint. The marvel was how the editor had contrived to carry intact that innocence of his through the horrors of his obscene profession. It argued an incorruptible natural soundness ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... forced from Phineus' palace to retire, They fled their former banquet. Heavenly ire Ne'er sent a pest more loathsome; ne'er were seen Worse plagues to issue from the Stygian mire— Birds maiden-faced, but trailing filth obscene, With taloned hands and looks for ever pale ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... ghastly harvest of the war Came all the beasts of earth whose facile sense Of odour tracks the bodies of the slain. Sped from his northern home the Thracian wolf; Bears left their dens and lions from afar Scenting the carnage; dogs obscene and foul Their homes deserted: all the air was full Of gathering fowl, who in their flight had long Pursued the armies. Cranes (29) who yearly change The frosts of Thracia for the banks of Nile, This year delayed their voyage. As ne'er before The air grew dark ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... hellish legions with an account of whose deeds,' so says this gallant gentleman our friend, 'I will not defile my pen, but whose boasts are like those of Attila the Hun, and who in their malice have invented obscene tortures worthy of Iroquois savages for all who fall into their clutches, be they men, women, or children.... But, by Heaven's mercy, dear Madame,' says M. de Puisaye to me, 'your noble husband was too weak to afford sport to those demons, and so he has escaped torment. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... invective. The veneer of dignity that had come to him with wealth and position slipped from him, as the old skin slips from a snake, and he went back to the vocabulary of his youth for terms sufficiently blasphemous and obscene to express his opinion of the strike, the strikers, the committee and its sponsors. He did not stop until his breath failed ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... went on girls began crying out in the carriage next us, and I could hear the words of obscene songs when the train stopped ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... king and queen. They struck at him with pikes, and forced upon his head the red bonnet of the Jacobins, while the most wretched of her sex encircled the queen with a living wall of vice, and loaded her with obscene execrations, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... he leaned from an open window, a figure not without its grandeur against the background of smoke and flame, and shouted a savage and obscene insult ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... the life they led resembled that of beasts rather than of men. Uncleanness was risen to the last excess amongst them; and the least corrupt were those who had no religion. The greatest part of them adored the devil under an obscene figure, and with ceremonies which modesty forbids to mention. Some amongst them changed their deity every day; and the first living creature which happened to meet them in the morning was the object of their worship, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... as eloquent in giving lessons to novices as his compeers in our own prisons, and he carefully instructs his hopeful pupils in the best ways of avenging their wrongs upon society. Some in the prison are merry, and enjoy a dance, while others are indulging in obscene jests and ribaldry. Still, there are those that find means to labor and to work at repairing shoes or clothes in the midst of this babel ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... of interest in connection with the above facts is that the old religions, however much of force, beauty, and truth we may concede to them, have never made warfare against these obscene forms of worship, nor against the notorious immorality of their devotees. Whatever may be said of the profound philosophy of life involved in phallic worship, for many hundreds of years it has been a source of outrageous immorality. Nevertheless, there has never been any continued ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... on then, wet and weary, trusting to fortune, but always blundering deeper and deeper into this horrible bog, until I began to think that my first night in France was destined also to be my last, and that the heir of the de Lavals was destined to perish of cold and misery in the depths of this obscene morass. ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ladies in remote country houses a notion that English schoolboys are taught to tell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seriously for a moment. Very occasionally, very vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to tell lies, which is a totally different thing. I may silently support all the obscene fictions and forgeries in the universe, without once telling a lie. I may wear another man's coat, steal another man's wit, apostatize to another man's creed, or poison another man's coffee, all without ever telling a ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... under the whiplashing woman's tongue. Finally he spoke, in English. He called Dor a puddle-snake. That wasn't all of what he said, by any means; the name was preceded by several adjectives and followed by an obscene command. Dor ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... so-called Comstock laws were passed there was a real disease to be treated: The symptoms of the disease were obscene books and pictures which were being freely circulated among the children of the land, boarding-schools, whether for girls or boys, being fairly flooded with the pernicious literature. The work of confiscation, suppression and ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... occupying bodies of military, police, or specials did not prevent; and the pictures drawn of their conduct by the newspaper reporters, one and all, are inexpressibly revolting. It was the usual English crowd assembled to enjoy an execution. They made the air resound with laughter at obscene jokes, shouts, cries and repartees; and chorused in thousands [beneath the gallows!] snatches of "comic" ballads and pot-house songs, varied by verses of "Rule, Brittania" and "God save the Queen," by way of exultation over the Irish. Once or twice, in the early part ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... tearing at food like wolves. Others darted into dark corners of the square to hide their prizes. A man appeared dressed in a woman's wrapper and hat, and capered around the fire to the accompaniment of shrieks of obscene laughter. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... God that you live in a happier day than that of Bunyan. The reign of Charles II was pre-eminently distinguished for licentiousness and debauchery. Still there were some who crucified the flesh, with its lusts, and held every obscene word in detestation and abhorrence; because it is written 'be ye holy, for I am holy.' Such must have sorely dazzled the owls of debauchery. Can we wonder that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... lightning-bugs and glowworms of many kinds are the same as in North America; that the beetle, or elator, when placed upon its back, snaps itself up in the air and falls upon its feet, as our species does; that the obscene fungus, or Phallus, taints the tropical forests, as a similar species at times taints our dooryards and pasture-borders; and that the mud-dauber wasps stuff their clay cells with half-dead spiders for their young, just as in North ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... indecent, obscene, tainted, defiled, gross, indelicate, polluted, tarnished, dirty, immodest, lewd, stained, unchaste, filthy, impure, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Holland, very learned—a perfect Magliabecchi—a devourer of books, and an observer of mankind, lent Lord Byron a quantity of unpublished letters by the poet Burns—letters that were very unfit to see the light of day, being full of oaths and obscene songs. After reading them, Lord ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... they laughed at our misery, which was almost insupportable—looking upon us as though we had committed some heinous crime, and they had not sufficiently punished us; they hallooed to us, crying out "Captain, Captain," accompanied with obscene motions and words, with which I shall not blacken these pages—yet I heard no check upon such conduct, nor could I expect it among such a gang, who have no idea of subordination on board, except when in chase of vessels, and even then but very little. My resentment was excited at such ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... in the market-places, nor posted on the corners of gates of palaces. She is of so exquisite a nature that he who knows how to treat her will convert her into gold of the most inestimable value. He who possesses her should guard her with vigilance; neither suffering her to be polluted by obscene, nor degraded by dull and frivolous works. Although she must be in no wise venal, she is not, therefore, to despise the fair reward of honorable labors, either in heroic or dramatic composition. Buffoons must ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and that although every one saw them devout, charitable, and regular in their religious duties, people were not to be misled by these things, for this was only a cloak intended to deceive the world and conceal their secret rites and obscene orgies. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... would come, and he felt indeed that the evil was too strong for him. Presently the beast desisted from its play, and looking wickedly about it, came near to the Father's bed, and seemed to put up its hairy forelegs upon it; he could see its narrow and obscene eyes, which burned with a dull yellow light, and were fixed upon him. And now the Father thought that his end was near, for he could stir neither hand nor foot, and the sweat rained down his brow; but he made a mighty effort, and in a voice which shocked himself, so dry and husky and ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob Centaur. This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially nude senorita, frail and lovely (his wife, as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit intercourse ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... thine hands, be clean, Cry, What is truth? O Pilate; thou shalt know Haply too soon, and gnash thy teeth for woe Ere the outer darkness take thee round unseen That hides the red ghosts of thy race obscene Bound nine times round with hell's most dolorous flow, And in its pools thy crownless head lie low By his of Spain who dared an English queen With half a world to hearten him for fight, Till the wind ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... to this dialogue in horror. As they sat grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by the old man's lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and disgust, which could hardly have been greater, though they had been obscene demons, marketing the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... monster of a king; Or virtue, or religion turn to sport, To please a lewd, or unbelieving Court. Unhappy Dryden!—In all Charles's days, Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays; And in our own (excuse some courtly stains) No whiter page than Addison remains. He, from the taste obscene reclaims our youth, And sets the passions on the side of truth, Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art, And pours each human virtue in the heart. Let Ireland tell, how wit upheld her cause, Her trade ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... therefore, always the practice at my table for females to stay as long as they found it pleasant, without being liable to a disgusting hint to depart, in order that the men who remained might have an opportunity of disgracing themselves by obscene and loathsome conversation. What a disgrace this to the national character! what a blot upon the very name of polished society! what an everlasting stigma upon British hospitality! what an indelible stain upon English manners! I always found that young men who had been bred at the universities ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... the tricks of trade." Montalembert, referring to the ruin of the cloisters in France, grieves thus: "Sometimes the spinning-wheel is installed under the ancient sanctuary. Instead of echoing night and day the praises of God, these dishonored arches too often repeat only the blasphemies of obscene cries." The element of truth in these laments gives them their sting, but one should beware of the fervid rhetoric of the worshipers of medievalism. This century is nobler, purer, truer, manlier, and more humane than any of the centuries that ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... grips and screamed. Again she writhed and screamed as she felt the hideous touch of the monster snatching at her. She struggled frenziedly through the muck of the swamp but the thing with the blood eyes scrabbled faster on its rotten limbs. The thing seized her in its obscene embrace. Raw terror tore another scream from her throat. Behind her on the projector a needle slammed into the red zone. Beyond the hundreds of long rows of couches a warning light flashed on the control console of Mezzanine F and its persistent buzz snared ...
— The Premiere • Richard Sabia
... but one kingdom of the habitable globe. One kingdom;—but who is to be its king? Is there to be no king in it, think you, and every man to do that which is right in his own eyes? Or only kings of terror, and the obscene empires of Mammon and Belial? Or will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts;—faithful guardian of great memories in the ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... or striking. Secondly, linga worship, though prevalent in the south, is not confined to it, but flourishes in all parts of India, even in Assam and Nepal. Thirdly, it is not connected with low castes, with orgies, with obscene or bloodthirsty rites or with anything which can be called un-Aryan. It forms part of the private devotions of the strictest Brahmans, and despite the significance of the emblem, the worship offered ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the eighteenth century, not only were religious systems very much at a discount among persons of intelligence, but the Deity himself was relegated to the position of an exploded idea, becoming an object of vituperation, witty or obscene according to the humour of the individual critic. As one of the illuminated, Mr. Verity did not escape the prevailing infection, although an inborn amenity of disposition saved him from atheism in its more blatantly offensive forms. The existence of the Supreme ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... me what an obscene loose play this "Parson's Wedding" [A comedy, by Thomas Killigrew.] is, that is acted by nothing but women at the King's house. My wife tells me the sad news of my Lady Castlemaine's being now become ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... shaft of light here and there. The flies, which had been a nuisance across the stream, here swarmed in myriads so thick that they seemed to hang in clusters from the boughs; and their incessant buzzing added to the horror of the place a hint of something foul, sinister, almost obscene. ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... grisettes—must have stirred Manet; recall the Frenchman's Balcony. And the bull-fights? Oh! what an iron-souled master was there—Goya when he slashed a bull in the arena tormented by the human brutes! None of his successors matches him. The same is the case with that diverting, devilish, savoury, and obscene series he called Caprices. It is worth remembering that Delacroix was one of the first artists in Paris who secured a set of these rare plates. The witch's sabbaths and the modern version of them, prostitution and its symbolism, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... rococo period, a period essentially rationalistic and devoted to pleasure, a period which believed in nothing but the obvious and understood love only in the sense of sensual pleasure. If sensuality had hitherto been evil—at least theoretically—it now became obscene. Stripped of every grand and cosmic feature, it degenerated into the principal form of amusement. The eighteenth century, though instructive and interesting to the student of eroticism, produced nothing new. Under the undisputed sway of France, a period of sensuality set ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... leading spirit was no longer Staupitz, disagreeably conscious of the difficulties of the enterprise, but the hunchback AEsop, who seemed to burn with a passion for slaughter. Lagardere likened him in his mind to some ungainly, obscene bird of prey, as he loomed out of the mirk waving his gaunt arms and shrieking in his rage and hate. "Kill them! kill them!" he screamed, as he rushed across the intervening space, and the bravos, heartened by his frenzy of fight, streamed after him, flinging themselves ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and stays, let things lie where they fell—and of all that luxury nothing was more pleasant than the knowledge that she did not have to take precautions against the rats, mice, cockroaches, and all their obscene little brothers which—on some far-off fantastic voyaging when she had been young and foolish—she seemed to remember having found in her own room. Then she was sinking into a bed like a tide of rainbow-colored foam, sinking ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... human countenance, with the smiling foolishness of the simple little folk who meet one's gaze, as they patiently carry on their minute trades in the gloom of their tiny open-fronted houses. Workmen squatted on their heels, carving with their imperceptible tools the droll or odiously obscene ivory ornaments, marvellous cabinet curiosities which have made Japan so famous with the European amateurs who have never seen it. Unconscious artists tracing with steady hand on a background of lacquer or of porcelain traditional ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... stable-boys, the kennels and their keepers, were loved better than aught else. She learned to lisp the language of grooms' and helpers, she cursed and swore as they did, she heard their songs and stories, and was as familiar with profanity and obscene language as other children are with nursery rhymes. Until she was five years old Sir Jeoffry never set eyes upon her. Then a strange chance threw her in his way and sealed ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that she but now begins to be weaned from her childish simplicity. She was reading before me in a French book where the word 'fouteau', the name of a tree very well known, occurred;—[The beech-tree; the name resembles in sound an obscene French word.]—the woman, to whose conduct she is committed, stopped her short a little roughly, and made her skip over that dangerous step. I let her alone, not to trouble their rules, for I never concern myself in that sort of government; ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... no sound on the earth except the ticking of the grasshopper, or the croaking of obscene frogs ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... for the children, proper regulations in regard to the schools, the trains at crossings, seducers, tramps and child abductors. They want strict laws against obscene literature and the unhealthy cigarette; and what is equally important, honest enforcement ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... certainly all Spaniards and Jesuits very villains, and is still cursing the pope and Spinola. One that thinks the gravest cassock the best scholar; and the best clothes the finest man. That is taken only with broad and obscene wit, and hisses any thing too deep for him. That cries, Chaucer for his money above all our English poets, because the voice has gone so, and he has read none. That is much ravished with such a nobleman's courtesy, and would venture his life for him, because he put off his hat. One ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... shuffling steps and cowering shivering forms, looking into the roads and kennels as they went in search of refuse food or disregarded offal. These forms were never beheld but in those nights of cold and gloom, when the terrible spectres, who lie at all other times in the obscene hiding-places of London, in archways, dark vaults and cellars, venture to creep into the streets; the embodied spirits of Disease, and Vice, and Famine. It was whispered by those who should have known, that these were Sampson and his sister Sally; and ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... not for thee nor me these things obscene; We have a higher pleasure, purer taste. My draughts have been with thee of hippocrene, And ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... the immortal Sancho. The book is a series of stories, rather than Sterne's subtle amalgam of pathos, gentle irony, and frank buffoonery; and the stories themselves are for the most part either insipid or obscene. There is perhaps one exception. The longest and the most elaborate of them, that which Schiller translated, is more like one of the modern French novels of a certain kind, than any other production of the eighteenth ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... "Open candle baudery," in verse 7, is an additional argument against Dr. Grosart's explanation: "Obscene words and figures made with candle-smoke," the allusion being merely to the blackened ceilings produced by cheap ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... had been. He glanced at me absently as I flitted past; I encountered no other person. The square between the hotel and the station was bathed in pure sunshine—such sunshine as reaches the Five Towns only after a rain-storm has washed the soot out of the air. I felt, for a moment, obscene in that sunshine; but I had another and a stronger feeling. Although there was not a soul in the square, I felt as if I was regarding the world and mankind with different eyes from those of yesterday. Then I knew nothing; ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... door. He had guessed right; above a brass knocker filmed with the floating muck of the air he saw the numeral, Two, painted beneath the fanlight. The windows on the left were blank, curtained. The house rose silent and without a mark of life above the obscene clamor of the city. He knocked sharply and waited; then he knocked again. Nothing broke the stillness of the facade, the interior. He tried the door, but it was solidly barred. Then a second fact, a memory, joined the bare location in his brain. It was a name—Rose—Rosemary Roselle. He beat ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... well for them that they did this, for now it was known that Agrippa's sickness was mortal, the most of the soldiers were already in a state of mutiny, and, inflamed with wine, paraded the market-places and larger streets, shouting and singing obscene songs, and breaking into the liquor shops and private houses, where they drank healths to Charon, who was about to bear away their king in his evil bark. As yet, however, they had not begun killing those against whom they had a grudge. ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... in triumph in processions through Egypt and Greece. It is still worshipped in some places at the present day. Near Niombo, in Africa, there is a temple containing several phallic statues; at Stanley-Pool the fete of the PHALLUS is celebrated with obscene rites. The Kroomen observe similar ceremonies at the time of the new moon, and in Japan on certain fete clays young girls flourish gigantic PHALLI at the end of long poles. The PHALLUS is also often represented on the monuments of ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... all before him with his cue, in the full flush of triumph, and a great heap of five-franc pieces before him, you may conceive with what wrath the proud, hasty, passionate man drove out, cane in hand, the obscene associates, flinging after them the son's ill-gotten gains; and with what resentful humiliation the son was compelled to follow the father home. Then Roland took the boy to England, but not to the old Tower; that ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... clear, and girlish, but the eyes of a depraved girl, in which a licentious expression flickered, without, however, hurting their pure surface. She moved like an overgrown school-girl, arms akimbo, bashful and blushing and in this position she sang in a thin, high voice, obscene verses which contrasted strangely with her apparent timidity. This was her charm and the audience received her atrocious words with roars of delight, contenting themselves with this, without demanding that she dance, respecting ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... impulse he said: "I'm going away. I've wanted to get out of this obscene nest of provincial stupidity from the day I first came here. And ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... of masturbation or self-abuse is very likely to be learned in boyhood, perhaps even by boys of six or eight years of age through their associations with obscene playmates. It not infrequently happens, however, that the habit is learned independent of these evil associations. It has been explained above that secretions frequently accumulate under the prepuce and ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... Calumny, Lie and Suspicion; and, in obvious allusion to Ferdinand's seizure of property, he named the statute-book "The Rapacious Defraudment of the Land." He saw the lords oppressing the poor, sitting long at table, and discussing lewd and obscene matters. He saw the rich idlers with bloated faces, with bleary eyes, with swollen limbs, with bodies covered with sores. He saw the moral world turned upside down. No longer, said Comenius, did men in Bohemia call things by their right names. They ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... often on the subject, with the lascivious smile of "an Oriental." At length his state became such, that he could not see any person of the other sex, whatever her age or appearance, without letting fall some obscene remark about her looks or ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... that Pitre, in his edition of Sicilian Volkslieder, expressly alludes to the coarseness of a whole class which he had omitted. The MSS. of Sicilian and Tuscan songs, dating from the fifteenth century and earlier, yield a fair proportion of decidedly obscene compositions. Yet the fact stated above is integrally correct. When acclimatised in the large towns, the rustic Muse not unfrequently assumes a garb of grossness. At home, among the fields and on the mountains, she remains ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... the down of multitudes of geese, which are forever plucked by the whole apparent force of the populace,—the fat of the devoted birds being substituted for lard in the kitchens of the Ghetto, and their flesh for pork. As we approached the obscene little riva at which we landed, a blond young Israelite, lavishly adorned with feathers, came running to know if we wished to see the church—by which name he put the synagogue to the Gentile comprehension. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Villiers—"or if not actual downfall, change and terrific upheaval. France and England particularly are the prey of the Demon of Realism,—and all the writers who SHOULD use their pens to inspire and elevate the people, assist in degrading them. When their books are not obscene, they are blasphemous. Russia, too, joins in the cry of Realism!—Realism! ... Let us have the filth of the gutters, the scourgings of dustholes, the corruption of graves, the odors of malaria, the howlings of drunkards, the revellings of sensualists, . . the worst ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... noble gardens, the remains of which still exist, at the foot of the Esquiline hill. It had been the foulest and most disreputable slum in Rome, given up to the burial of paupers, the execution of criminals, the obscene rites of witches, a haunt of dogs and vultures. He made it healthy and beautiful; Horace celebrates its salubrity, and Augustus, when an invalid, came thither to breathe its air. (Sat. I, viii, 8, 14.) There Maecenas set out his books and his gems and his ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... violence. His temple was profaned, and His altars desecrated. What British ruthlessness had left scathed and prostrate, was soon looked upon with neglect. The moles and the bats held their revels undisturbed within its once hallowed courts, and the "obscene owl nestled and brought forth in the ark of the covenant." The church in which our fathers worshipped, stabled the horse and stalled the ox. The very tombs of the dead, sacred in all lands, became a slaughter ground of the butcher, and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... could offer him up as a sacrifice for the salvation of mankind, should be put, after this humiliating manner, between profane hands, which, besides being inured to rapine and bloodshed, were employed day and night in impure purposes, and obscene contacts [t]. Such were the reasonings prevalent in that age; reasonings which, though they cannot be passed over in silence, without omitting the most curious, and perhaps not the least instructive part of history, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... the severeness of his industry, he appears to have become a prey to extraordinary visions and imaginations. Among the rest, the devil visited him in his cell, and, thrusting his head in at the window, disturbed the saint with obscene and blasphemous speeches, and the most frightful contortions of the features of his countenance. Dunstan at length, wearied out with his perseverance, seized the red-hot tongs with which he was engaged in some chemical experiment, and, catching the devil by the nose, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... his little Ferdy, for which he would be grieved to seem ungrateful. But yet—but yet—the responsibility, the anxiety, the ceaseless fretting care! This fierce, unbroken city";—he spoke of it as though it were a newly-lassoed and untamed mustang,—I liked the simile; "this lawless, blasphemous, obscene, and dangerous community; these sights of heartlessness and cruelty; these sounds of selfish, greedy contention; the absence of all taste and culture,—no lines of beauty, no strains of music, no tones of kindness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... I cried, "who have failed to understand your own symbols. To use plain language, then, where is Susan? She is the lamb that was entrusted to your keeping, and that you suffered the obscene ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the horrible misconceptions that we saw might arise; the odious imputations on honour and purity that would follow. Could we, the teachers of a lofty morality, venture to face a prosecution for publishing what would be technically described as an obscene book, and risk the ruin of our future, dependent as that was on our fair fame? To Mr. Bradlaugh it meant, as he felt, the almost certain destruction of his Parliamentary position, the forging by his own hands of a weapon that in the hands ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... are the composers and singers of those Carnival songs,—cruel satires most often, of which the local meaning is unintelligible to those unacquainted with the incident inspiring the improvisation,—of which the words are too often coarse or obscene,—whose burdens will be caught up and re-echoed through all the burghs of the island. Vile as may be the motive, the satire, the malice, these chants are preserved for generations by the singular beauty of the airs; and the victim of ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... touched raw skin, a pain like the burn of a hot iron shot through him; before he was through, he was in agony. Satisfied that he had disinfected every wound, he dropped the towel and clung weakly to the side of the jeep. He grunted out a string of English oaths, and capped them with an obscene Spanish blasphemy he had picked up among the Fourth Level inhabitants of his island home of Nerros, to the south, and a thundering curse in the name of Mogga, Fire-God of Dool, in a Third-Level tongue. He mentioned Fasif, Great God of Khift, ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... cannot be reproduced]. Perhaps they might be used in the solemn part of their ceremonies; and the Fescennine, which were invented after them, in their afternoons' debauchery, because they were scoffing and obscene. ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... they turn'd; but each Had first between his teeth prest close the tongue, Toward their leader for a signal looking, Which he with sound obscene triumphant gave. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... cannibal races; of the naked savages of NICOBAR and ANDAMAN; of CEYLON the Isle of Gems with its Sacred Mountain and its Tomb of Adam; of INDIA THE GREAT, not as a dream-land of Alexandrian fables, but as a country seen and partially explored, with its virtuous Brahmans, its obscene ascetics, its diamonds and the strange tales of their acquisition, its sea-beds of pearl, and its powerful sun; the first in mediaeval times to give any distinct account of the secluded Christian Empire of ABYSSINIA, and ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... eminent prelates of the older Church were eulogizing debauched princes like Louis XV, and using the unspeakably obscene casuistry of the Jesuit Sanchez in the education of the priesthood as to the relations of men to women, the modesty of the Church authorities was so shocked by Linnaeus's proofs of a sexual system in plants that for many years ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... emerged into daylight once more they found that already a whole army of vultures had gathered about the carcass of the strange monstrous beast, and were busily engaged in devouring the malodorous flesh. The trio made a wide circuit so as not to disturb the obscene birds at their disgusting banquet, and in due time found their way back again to their camp, where, after a hearty meal, they set to work in earnest upon the construction of ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... bare school-yard during the afternoon recess, when Maria, sitting huddled over the stove for warmth, heard such a clamor that she ran to the window. Out in the desolate yard, a parallelogram of frozen soil hedged in with a high board fence covered with grotesque, and even obscene, drawings of pupils who had from time to time reigned in district number six, was the little Ramsey girl, surrounded by a crowd of girls who were fairly yelping like little mongrel dogs. The boys' ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of nature herself. But Beaumont and Fletcher's pages are corrupt. Even their chaste women are immodest in language and thought. They use not merely that frankness of speech which was a fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which could not proceed from a pure mind. Chastity with them is rather a bodily accident than a virtue ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... executed in 1746.] and even its bleak and mouldered jaws command you to be a man. I ask you, in the name of God and of your country, will you draw your sword and go with me to Carlisle, were it but to lay your father's head, now the perch of the obscene owl and carrion crow and the scoff of every ribald clown, in consecrated earth as befits his ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... arguments. It is a thing not easily forgotten or forgiven for the Irishmen who engineered it, that such a ferocious and foolish display of truculent cowardice should have taken place. For an hour Mr O'Brien manfully faced the obscene chorus of cat-cries and disorder. He describes one of the incidents that occurred ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... fast. Germinie did not notice it: in her eyes he was still the child he had always been. From habit she always stooped to kiss him. One day she was summoned before the abbe who was at the head of the school. He spoke to her of expelling Jupillon. Obscene books had been found in his possession. Germinie, trembling at the thought of the blows that awaited the child at his mother's hands, prayed and begged and implored; she succeeded at last in inducing the abbe to forgive the culprit. When she went down into the courtyard again ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... which startles us in words which fall from a woman's lips took a different color when every woman's part was acted by a boy."[3] Why, in the name of all moral sense, should it be less dreadful that gross and obscene passages should be uttered at a public spectacle by young and unformed boys than by adult women, who at least would have the safeguard of mature knowledge and instincts to teach them their full loathsomeness? Do we really think that boys are born less pure than girls? Does the mother, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... Destroyer, stands only for the divine husband of Parvati, the divine wife. Hinduism, I admitted, is not as inhuman and superstitious as it looks. But I admitted it reluctantly and with many reserves, remembering all I had seen and heard of obscene rites and sculptures, of the perpetual repetition of the names of God, of parasitic Brahmins ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... to build His Temple right against the Temple of God On that opprobrious Hill, and made his Grove The pleasant Vally of Hinnom, Tophet thence And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell. Next Chemos, th' obscene dread of Moabs Sons, From Aroer to Nebo, and the wild Of Southmost Abarim; in Hesebon And Heronaim, Seons Realm, beyond The flowry Dale of Sibma clad with Vines, 410 And Eleale to th' Asphaltick Pool. Peor his other Name, when he entic'd Israel in ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... common to Plains tribes in many of their dances. The whole line of dancers proceed with their peculiar motion into the kozhan and around the fire, passing before the patient, the Chanzhini{COMBINING BREVE} all the while uttering hoarse, animal-like cries. Their utterances are always coarse and obscene, causing much merriment, which is supposed to aid the patient in casting off his illness. After passing through the kozhan the Tsannati{COMBINING BREVE} form in line outside and with their feet keep time to the singing and drumming, ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... ingrained belief in a certain ancient kindliness sitting beside the very cradle of the race of man—these influences are truly moral. When we put beside them the trumpeting and tearing nonsense of the didactic Tolstoy, screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women, and children out of respect to humanity, combining in one chaos of contradictions an ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... occupation,—it was about eleven when the sentinels were changed and the night was warm and bluish, the demonstration, perhaps in my honor, was exceptionally noisy and obscene. ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... tried to make the sacred sign of the cross; the Succubus perched on my bed, on the bolster, at the foot, everywhere, occupying herself in distracting my nerves, laughing, grimacing, putting before my eyes a thousand obscene images, and causing me a thousand wicked desires. Nevertheless, taking pity on me, my lord the Archbishop caused the relics of St. Gatien to be brought, and the moment the shrine had touched my bed the ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... cannot get up to the granite junctions in the glen, the stream comes down from them pure to the Garry; but in Beddington Park I am stopped by the newly-erected fence of a building speculator; and the bright Wandel, divine of waters as Castaly, is filled by the free public with old shoes, obscene ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... We are camping here to-night. I sit in the shade of the Temple walls, While the cadenced water evenly falls, And a peacock out of the Jungle calls To another, on yonder tomb. Above, half seen, in the lofty gloom, Strange works of a long dead people loom, Obscene and savage and half effaced— An elephant hunt, a musicians' feast— And curious matings of man and beast; What did they mean to the men who are long since dust? Whose fingers traced, In this arid waste, These rioting, twisted, ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... dogs be driven at all. But there is little point in the excuse; such speech is, to an extent not far from universal, the speech of the country. Swedes who have little and Indians who have none other English will yet be volubly profane and obscene; in the latter case often with complete ignorance of the meaning of the terms. Yet it must be recorded not ungratefully by the impartial observer that the rare presence of a decent woman or a clergyman will almost always put a check upon blackguardly speech, even that of a dog ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... a man, bury them under what guano-mountains and obscene owl-droppings you will, do not perish, cannot perish. What of Heroism, what of Eternal Light was in a Man and his Life, is with very great exactness added to the Eternities, remains forever a new divine portion of the Sum ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... his sting into a poisonous libel And on the honor of—oh God!—his wife, The nearest, dearest part of all men's honor, Left a base slur to pass from month to mouth, Of loose mechanics with all foul comments, Of villainous jests and blasphemies obscene; While sneering nobles in more polished guise Whispered the tale and smiled upon the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Trafalgar, and Sheridan's fifty-fourth, he began a course of persecution which definitely marks an access of dementia. The affair took an acute turn suddenly, and I don't intend to say more about it than that it took the form of anonymous and obscene letters, some of them addressed to Lady Bessborough's daughter, Caroline, then a child, some to herself, some to the children of the Duchess of Devonshire. The letters, which continued throughout the year, were signed with the names of ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... through the promptings of a benighted religion," for fear of the legal consequences which might fall upon her if she sold the book, for love of gain, for love of notoriety, for love of "posing as a martyr," and so on, and so on. She was publicly vilified and privately abused, pursued with obscene, anonymous, and insulting letters until the day of her death. In fact, every imputation was hurled at her, and she who might have answered all her persecutors with a word, held her peace, or broke it only to put them on another track. It was not merely the act itself which caused ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... material Brigham welded to his own forms. He was able to assume consistently an appearance of uncouth ignorance in order to retain his hold over his uncultivated flock. He delivered vituperative, even obscene sermons, which may still be read in his collected works. But he was able also on occasions, as when addressing agents of the Federal Government or other outsiders whom he wished to impress, to write direct and dignified ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... refers also to the Durga festival, in which the weird and often horrible and obscene rites of Skakti worship not infrequently play ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... noises produced by numerous tom-toms, horns made from elephants' tusks, and the still ruder, if possible, rattle of two pieces of wood, or common metal, which the women beat together to a tune similar to what in Ireland is known as the Kentish fire. The constant firing of musketry, and the obscene dances performed by the two sexes form one of the most debasing and savage exhibitions it is possible to see. In this way does the procession parade the principal streets, the king seated in his basket carried by his slaves, and protected by the umbrellas, according to his rank—the Fetish-men ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... people with extreme consideration," sighed Tai-yue, "but such a supremely suspicious person am I that I imagined that you inwardly concealed some evil design! Yet ever since the day on which you represented to me how unwholesome it was to read obscene books, and you gave me all that good advice, I've felt most grateful to you! I've hitherto, in fact, been mistaken in my opinion; and the truth of the matter is that I remained under this misconception up to the very present. But ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the mischief effected by John David Michaelis against the Old. This theologian was profoundly learned in the Oriental languages, but he was a reckless and irreverent critic. He made light of many of the occurrences of the Old Testament, and whenever the students applauded one of his obscene jokes, he was tickled into childishness. He made no claim to an experimental acquaintance with the operations of the Holy Spirit, and used his position as theological professor and lecturer only as the stepping-stone to money and fame. He would make Moses a very good sort of statesman, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... flesh, so close they gather round the brazier; and vapours issue forth that blind and suffocate. From every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgment-hour were near at hand, and every obscene grave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, women, and men, and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... wandered back through the darkness, one by one, into heaven; but the last, lighted on by their own lurid splendours, said, 'Wherever we go, there is heaven!' And deeper and lower descending, lost their shape and their nature, till, deformed and obscene, the bottomless pit closed ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... noblemen of Rome might affix to what he should produce. It was at the period when Greece was led captive and Asia made tributary to the Republic, fast verging itself to slavery and ruin, that a multitude of Syrian captives, bigoted to the worship of their obscene Ashtaroth, and the unworthy successors of Socrates and Zeno, found there a precarious subsistence by administering, under the name of freedmen, to the vices and vanities of the great. These wretched men were skilled to plead, with a superficial but plausible set of sophisms, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... equal terms with their normal fellows, or (b) of managing themselves and their affairs with ordinary prudence. Feeble-mindedness may affect the moral nature only, rendering the person selfish, untruthful, obscene, or unemployable. The Act of 1899 controls feeble-minded children; many such become ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... were to be found on the bridge near the entrance to the Place Dauphine. Tabarin retired from the business about 1630, but his partner continued at the old stand with a new clown, who must have been either less witty or more obscene than Tabarin, for in 1634 Mondor was abated as a nuisance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... entirety is of a nature to affect the mind and undermine health to such a degree that the life will be ultimately endangered, it will entitle the injured party to a divorce. Ungovernable outbursts of rage, the use of profane and obscene language, applying insulting epithets to the wife in the presence of others, acts of cruelty and neglect in sickness, coupled with failure to provide suitable food and clothing, have all been held ...
— Legal Status Of Women In Iowa • Jennie Lansley Wilson
... off his spectacles, to talk filthily upon it? Methinks I see him now," added the bold slut, "splitting his arch face with a broad laugh, shewing a mouth, with hardly a tooth in it, and making obscene remarks upon what ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... lot of nonsense that he had thought about the immaculacy of the flesh? The world in general found his theories ridiculous or obscene. The world might be right. After all, the majority is not necessarily wrong. Jamie's illness interfered like a blank space between his present self and the old one, with its strenuous ideals of a purity of body ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... be people of the worst description: there was one in particular, a burly savage-looking fellow, of about forty, whose conduct was atrocious; he sat with his wife, or perhaps concubine, at the door of a room which opened upon the court: he was continually venting horrible and obscene oaths, both in Spanish and Catalan. The woman was remarkably handsome, but robust and seemingly as savage as himself; her conversation likewise was as frightful as his own. Both seemed to be under the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... that the grace of the Gospel has been preached through himself and his carnal presence, He said to the Jews: "If ye believe Moses, ye should also believe me; for he wrote about me."[52] There are many other arguments also to oppose to the contention of the sorcerer. For how will obscene things give life, if it were not a conception of daemons? When the Lord himself answers in the Gospel to those who say unto him: "If such is the case of the man and the woman, it is not good to marry." But He said unto them: ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... back, and hostilities were suspended. However, they soon returned to the attack, and again were repulsed with loss. Hostilities were once more suspended. They then, for the third time, called upon us to surrender, promising that our lives should be spared. Antony Mauprat replied with an obscene jest. They remained undecided, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... features: Faithless, mean; Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene; Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles; And if I bid it face what I observe, Declares me hoodwinked by my ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... now declare that I will abstain from [323] the use of all low or profane language; from the taking of the name of God in vain; and from all impurity, or from taking part in any unclean conversation or the reading of any obscene book or paper at any time, in any ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... with meat, and boiled rice that is bought from others. Of righteous practices they have none. Their women, intoxicated with drink and divested of robes, laugh and dance outside the walls of the houses in cities, without garlands and unguents, singing while drunk obscene songs of diverse kinds that are as musical as the bray of the ass or the bleat of the camel. In intercourse they are absolutely without any restraint, and in all other matters they act as they like. Maddened ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... hostile and inhospitable, the look of a man who sneered out of his heart and carried a challenge in his eyes. The stranger made the mental observation that this citizen was a sour-looking customer, who apparently resented the coming of one more to the mills of Ascalon's obscene gods. ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... affair to negotiate with him; but what may very safely be turn'd upon thy trust. It is in the general behalf of this fair society here that I am to speak; at least the more judicious part of it: which seems much distasted with the immodest and obscene writing of many in their plays. Besides, they could wish your poets would leave to be promoters of other men's jests, and to way-lay all the stale apothegms, or old books they can hear of, in print or otherwise, to farce their scenes withal. That ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... scene there is an obscene play upon (a) word which means in Greek both 'sow' and ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... conduct only condemned criminals, or convey filth and night soil, for nothing pure or holy has either ingress into or egress from them, so into the ears of curious people goes nothing good or elegant, but tales of murders travel and lodge there, wafting a whiff of unholy and obscene narrations. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... of rejoicing which penetrated even his single-tracked, murder-obsessed brain. He turned, purple-face and explosive, to see what the obscene sound ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... gilded figure about sixty feet high—colossal and rather awe-inspiring in "the dim religious light.'' But in one of the temple buildings, where the two monks who accompanied us said that daily prayers were chanted, I saw representations in brass and gilt that were as filthily obscene as anything that I saw in India. There is immorality in lands that are called Christian, but it is disavowed by Christianity, ostracized by decent people and under the ban of the civil law. But Buddhism puts immorality in its temples and the ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... increasing the revenues of the gods and their priests. Religious prostitution and theological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt, and other ancient civilized countries. Commenting on a series of obscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154): "We are shocked at the morality of a nation which could supply the deceased with such literature for the eternal journey." Professor Robertson Smith says that "in ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... long-past days Had been some sculptur'd monument, now fallen And half-obscured by moss, and gathered heaps Of withered yew-leaves and earth-mouldering bones; And shining in the ray was seen the track Of slimy snail obscene. Composed his look, His eye was large and rayless, and fix'd full Upon the Maid; the blue flames on his face Stream'd a pale light; his face was of the hue Of death; his limbs were mantled in ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... Supreme Being, the creator of themselves and the universe. This word is Lacha, which with them is the corporeal chastity of the females; we say corporeal chastity, for no other do they hold in the slightest esteem; it is lawful among them, nay praiseworthy, to be obscene in look, gesture and discourse, to be accessories to vice, and to stand by and laugh at the worst abominations of the Busne (gorgios, or gentiles) provided their Lacha ye trupos, or corporeal chastity, remains unblemished. The gypsy child, from her earliest years, is told by her strange mother ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... woman, in spite of the tremendous pressure that Nature will put upon her, may revert weakly to type. The most powerful of all the forces working for Nature and against feminism will be the quite brutal and obscene naturalness of war, and the gross familiarity of civilization with it for so long a period. There is reversion to type with a vengeance! The ablest of the male inheritors of the accumulated wisdom and experiences ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... clearly why we need something more than that. You have good enough laws to-day in every State in this Union for the suppression of what are termed the social vices; for the suppression of the grog-shops, the gambling houses, the brothels, the obscene shows. There is plenty of legislation in every State in this Union for their suppression if it could be executed. Why is the Government, why are the States and the cities, unable to execute those laws? Simply because ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... viz., from man's lowly origin, as furnishing a strong presumption against his immortality. This plea, familiar enough in sceptical discussions of the subject, has been put forward with great poetic force by Mr. William Watson; after graphically describing {228} "the gibbering form obscene that was and was not man," as lower in many respects than the beasts and birds in whose midst he dwelt, he suggests ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the lanes of the slums and the weed-grown enclosures within the old ramparts, between the black, lightless cluster of huts, like cow-byres, like dog-kennels. The horseman hammered with the butt of a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at the wooden sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his blows. He called out men's ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... rioted in the filth of a debauched and corrupt faction in this city, no person experienced so much of his obscene and vulgar abuse as Dr. Priestley. There is not a single fact on record or capable of being shewn, to prove that Dr. Priestley was guilty of any other crime than being a dissenter from the church of England, and a warm friend of American Independence. For this he was abused by Porcupine—and ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... held in more mortal abhorrence by the Christians, than the other and more rational kinds of heathen devotion; that is, if any at all had a right to be termed so. The brutal worship of Apis and Cybele was regarded, not only as a pretext for obscene and profligate pleasures, but as having a direct tendency to open and encourage a dangerous commerce with evil spirits, who were supposed to take upon themselves, at these unhallowed altars, the names and characters of these foul deities. Not ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the kine jump into rivers to be out of earshot on't. What, false knave, did I buy thee a fine new psaltery to be minded o' my latter end withal? Hearken! these be the songs that glad the heart, and fill the minstrel's purse.' And he sung so blasphemous a stave, and eke so obscene, as I drew away from him a space that the lightning might not spoil the new psaltery. However, none came, being winter, and then I said, 'Master, the Lord is debonair. Held I the thunder, yon ribaldry had been thy last, thou ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... asleep at his side in a nightcap. Every one who knows Keene's work can imagine how the huge well-fed figure was drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law; ill-dressed men with whisky—ill- ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... suggested to me that none but wretches of the most profligate character could be guilty of such atrocious conduct, in which opinion I fully concurred. One day, when I was about to address the people at the close of the poll, this gang began their accustomed attack, and vociferated the most revolting, obscene, and truly horrid observations, relating to my wife; upon which I turned round and asked, if it were possible for such language to proceed from the mouth of any one who possessed the character of a man? And I added, that it did appear ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... and be kept at all times in a clean condition; and if women or girls are employed in any such establishment, the water-closets used by them shall have separate approaches and be separate and apart from those used by men. All water-closets shall be kept free of obscene writing and marking. A dressing-room shall be provided for women and girls, when required by the Factory Inspector, in any manufacturing establishment in which women and ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... to explain the name, I must here digress into a chapter of the history of manners in the nineteenth century, very well worth commemoration for its own sake. In some of the studios at that date, the hazing of new pupils was both barbarous and obscene. Two incidents, following one on the heels of the other tended to produce an advance in civilization by the means (as so commonly happens) of a passing appeal to savage standards. The first was the arrival ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... shouting. To increase the merriment, one or two jackanapes, with zebras' manes tied over their heads, would advance with long tubes like monster bassoons, blowing with all their might, contorting their faces and bodies, and going through the most obscene and ridiculous motions to captivate their simple admirers. This, however, was only the feast; the ball then began, for the pots were no sooner emptied than five drums at once, of different sizes and ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... that effeminacy is not opposed to perseverance. For a gloss on 1 Cor. 6:9, 10, "Nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind," expounds the text thus: "Effeminate—i.e. obscene, given to unnatural vice." But this is opposed to chastity. Therefore effeminacy is not a vice opposed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... depths of Paris life: prostitutes and criminals, the murderers of to-morrow, who came to see how a man ought to die. Loathsome, bareheaded harlots mingled with bands of prowlers or ran through the crowd, howling obscene refrains. Bandits stood in groups chatting and quarrelling about the more or less glorious manner in which certain famous guillotines had died. Among these was one with respect to whom they all agreed, and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... are printed without any approbation or privilege. Many are exposed on stalls, which are very improper for the public eye. One of these was called the Private Life of the Queen, in two volumes, with obscene prints. The book itself is contemptible and disgusting, and might as well have been called the Woman of Pleasure. Of books of this sort I saw above thirty, with plates. Another was on a subject not fit even ...
— A Trip to Paris in July and August 1792 • Richard Twiss
... closed and bolted. Its stout oaken panels were soon dashed in, and the door driven from its hinges. A crowd of miserable women, abandoned to the lowest depths of degradation and vulgarity, rushed into the apartment, assailing her ears with the most obscene and loathsome epithets the language could afford. The queen stood in the recess of a window, with queenly pride curbing her mortal apprehension. A few friends had gathered around her, and placed ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... with a lurid halo. It's too hot to sleep, and my sole amusement consists in watching the cockroaches, which are in a state of intense excitement and happiness. They manifest these feelings in a very remarkable manner—a sudden unanimous impulse seems to seize the obscene thousands which usually lurk hidden in the corners of my cabin. Out they rush, helter-skelter, and run over me, my table, and my desk; others, more vigorous, fly, quite regardless of consequences, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... it by word or feature. He went on humming a tune without words as he worked, handing out biscuits and ham to the hungry crew. Jim had eaten his breakfast already, and was smoking a cigarette at his ease. Now and then he addressed somebody in obscene jocularity. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... the infant of an employed parent. So on the very day of the lawyer's encounter there was another sickening journey to what proved to be a tenement in West Fifty-third Street. The newel post to the entrance was defaced with obscene handwriting, the hallways were like cellars, and there was a sign in the window, ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... in the clumsy graffito of the Crucifixion,—emerges in the Middle Ages in a turbulent growth of grotesque, wherein those grim figures of Death or Devil move through a maze of imagery often quaint and fantastic, sometimes obscene or terrible—takes a fresh start in the Passionals of Lucas Cranach, and can be traced in England through her Rebellion and Restoration up to the very confines of the eighteenth century. Why, we have to ask, even granting that William ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... there came black Lords; and Dwarfs obscene With lavish tongues; and Trolls; and treacherous Things Like loose-lipp'd Councillors and cruel Kings Who sharpen lies and daggers subterrene: And flashed their evil eyes and weeping cried, "We ruled the world for Peace. By her own ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... He held the religious press up to the scorn of church members for accepting advertisements which the publishers knew and which he proved to be not only fraudulent, but actually harmful. He called the United States Post Office authorities to account for accepting and distributing obscene circular matter. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... feeble phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within, showed the dripping stone of the walls, from which all traces of whitewash had vanished; the dank, fetid and mildew-tainted hard earth floor with its obscene fungi; the rotting remains of what had been stools, chairs, and tables, and other more shapeless furniture; the heavy planks and massive beams of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit plank door leading to bins and chambers beneath other ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... meeting there came to him some premonition of the future, some half-revealed, half-blurred picture of prophecy. Perhaps that picture was one of himself, lying in the darkness on the roof of the railway carriage, and an obscene Boolba standing erect in a motor-car on the darkened station, waving his rage, ere the three quick ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... such forebears the generation of Cortes received its heritage of Christian chivalry. The discovery of a new world, peopled by barbarians, opened a fresh field to Spanish missionary zeal, in which the kingdom of God upon earth was to be extended and countless souls rescued from the obscene idolatries and ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady |
