"Obliquity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and referring to my having saved his son's life, in doing which, however, he quite won my heart by the evident pride and affection with which he spoke of Freddy. The lady of the house was a little, round, merry-looking woman, chiefly remarkable (as I soon discovered) for a peculiar mental obliquity, leading her always to think of the wrong thing at the wrong time, whereby she was perpetually becoming involved in grievous colloquial entanglements, and meeting with innumerable small personal accidents, at which no one laughed so heartily ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... upon the believer's understanding. So the man whose whole faith rests on the miraculous and on acts of special intervention, regards the strictly positive and scientific thinker as the dupe of a crude and narrow logic. But this now carries with it no implication of moral obliquity. De Maistre's rather grotesque conviction that infidels always die of horrible diseases with special names, could now only be held among the very dregs ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... the self and the Supreme Soul are separate realities and which is the only barrier to the self's final emancipation and final absorption into the Divine. To the Christian, on the other hand, the dread enemy is sin—that moral obliquity which differentiates the soul from the perfect ethical beauty of God. In consonance with this, the salvation which is exalted as the summum bonum, to be forever sought by the one, is self-knowledge, by the other self-realization in conformity to the Divine Will. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... with him in works of love and charity, sat Thomas Whitson, of the Hicksite school of Friends, fresh from his farm in Lancaster County, dressed in plainest homespun, his tall form surmounted by a shock of unkempt hair, the odd obliquity of his vision contrasting strongly with he clearness and directness of his spiritual insight. Elizur Wright, the young professor of a Western college, who had lost his place by his bold advocacy of freedom, with a look of sharp concentration in keeping with an ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... some thirty-two minutes of sunlight at this latitude. The explanation is that the angle between the equator and the elliptic is no longer 23-1/2 deg. as it has been from time immemorial, but it is greater. If the continuing tilt keeps up long enough, the obliquity will be 90 deg. When that happens, there will be perpetual midday at the north pole and perpetual night at the south pole. The whole northern hemisphere will be bathed in a continuous flood of sunlight while the southern hemisphere will be a region of cold and dark. ...
— The Solar Magnet • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... for example, water reflects 22 rays, at 60 deg. it reflects 65 rays, at 80 deg. 333 rays; while at an incidence of 891/2 deg., where the light almost grazes the surface, it reflects 721 rays out of every 1,000. Thus, as the obliquity increases, the reflection from water approaches, and finally quite overtakes, the perpendicular reflection from mercury; but at no incidence, however great, when the incidence is from air, is the reflection from water, mercury, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... imbecility. He was what you call a remittance man. He got so much a quarter—a miserable sum it was—to keep out of England. He travelled about formerly. But no amount of travel, no association with his betters, could pierce his stolid pachydermatous obliquity. He was the worst kind of Englishman; he could not even cheat without being found out. But for the wise counsels of his lady he would have been in the lock-up over and over again. Such being the case, he took a justifiable pride in his Anglo-Saxon origin. Whenever a project seemed too risky—not ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... heart a good lad, an honourable and honest lad—at times haply 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
... although she never seemed to wish to see him. At last she fell into a 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 meanwhile, and he had fallen heir to the property and the estates. They ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... not opposite one 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 ...
— The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church • A. Hamilton Thompson
... figured in the adjacent cuts, wherein, in place of a single leaf, two are produced in the elm. In the one case the new leaflet springs from the apex of the petiole and partially fills the space consequent on the obliquity of the base of the leaf. In the other it would seem as if two distinct leaves emerged from the stem in juxtaposition. This is probably due to a lateral chorisis or subdivision of the primitive tubercle or growing point, ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... Dock Vincent had not been a person of higher moral purposes than her husband, sad indeed would have been the lot of the two children that slept in the captain's state-room on board of the Caribbee. As is often the case, she knew less of her husband's moral obliquity than the world at large, though even she knew enough to believe that he was not what he should be. People did not tell her of Dock's wicked deeds, and he complained bitterly to her of the hard treatment which the world bestowed upon him. That good men frowned at him and spurned him he unjustly ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... as other men are, and comes through perilous escapades with miraculous success. It is at first difficult to see why Falkland does not realise that his plan of ceaselessly harassing his victim is likely to force Williams to accuse him publicly, but gradually we begin to regard his mental obliquity as one of the decrees of fate. Falkland's obtuseness is of the same nature as that of the sleeper who undertakes a voyage to Australia to deliver a letter which anywhere but in a dream would have been ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... of Eboli, which the misty delirium of the poet 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 ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... really regarded himself as clean handed. Yet deep in his nature was that obliquity, that adeptness at trickery, that facility in deceit, which made him the success he was. He could always meet a crook on his own ground. He had no extraneous sensibilities to eliminate. He mastered a secret process of opening and ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... 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, must ever excite in the minds of men who have been instructed, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... the water but drawn cautiously and rapidly up again, when a red drop at plus 42 degrees 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 to attain an approximation to the quantity of terrestrial ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... that of one conscious always of leading a triumphal 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 Great ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... internal conditions of the age he aimed to reproduce. The project seemed, on the whole, to have been well conceived and consistently prosecuted. It was seldom that Uncle Hiero achieved so harmonious a piece of work; but the idea showed greater moral obliquity than Balder would have looked for in the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... 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
... 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. ...
— 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
... vindication, 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
... is 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 as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... itself, does not help us at all with our own difficulty. I am inclined to think that he is of our nation and fair complexion. Really, when you reflect, it is unjust to assume your tertium quid and complicate the story—yet. We have no actual evidence of her—obliquity." ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... who could use their fists than 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, and an ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... virtue?" Upon this he approached the pawnbroker: it was long before he could obtain a hearing, and he did not find civility. The man was unwilling to part with a valuable pledge so soon, or perhaps he hoped to retain it eventually; or it might be, that the obliquity of his nature disqualified him for respectful behaviour. A pawnbroker is frequently an important witness in criminal proceedings: it has happened to me, therefore, afterwards to see many specimens of this kind of banker; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... silent, thinking over why he was on the Indian. There was a moral obliquity about his present position; the new light of his discovery showed him this strongly. His feelings had been played upon by the owner of the Indian, ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... correct, was the second mate wholly answerable for beginning his life again with the imposture he had practiced? The contributor had either so fallen in love with the literary advantages of his forlorn deceiver that he would see no moral obliquity in him, or he had touched a subtler verity at last in pondering the affair. It seemed now no longer a farce, but had a pathos which, though very different from that of its first aspect, was hardly less tragical. Knowing with what coldness, or, at the best, uncandor, he (representing ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Seven Years' War had largely been waged, should escape contribution 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 ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... night that it was hard to determine the dividing line between the two. So much more of the deck behind him, and of the sky immediately beyond his neck, was obliterated than by any possible human outline. Whether owing to obliquity of disturbed vision, tricks of shadow, or movement of the vessel between the stars and foam, the Irishman saw these singular emanations spread about him into space. He saw them this time directly. And more than ever before they seemed in some way right and comely—true. ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... 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 ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan
... 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 ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... York with 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 ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... warm with his legacy, and tender by the recent separation, thought 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 ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... never-to-be-forgotten voice, of the captain of horse-thieves; and as Roland's sword dropped from his hand in the surprise, up rose Roaring Ralph himself, his eyes rolling, as Roland saw by a second flash of lightning, with thrice their usual obliquity, his left hand scratching among the locks of hair exposed by the blow of the sabre, which had carried off a huge slice of his hat, without doing other mischief, while his right brandished a rifle, which he handled as if about to repay the favour with interest. ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... inclination and 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
... invoking the saints only for their prayers, is indeed most unsatisfactory. Whilst to some minds the expedient to which those writers have had recourse carries with it the stamp of mental reservation, and spiritual subterfuge, and moral obliquity; others under the influence of the purest charity will regret in it the absence of that simplicity, and direct openness in word and deed, which we regard as characteristic of the religion of the ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... than at Chartres, at Reims, and at Rouen, this humble sanctuary, built by Benedictine monks whose names are unknown, represents in its serpentine line, in the perspective of its aisles and the obliquity of its vaulting, the allegorical presentment of our Lord on the Cross. In all other churches the architects have to some extent imitated the cadaverous rigidity of the head fallen in death; at Preuilly the monks have perpetuated the never-to-be-forgotten instant that elapsed between the 'Sitio' ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the Temple, the Pagan's faculties had, unconsciously to himself, acted solely in reference to the daring design which it was the business of his whole existence to entertain. Influenced, therefore, by this obliquity of moral feeling, he had scarcely reflected on the discovery that he had just made at the base of the city wall, ere his mind instantly reverted to the ambitious meditations which had occupied it in the morning; and the next moment, the first dawning conception ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... exists where lymph is in excess over arterial blood. It is distinguished by concavity of features and obliquity of angles, or rather the absence of angles. The face is usually broad in general outline, and concave in profile, the forehead prominent and wide at the upper part, and medium in development at ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... a summer evening, and the conversation, which had roamed in a desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, came round at last to the question of atavism and hereditary aptitudes. The point under discussion was, how far any singular gift in an individual was due to his ancestry and how far to ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... difficult to keep their morale steady, and am inclined to think many of my own sceptical sufferings are traceable to this source. I well remember what reflections arose in my childish mind from a comparison of the Hebrew history, where every moral obliquity is shown out with such naivete, and the Greek history, full of sparkling deeds and brilliant sayings, and their gods and goddesses, the types of beauty and power, with the dazzling veil of flowery language and poetical imagery cast over ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... lazy and idle. Girls are content to sit and have 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. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... 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 ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Sun Temple theory may be, the facts recorded by Sir Norman Lockyer in 1901 are even more so, as by independent calculations he has arrived at the same date for Stonehenge as the archaeologist. Briefly his task was to calculate the extent of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic since the building of Stonehenge. The whole process involves a certain knowledge of astronomical operations and calculations, and the reader is referred to Sir Norman Lockyer's book for the actual steps taken to arrive at his conclusion. But on astronomical grounds pure ...
— Stonehenge - Today and Yesterday • Frank Stevens
... frequently meet with language of similar import in the present day. If we did not know its authorship we could easily tell the ecclesiastical fountain whence it flows. "The implications of false and shallow reasoning," says an American Unitarian divine, "partial observation, intellectual grouping, moral obliquity, spiritual ignorance,—in short, of puerility and superstition involved in a large part of the appeals, the preaching, the cant terms, the popular dogmas, the current conversation of Christendom,—are ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... the normal equanimity observable in circumstantial evidence, hereditary disciplinarisms are totally devoid of potential abstemiousness. This may be owing to the fact that at ebb and neap tides the obliquity of vision (duism) remarked by most invalid veterans in their occasional adversaria, is unconscious of their parental dignity, and by no means to be confounded with the referees in astronomical or pharmaceutical cases, or with ordinary omphalopsychites. Whatever be or not be the result ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... only as to opinion; nevertheless, those who decide upon handwriting believe in their infallibility. Cross-examination can never shake their confidence. Some will pin their faith even to the crossing of a T, "the perpendicularity, my lord," of a down-stroke, or the "obliquity" ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... 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 ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... satire of pathos must always issue from a mind deeply imbued with the ideal. It is nothing but an impulsion towards harmony that can give rise to that deep feeling of moral opposition and that ardent indignation against moral obliquity which amounted to the fulness of enthusiasm in Juvenal, Swift, Rousseau, Haller, and others. These same poets would have succeeded equally well in forms of poetry relating to all that is tender and touching in feeling, and it was only the accidents ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... In his Diary of 1814 there is a passage (vol. ii. page 270.) which I had preserved solely for the purpose of illustrating this obliquity of his mind, intending, at the same time, to accompany it with an explanatory note. From some inadvertence, however, the note was omitted; and, thus left to itself, this piece of mystification has, with the French readers of the work, I see, succeeded ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... point in the friendship of a lady and gentleman, when they bring against each other all kinds of delightful charges of moral obliquity. Take care, Miss Blunt! A couple of intelligent New-Englanders, of opposite sex, young, unmarried, are pretty far gone, when they begin morally to reprobate each other. So you told Mr. Johnson that he is conceited? And I suppose you added, that he was also dreadfully satirical and skeptical? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... called the zodiac is placed under the three that are in the midst, and is oblique, gently touching them all. Likewise, they are all divided in right angles by the meridian, which goes from pole to pole. It is supposed that Pythagoras made the first discovery of the obliquity of the zodiac, but one Oenopides of Chios challenges to himself the invention ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... of the words, 'IF THINE EYE BE SINGLE'? It is an expressive term; and in its curt simplicity covers a profound truth. 'If thine eye,' namely,—the ability to see,—'be single,' that is straight and clear, without dimness or obliquity,— 'thy whole body shall be full of light.' Christ evidently did not apply this expression to the merely physical capability of sight,— but to the moral and mental, or psychic vision. It matters nothing ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... 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
... discourse is, to use his own words, "a rapid sweep through the eons and the centuries," illustrating the great truth of the development of the race from its origin to the time in which we are living. It is a long distance from the planetary fact of the obliquity of the equator, which gave the earth its alternation of seasons, and rendered the history, if not the existence of man and of civilization a possibility, to the surrender of General Lee under the apple-tree ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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 in the greater multiplicity of turns of wire, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... her and for what she stood for. It was in my blood, in my race, in my tradition, in my training. We, all of us for generations, had made for efficiency, for drill, for restraint. Our Romance was just this very Spanish contrast, this obliquity of vision, this slight tilt of the convex mirror that shaped the same world so differently to onlookers at different points of ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... but presume he must, in some way or other, have been connected with the 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, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... back and 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 Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... black; 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 opening ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... readily accounted for. All the modifications alluded to, which have hitherto been applied to the purposes of locomotion, are adaptations of plane surfaces. Now it is the character of plane surfaces to present the same angle, and consequently to impinge upon the air with the same condition of obliquity throughout. But the rate of revolution, and consequently of impact, varies according to the distance from the axis; being greatest at the outer edge, and gradually diminishing as it approaches the centre of rotation, where it may be supposed to be altogether evanescent. ...
— A Project for Flying - In Earnest at Last! • Robert Hardley
... 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 ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... Mr. Crawford. "I'll give you a lick after school. Think of bringing obliquity upon the school in the presence of a teacher from the Old ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... went back to town in much better spirits, and so absorbed in his hopes, that, when he arrived at Podden Place, he did not observe that, from some obliquity of vision, or want of the normal correspondence between will and muscle, his hand twice missed the knocker-wandering first above, then below it; and that, when actually in his clasp, he did not feel the solid iron: the sense ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Editorial Wild Oats • Mark Twain
... associations, and 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 wandering instinct was greatest,—viz. ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... of the 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 which are found in his ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... whether the man of the embassy had had a snub nose or the thin straight feature of this man who would have attracted her attention in any ease if only because he did not carry his shoulders with the disillusioning obliquity of the British Army...why did he not turn round? Alexina felt an impulse to throw her cup straight across the room at the back of ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... my sister Arabel, 'it would not do.' And she was right, and we all agreed that she was right. It is an obliquity of the will—and one laughs at it till the turn comes for crying. Poor Henrietta has suffered silently, with that softest of possible natures, which hers is indeed; beginning with implicit obedience, and ending with ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... as well as of conduct, was convincing proof that he acted without principle, and was influenced by his own selfish views. Man, to be great, must act always from principle. Principle, like truth, is a straight edge, will admit of no obliquity, is always the same, and under all circumstances: conduct squared by principle, and sustained by truth, inspires respect and confidence, and these attributes, though they may and do belong to very ordinary minds, are nevertheless ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... XXXII. ), and passed through the conjoint tendon straight to the external ring, the epigastric artery will be found on the outside of the neck of the sac. In recent herniae the differential diagnosis is comparatively easy, but in those of old standing and large size, in which the obliquity of the canal has been much diminished, it is almost impossible to tell of what kind the hernia originally was, and consequently to determine in which direction it is safe to incise ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... upward by the centrifugal action of the screw will, by impinging on the overhanging stern, press the vessel forward in the water, just in the same way as is done by the wind when acting on an oblique sail. I believe, the two revolving vanes without any twist or obliquity on them at all, would propel a vessel if set well forward in the dead wood or beneath the bottom, merely by the ascent of the water up the inclined plane of the vessel's run; and, at all events, a screw ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... 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 ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... 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 tables are level. The nippers and dividers ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... 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 ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... was considerate on my part: I was allowing for the angle of obliquity in your vision. You would have exactly ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... we 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 most popular (and, we venture to add, most ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 on Down to the ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... the use of which he is a great master; 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
... second makes them 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 and idiot ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... 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
... reconcile a sincere personal confession with the decorous obliquity of an Official Narrative; and I found that I had put the Antarctic Committee in a difficulty from which I could rescue them only by taking the book off their hands; for it was clear that what I had written was not ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... 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, ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... of some shells originate from the thinness of the laminae of which they consist, rather than to any colouring matter, as is seen in mother-pearl, which reflects different colours according to the obliquity of the light which falls on it. The beautiful prismatic colours seen on the Labrodore stone are owing to a similar cause, viz. the thinness of the laminae of which it consists, and has probably ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... jury to vest it in 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 ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... The mode universally adopted by Nature is the oblique waft of the wing. We have only to choose between the direct beat overtaking the velocity of the current, like the oar of a boat, or one applied like the wing, in some assigned degree of obliquity to it. Suppose 35 feet per second to be the velocity of an aerial vehicle, the oar must be moved with this speed previous to its being able to receive any resistance; then if it be only required to ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... something acutely touching in this humble petition. He had always felt a sort of imaginative tenderness for poor little unexplained Giacosa, and these words seemed a supreme contortion of the mysterious obliquity of his life. All of a sudden, as he watched the Cavaliere, something occurred to him; it was something very odd, and it stayed his glance suddenly from again turning to Mrs. Light. His idea embarrassed him, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... angle the Perpendicular masonry turns the corner and enfolds 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, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon - A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric • Cecil Walter Charles Hallett
... but little 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 piece by a ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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 to be minors or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... outsider can possibly understand; for, by common agreement, arbitrary names are applied to every object which the robbers at any time handle, and to every sort of underhand business which they transact. But this gibberish is not exactly an outcome of any moral obliquity; it is employed as a means of securing safety. The gipsy cant is the remnant of a pure and ancient language; we all occasionally use terms taken from this remarkable tongue, and, when we speak of a "cad," or "making a mull," or "bosh," ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... observatory was built. Large numbers of 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 ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... so confounded, perplexed, alarmed, and grieved me, as the discovery of Mr Clayton's criminality and falsehood. There are mental and moral concussions, which, like physical shocks, stun and stupify with their suddenness and violence. This was one of them. Months after I had been satisfied of his obliquity, it was difficult to realize the conviction that truth and justice authoritatively demanded. When I thought of the minister—when his form presented itself to my mind's eye, as it did, day after day, and hour after hour, it was impossible to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... 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 ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... 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 ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... was all said good-naturedly, was meant to be funny, and was uttered from a public rostrum with an utter obliviousness to the mental obliquity that a moment's thought will disclose. It left upon my mind much the same impression as that once made by hearing an apparently respectable man boast of having stolen an umbrella ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... downward. And thus, by changing the situation of the stone, as often as there is occasion, the island is made to rise and fall by turns in an oblique direction, and by those alternate risings and fallings (the obliquity being not considerable) is conveyed from one part of the dominions ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... a piece of glass or a stone which are about to emerge with different inclinations. (See Fig. 1.) As their course approaches more nearly to the surface, so will the emerging rays issue more nearly along the surface of the stone; but the obliquity of the emerging rays increases much more rapidly than that of the internal rays, until for one ray in the series the direction of the light (C in the figure) refracted out coincides with that surface. What, then, will happen to the light ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1082, September 26, 1896 • Various
... dangerous—say a river, a town, or a forest—the aeronaut perceiving to his right, let us suppose, a piece of ground suitable for his purpose, pulls at the cords which surround the right side, and by thus imparting a greater obliquity to his roof of silk, glides through the air, which it cleaves obliquely, towards the desired spot. Every descent, in fact, is determined by the side on ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... as homeless wayfarer in exile, making his way from place to place. When he falls from grace it is Beatrice who disturbs his peace of mind by "a battle of thoughts." It is the "strong image" of Beatrice who comes to him as he had seen her as a child, raises him from moral obliquity, fills him with the very essence of the spiritual. Then he has a wonderful vision—"a vision in which I saw things which made me resolve to speak no more of this blessed one (Beatrice) until I could more worthily treat ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... of moral obliquity on the slavery question, Douglas made a dignified and worthy reply. "I hold that the people of the slave-holding States are civilized men as well as ourselves; that they bear consciences as well as we, and that they are accountable to God and their posterity, and not to us. It is for them to decide, ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... the two halves of the brain; Second, an obliquity of the interior part of the brain or skull—in fact, a continuation upward of what is usually termed a sloping forehead; third, a distinct lessening of the posterior cerebral lobes, so that, as in the lower animals, they are not large enough ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... three or four months, the brig cruised among the other islands of the Western Carolines, buying copra and turtle-shell in considerable quantities; for the much-maligned "Bully," despite his moral obliquity of vision in his commercial dealings with the merchants of Tahiti and other Polynesian ports, yet possessed the confidence of the wild Caroline Islanders to a remarkable degree. Then we returned to Ponape, where we remained a month, wooding and watering and cleaning the ship's bottom ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... the Negro, and that the years of freedom already enjoyed by him have simply brought forth a generation of vipers. Too often, from the lowest to the highest court, the records are so manipulated as to show the moral obliquity of the Negro. It is a potent fact that public opinion of the Negro is largely, if not wholly, based upon press reports, whether it pertains to religion, politics, morality, or otherwise. I hold, therefore, that it is largely misinformation that brings the Negro into bad odor in this regard, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... ill-made urchin, who, by his stunted growth, seemed about twelve or thirteen years old, though he was probably, in reality, a year or two older, with a carroty pate in huge disorder, a freckled, sunburnt visage, with a snub nose, a long chin, and two peery grey eyes, which had a droll obliquity of vision, approaching to a squint, though perhaps not a decided one. It was impossible to look at the little man without some disposition to laugh, especially when Gammer Sludge, seizing upon and kissing him, in spite of his struggling and kicking in reply to her caresses, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... awful magnitude of the universe, so do we conjecture the magnitude of human life by resolving into distinct shapes the nebulous mist of antiquity separated from us by vast intervals in time. The profoundest lessons, such as are heeded by the race, such as are universally intelligible, have this obliquity of origin. Thus, in the distractions of the present, no relief is found through compensatory consolations from the present; but we turn to the figures of the past,—figures caught in the mind, and held fixed, as in bas-relief,—figures ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... At length I was awakened to something like consciousness, by a rapid and universal expectoration. I rose, and became painfully distressed by a conflict of opposing feelings. I remembered, in spite of the present obliquity of the minister, his great kindness to me—I remembered it with gratitude—this urged me to speak aloud, whilst a sense of justice as strongly demanded silence, and pity for the man whom I had undertaken to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... sanctity I bloom, With surplus of beatitude I bless, I'm the confidant of Destiny and Doom, I'm the apogee of knowledge more or less. If I lie, it is to temporize with lying Lest obliquity should suffer in the light. If I prey upon the widow and the dying, They withheld; and I compel them to do right. I am justified in all that I endeavor, If I fail it is because the rest are fools. I'm serene and unimpeachable forever, The ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... coulisses of the Opera, or in thousands scowling from under a shako 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 utter selfishness, of ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... the 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 ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... negotiations which preceded hostilities. If in 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 ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... probably correct in its general estimate, represents him as a successful student of astronomy and geography, and as one of the pioneers of exact science among the Greeks. He taught, if he did not discover, the obliquity of the ecliptic, is said to have introduced into Greece the gnomon (for determining the solstices) and the sundial, and to have invented some kind of geographical map. But his reputation is due mainly to his work on nature, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of a glossy bell-crowned hat, which is worn a little inclined to one side, at the angle of self-reliance,—this being a very slight dip, as compared to the outrageous slant of country dandies and the insolent obliquity indulged in by a few unpleasantly conspicuous city-youth, who prove that "it takes three generations to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... Association in 1881 Sir John Lubbock called attention to the fact that these animals appear to indicate both a hot and a cold climate, and he referred to the fact (known to astronomers) that the earth passes through periods of slow change in the eccentricity of its orbit, and in the obliquity of the ecliptic. The result of the latter condition is, to produce periods of about 21,000 years each, during one-half of which the Northern hemisphere will be hotter, and in the other the Southern. At present we ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... 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. ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... 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 |
