"Obscure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the respectable inhabitants, instead of being termed 'larrikins,' as in Victoria, are denominated 'hoodleums.' The name is more musical than the one in vogue here, and probably equally as descriptive, as its origin appears to be just as obscure as that of the word 'larrikin.' This word, before it got into print, was confined to the Irish policemen, who generally pronounced it 'lerrikan,' and it has been suggested that the term is of Hibernian origin, and ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... a strange text, and a more obscure passage, perhaps, than any other in the New Testament, for I do not certainly know what St. Peter means. At first sight, the words import as though Christ had preached to the spirits,—that is, the souls which were formerly unbelieving at the time Noah was building ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... if he did not care to go to walk, there was his room with the books in the chimney cupboard. Some of them David had read before, but many of them he had not. One or two were old friends; but not so "Dare Devil Dick," and "The Pirates of Pigeon Cove" (which he found hidden in an obscure corner behind a loose board). Side by side stood "The Lady of the Lake," "Treasure Island," and "David Copperfield"; and coverless and dogeared lay "Robinson Crusoe," "The Arabian Nights," and "Grimm's Fairy Tales." There were more, many more, and David devoured them all with eager eyes. ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... from the scarp. He seems, to judge from reports, to have gone a little way south in the thicker timber, and then to have turned north again in the direction of Blaauwildebeestefontein. After that his movements are obscure. He was seen on the Klein Labongo, but the sight of the post at Blaauwildebeestefontein must have convinced him that a korhaan could not escape that way. The next we heard of him was that he had ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... turned obediently. Presently they were moving in a wide circle with the houseboat as a center. A slight surface wind had arisen and the water in the cove was a bit choppy, but not enough to obscure bubble tracks made by Scuba ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... going east. It was storming, but it was not dark, and they knew each foot of the way. At first, on the level, the woman rode in one of the sleds, but when it grew hilly, she trudged behind. Her sharp eyes now keenly searched every dark or obscure spot along the hillside trail. The wind lessened somewhat, and the moon came ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... provided with cigarettes and other comforts for the men, and asked him to give me a runner to take me to the front line. He absolutely refused to do anything of the kind, as he told me he did not know where it was himself. The situation was most obscure. Our men had attacked and had been driven back and then they had attacked again, but he thought they were now in shell holes and would be hard to find. In fact, he was most anxious about the condition of affairs and was hoping ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... and explain any obscurities of speech arising either from a difficulty in the things signified, or from the words uttered being unknown, or from the figures of speech employed, according to Dan. 5:16, "I have heard of thee, that thou canst interpret obscure things, and resolve difficult things." Hence the interpretation of speeches is more excellent than the gift of tongues, as appears from the saying of the Apostle (1 Cor. 14:5), "Greater is he that prophesieth than he that speaketh with tongues; unless perhaps he interpret." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... until there was one universal shout. Then some favorite general officer, dashing by, followed by his staff, would explain the cause. At other times, the same cheering and enthusiasm would result from the passage down the column of some obscure and despised officer, who knew it was all a joke, and looked mean and sheepish accordingly. But no man could produce more prolonged or hearty cheers than the "old hare" which jumped the fence and invited the column to a chase; and often it was said, when the rolling shout arose: "There goes old ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... have crossed the whole of Europe, from fair to fair, and to have completed his strange education as an artist and magician at the very fountain-head of art and magic, among the Gipsies. A period of Erik's life remained quite obscure. He was seen at the fair of Nijni-Novgorod, where he displayed himself in all his hideous glory. He already sang as nobody on this earth had ever sung before; he practised ventriloquism and gave displays ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... the bread of impatience, until The First Half Million are ready. Thereupon we shall break through our foeman's line at a point hitherto unassailed and known only to the scribe of Dundee, and proceed to roll up the German Empire as if it were a carpet, into some obscure corner of the ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... ardent natures, is generally the preparation for an outburst of activity that is to dazzle, or delight, or terrify the world. Thence he came back, a stripling of twenty years, dazed with dreaming and surfeited with classic lore, to begin the struggle for existence in his native Rome as an obscure notary. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... this obscure period that the drama was really performed; and its scene was in the heart of Esther, shut away from all eyes. Had this warm, upright, sullen girl been differently used by destiny, had events come upon ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 89. This is, rather, obscure. Nilakantha observes that the Vedic text referred to is: 'Do not covet anybody's property.' What Janaka says seems to be this: Thinking of this prohibition about coveting other people's property, I thought how could it be ascertained what belongs ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of this remarkable achievement, one which for boldness, intrepidity, and skill in expedients has few to rival it in the annals of history, and which, if performed by men of note, instead of by an obscure band of robbers, would have won for them a high ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... this town. I am well acquainted with him, and have brought him twice to my Lord's to dinner. He looks very simple. He telleth me that one Borrheus, that hath written well upon Aristot. priorum, &c., even now is printing goodly commentaries upon Aristotle's Rhetoric. But Sturmius will obscure them all." ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... POST after POST succeeds, and, all day long, GAZETTES and LEDGERS swarm, a noisy throng. When evening comes, she comes with all her train; Of LEDGERS, CHRONICLES, and POSTS again. Like bats, appearing when the sun goes down, From holes obscure and corners of the town. Of all these triflers, all like these, I write; Oh! like my subject could my song delight, The crowd at Lloyd's one poet's name should raise, And all the Alley echo to his praise. In shoals the hours their constant ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... appraise it. "Yes, of course, it's quite too extraordinary," she would concede briskly. "An impossible creature, of course; one feels that he was laughing at her all the time—it's not his best work, rarely!" And she would drag Jim past forty interesting canvases to pounce upon some obscure, small painting in a dark corner. "There!" she would say triumphantly, "isn't that astonishing! So kyawiously frank, if you know what I mean? It's most amazing—his sense of depth, if you know what I mean? Rarely, to splash things on in that way, and to grasp it." A clawed little hand would ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... vehement declamation and easy credulity of his antagonists. 1. The silence of Valentinian may suggest a probable argument that the partial severities, which were exercised in the name and provinces of his colleague, amounted only to some obscure and inconsiderable deviations from the established system of religious toleration: and the judicious historian, who has praised the equal temper of the elder brother, has not thought himself obliged to contrast the tranquillity of the West with the cruel persecution ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... to be left to himself in his utter bewilderment! Flo, separated from her detrimental uncle, and placed in a convent school! Tarbox, the obscure pioneer, a shrewd speculator emerging into success, and taking the uncle's place! And all this within that month which he had wasted with absurd repinings. How feeble seemed his own adventure and advancement; how even ludicrous his pretensions to any patronage and superiority. ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... records of long continued priapism in which either the cause is due to excessive stimulation of the sexual center or in which the cause is obscure or unknown. There may or may not be accompanying voluptuous feelings. The older records contain instances of continued infantile priapism caused by the constant irritation of ascarides and also records of prolonged priapism associated with intense agony and spasmodic cramps. Zacutus ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... some concrete expression. In this very matter of the State, for example, we are dealing with an organization of individuals, and if our way of talking about it makes us overlook the flesh and blood of which it is composed, the other way may obscure in our minds the vital differences introduced by the very fact of organization. The Germans have often seen the wood more clearly when the Englishman was more careful to distinguish and name the trees. So ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... art—The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat, which one might call a fantasia upon Publicity, and (to my mind the best thing in the volume) My Son's Wife, an exquisitely humorous and cunning study in the Influence of Landed Estate upon a Modern. If this definition strikes you as obscure, read the story and you will understand. For the rest, as I said above, all tastes are catered for; so that the rival schools who admire Mr. KIPLING most as the creator of Plain Tales, or Stalky or Puck, will each receive encouragement and support; while, if there be those who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... thus:—each physician is a physician of one disease and of no more; and the whole country is full of physicians, for some profess themselves to be physicians of the eyes, others of the head, others of the teeth, others of the affections of the stomach, and others of the more obscure ailments. ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... of Oxford is more or less connected with that of the obscure and insignificant monastery of St. Frideswide, though even at Oxford it is observable that the town and the University grew up in almost entire independence of any influence exercised by any of the older religious ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... the welfare of the child and allow no other point to obscure this—is the whole meaning of the ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... strangely and so luckily chosen, while the mass was rejected. For that mass, from earliest childhood until death, there was only toil in squalor—squalid food, squalid clothing, squalid shelter. And when she read one day—in an obscure paragraph in her newspaper—that the income of the average American family was less than twelve dollars a week—less than two dollars and a half a week for each individual—she realized that what she was seeing and living was not New York and Cincinnati, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... a wilderness obscure, The lonely mansion lay; A refuge to the neighbouring poor, And strangers ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... an engagement. Ma foi, there is no hurry. My daughter is only seventeen years old, and your son twenty-one. While we wait, time will be progressing, events will succeed each other; things which in the evening look dark and obscure, appear but too clearly in the light of morning, and sometimes the utterance of one word, or the lapse of a single day, will reveal the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... office, viz. a fuller recital in the preamble of the Bill and no penal clause in the body of it. (The present Bill looked pettish and undignified, as if framed in anger as a return for the insult, and not a correction of the state of the law.) He thought the Law very complex and obscure, and never found it acted upon. He would have proposed therefore that Committees of both Houses should enquire into the whole subject; the state of the Convents; whether subjects were detained against ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... longer, but, leaning against the back of his chair, he let his head fall upon his breast. He remained for some time buried in thought and vainly trying to connect the obscure words he had just heard with Lambernier's incomplete revelations. With the exception of Gerfaut, who did not lose one of his host's movements, the guests, more or less absorbed by their own sensations, paid no attention to the strange attitude of the master of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... obscure gentleman of very great virtue, who has recently become Guise's most valued counsellor. He keeps Guise on his guard against Catherine's wiles, they say, and discourages Guise's amour with her daughter, Marguerite, which Catherine has an interest in maintaining. ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... my fortune had changed. One good thing followed another. It is always darkest before the storm breaks that clears the sky. My horizon so lately dim and obscure began to clear. As if five hundred dollars, safely deposited in a marble-front bank, wasn't enough for one week to convince me that life had something for me besides misfortune, three days after Mrs. Sewall ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... was not obscure and unimportant. His father had been a successful general in Britain and Africa, and he himself had been instructed by his father in the art of war, and had served under him with distinction. As Duke of Maesia he had vanquished an ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... From that region royal and mighty mansion, The seed celestial and heavenly wisdom, The Second Person, and God's one Son, For our sake is man become. This godly sphere, descended here, Into a virgin clear, She undefiled, By whose work, obscure our ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... well says, "The stars are instruments of far greater use than to give an obscure light, and for men to gaze on after sunset"; and he quotes Plotinus as affirming that they "are significant, but not efficient"; and also Augustine as saying, "Deus regit inferiora corpora per superiora": God rules the bodies below by those above. But best of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... was only to strengthen the agreement, and it was arranged that the infant heir of James III should marry the Princess Cecilia, Edward's daughter. In 1479-80, when the French were again alarmed by the diplomacy of Edward IV, we find an outbreak of hostilities, the precise cause of which is somewhat obscure. It is certain that Edward made no effort to preserve the peace, and he sent, in 1481, a fleet to attack the towns on the Firth of Forth, in revenge for a border raid for which James had attempted to apologize. Edward was unable to secure the services of his old ally, ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... dreamer of participating in the glory. His grandfather had been a citizen of Earth and gave up a commercial position to take a job that amounted to little more than a janitor in an obscure department of Interplanetary Financial Clearing. He wanted to get into the big job, into space, but never made it. Ronny's father managed to work up to the point where he was a supervisor in Interplanetary ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... to make of it. It may be designed to show the rudeness of the soldiery, and the peril in which any follower of Jesus would have been had he been caught. Some have supposed that the young man was St. Mark, and that this is the painter's signature in an obscure corner of his picture. (See Holzmann in Handcommentar zum Neuen Testament.) In the first volume of the Expositor there is a paper on the subject by Dr. Cox, but it does not throw much light ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... and the opportunities of education in Ireland, and made an English statesman's name beloved in the Emerald Isle for the first time since Charles James Fox. Nor should his great work for Ireland obscure the grand achievements of the earlier years when he led the Liberal party through its wonderful program of reform in England; nor should any prejudice against the friend of Ireland dull our perception to the clear voice which so often pleaded the cause of ignorance and ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... which adjourned in 1891 left the School Suffrage Law obscure, incomplete and with no provisions to carry out its intentions. In many cases the women had to provide their own ballots and ballot-boxes. To the credit of the large majority of the judges of election it can be said that they accepted the votes of the women ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... hillocks, here and there, over snowy great mushrooms, of a sort to be salted and eaten during fasts. The wife of the priest, who is condemned to so much fasting, had a wonderfully keen instinct for these particular mushrooms, and had explained to us all their merits, which seemed obscure to our non-fasting souls. Our Russian forester regaled us with forest lore, as we lay on our backs to look at the tops of the trees. But, to my amazement, he had never heard of the Leshi and the Vodyanoi, the wood-king and water-king of the folk-tales. At all events, he ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... this, conclusions must, as a rule, be stated with few of the facts upon which they rest, for to give more than the plainest of these would be to far outrun the possible limits of space, and would furthermore lead into technical details which to most readers are obscure and wearisome. ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... be overcome with a passionate distaste for the grandeur and splendor that surrounded him, and long to lay aside his brilliant position, and fly to the retirement of an humble and obscure life. ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... great Apostle expressed what every ambassador of Christ constantly experiences when in the thick of the Master's work. His are the joys of acquisition. His purse may be scanty, his teaching may be humble, and the field of his labor may be so obscure that no bulletins of his achievements are ever proclaimed to an admiring world. Difficulties may sadden and discouragement bring him to his knees; but I tell you that obscure, toiling man of God has a joy vouchsafed ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... is a little obscure. The Spanish has 'y moviendo asimismo los otros del otro bordo, aquellos que tienen sus carretones que andan per ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... hand; an index and obscure prologue to the history of lust and foul thoughts. They met so near with their lips that their breaths embraced together. Villainous thoughts, Roderigo! when these mutualities so marshal the way, hard at hand comes the master and main exercise, the incorporate conclusion: pish!—But, ...
— Othello, the Moor of Venice • William Shakespeare
... suppress stage-plays." Yet, all this notwithstanding, some little show of life stirred now and then in the seeming corpse of the drama. A few players met furtively, assembled a select audience, and gave a clandestine performance, more or less complete, in some obscure quarter. Secret Royalists and but half-hearted Puritans abounded, and these did not scruple to abet a breach of the law, and to be entertained now and then in the ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... the key, the lock creaked very loudly, but at the same moment he was aware of another and a different sound—that of a door opening. The Count turns, and in the centre of an obscure side-room, whose door was open, he sees a white figure, with its ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... according to the ancient constitution. In pursuance of this policy they took down from the hill of Areopagus the laws of Ephialtes and Archestratus relating to the Areopagite Council; they also repealed such of the statutes of Solon as were obscure, and abolished the supreme power of the law-courts. In this they claimed to be restoring the constitution and freeing it from obscurities; as, for instance, by making the testator free once for all to leave his property as he pleased, ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... the feelings of his dead wife's only brother. But the Major's invariable courtesy to the poor or unfortunate was no longer in evidence when he found that John Merrick was a multi-millionaire with a strongly defined habit of doing good to others and striving in obscure and unconventional ways to make everybody around him happy. His affection for the little man increased mightily, but his respectful attitude promptly changed, and a chance to reprove or discomfit his absurdly rich brother-in-law was one of his most satisfactory ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... cause Rizzio owed his power (and to even the most clear-sighted historians this point has always remained obscure), be it that he ruled as lover, be it that he advised as minister, his counsels as long as he lived were always given for the greater glory of the queen. Sprung from so low, he at least wished to show himself worthy, of having risen so high, and owing everything to Mary, he tried to repay her with ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... beautiful and lucky player, were figures being woven into a web of tapestry together; that they were forced to group themselves as the weaver of the web decreed. He saw his own figure woven into an obscure and shadowy corner far from that of Mary, and, rebelling against the choice of the weaver, wished to tear the tapestry in pieces. But the next moment he was ready to smile at himself with the quiet, cynical smile ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... in future as 'Lady Daphne,' and treat her in all respects as your equal in rank.... I don't know why you should look so surprised." (If they did, it was merely that any such recommendation should be thought necessary.) "Miss Heritage's parentage may, it is true, be obscure—but not more so, from all I have been told, than that of most of your own ancestresses. Indeed, I am much mistaken if she has not a better claim to be considered a lady than any of them. Not that I think mere birth of any importance myself, but I object to people giving themselves airs ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... methods is apparent. Physiologists and gynaecologists believe that in natural intercourse there is, apart from fertilisation, an absorption of certain substances into the system of the woman. The role of this absorption is at present obscure, but it obviously exists for a purpose; and it is permissible to speculate whether, under natural conditions of intercourse, there is not a mutual biological reaction that makes, amongst other things, for physical ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... brush. Where there had been a forest there was now only a stump field and the figures of the men carrying armloads of the dry branches of trees and throwing them on the fire. The fire made a great splash of color in the gathering darkness and for some obscure reason both girls were deeply moved by the sight, sound, and perfume of the night. The figures of the men seemed to dance back and forth in the light. Instinctively Clara turned her face upward and looked at the stars. She was conscious of them and ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... swept along rapidly, now appearing to my eyes somewhat whiter on top, although the surrounding red was so glaringly prominent as to obscure everything else. Suddenly the creature gave a kick and whirled over, turning the white expanse directly toward us. At the same moment De Noyan dropped the point of his rapier against the side of the boat, with ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... escape the other. Looked upon as the word of God, pointing out the only means of salvation, men placed themselves, through the Bible, in direct communication with the Deity, and, casting aside the authority of a church, acknowledged responsibility to Him alone. The difficulty of interpreting obscure portions of the Scriptures drove many to frenzy and despair. A hopeful or consoling passage was hailed with joy. "Happy are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." "Lo," wrote Tyndale, "here God hath made a covenant wyth us, to mercy full unto us, yf we ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... whispered, "you know I loved you more than any other human being, but I dare not show it lest my feelings should run riot with me. Farewell! The future is all obscure and uncertain. I dare not talk of ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... herself in the end if she persevered. A good man might have failed to comprehend Beth, but a good man would have felt the force of goodness in her, and would have reverenced her. Maclure recognised no force in her and felt no reverence; all that was not animal in her was as obscure to him as to the horse in his stable that whinnied a welcome to her when she came because he expected sugar. It is pleasant to give pleasure; but there must be more in marriage for it to be satisfactory than free scope to ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... learn little about her father's death as yet. A Paris paper reported, and Boston papers copied, the statement that an American of his name, stopping at an obscure French town, was missing for two days, and found on the third, murdered, robbed, horribly disfigured. Mr. George Breynton had been traveling alone in the interior of the country, and had written home that he should be in this town—St. Pierre—at precisely ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... dainty baby feet To make thy mother's life and love complete? What truer hand than His could mark thy path? What greater love than God, thy Father, hath? What greater wisdom shields thee from all strife? What greater mercy grants eternal life? When shadows come, and clouds obscure thy way He knows that darkness only heralds day. If bruised thy flesh, though mother's heart may bleed, He, in His mercy, knows thy greatest need. Then, little feet, though mother's prayers may rise, In love and trust, that never doubt ...
— Nestlings - A Collection of Poems • Ella Fraser Weller
... and their defeats, thou wert in darkness still. Yes, their failures, their errors even, have a right to your respect; for man is weak..... Weep then, for us obscure travellers—unknown victims, who, by our mortal sufferings and unheard-of labors, have prepared the way before you. Pity me, who have passionately loved justice, and perseveringly sought for truth, only opened ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... biography, criticism, romance, he had absorbed every thing in our language worthy of attention. Shakspeare, Milton, indeed all the English poets, were his familiar companions. There was not a disputed passage or an obscure reading in any one of the great plays upon which he could not off-hand quote the best renderings, and throw original light from his own illumined mind. Upon theology he had apparently bestowed years of investigation and reflection. A sincere Christian, he had been a devout and constant student of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... trembling soul— Thy sins so heinous and so foul, Which like a cloud obscure thy day, I've blotted out, ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... Mr Barnacle, 'to any member of the—Public,' mentioning that obscure body with reluctance, as his natural enemy, 'to memorialise the Circumlocution Department. Such formalities as are required to be observed in so doing, may be known on application to the proper branch ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... for her effort? May we not rather believe that life's tree may have risen at first in hundreds of tentative trunks of which two have become in the progress of the ages so far dominant as to entirely obscure less progressive types? The Myxomycetes are independent; all that we may attempt is to assert their near kinship with one or other of ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... the poor teacher was forced to pay her scanty dollars. There were bulletins, rules, counter-rules. As she talked, Sommers caught the atmosphere of the great engine to which she had given herself. A mere isolated atom, she was set in some obscure corner of this intricate machine, and she was compelled to revolve with the rest, as the rest, in the fear of disgrace and of hunger. The terms "special teachers," "grades of pay," "constructive work," "discipline," ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... possessed but little firmness and an insatiable thirst after distinction. To jostle men of rank and property out of his path, and to jostle them successfully, when approaching the heart of an heiress, was too much for the vanity of an obscure young man, with only a handsome person and good talents to recommend him. The glare of fashionable life, and the unexpected success of his addresses made him giddy, and despite an ineffaceable conviction of dishonor and treachery, he found himself husband ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Vittel, a scholar of Neufchateau. She was the most learned of all, for she had heard stories read out of books. Among the godmothers there are mentioned also the wife of Nicolas d'Arc, Jacques' brother, and two obscure Christians, one called Agnes, the other Sibylle.[164] Here, as in every group of good Catholics, we have a number of Jeans, Jeannes, and Jeannettes. St. John the Baptist was a saint of high repute; his festival, kept on the 24th ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... thought and opinion, and propagandists of new ideas; they are often also store-houses of facts, repositories of history, annals of biography, records of genealogy, treasuries of statistics, chronicles of invention and discovery. They sometimes throw an unexpected light upon obscure questions where all books are silent. Being published for the most part upon some subject that was interesting the public mind when written, they reflect, as in a mirror, the social, political, and religious spirit and life of the time. As much as newspapers, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... acts which display the mind of the deposed king are all exquisite, though their beauty is not obvious to the many. There is a kind of intensity of the soul, so intense that it is obscure to the many till it is interpreted. Writers of plays know well how tamely words intensely felt may read. They know, too, how like fire upon many souls those words will be when the voice and the action ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... mussels, very hard-coated bombadier beetles, stinging insects and nauseous-tasted caterpillars, can afford to be brilliant by the various means of active defence or passive protection they possess, other than obscure colouration. He says "the {27} attitudes of some insects may also protect them, as the habit of turning up the tail by the harmless rove-beetles (Staphylinidae) no doubt leads other animals, besides children, to the belief that they can sting. The curious attitude assumed by sphinx ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... most pretensions in this topsy-turvy of a world regard it as a disgrace to have been obscure and ignorant, and pride themselves upon their persistence in their own kind of obscurity and ignorance! No wonder the few strong men do about as they please with such a race of nincompoopery. If they didn't grow old and tired, what would they ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... I looked upon so sinister a country or a swamp so vast and desolate. It seemed more black than dusky, and the gloom lay not in the obscure light of thick-set spruce, pine, and hemlock, but in the shaggy, monstrous, and forbidding growth which appeared to be soiled with some common dye, water, earth, tree-trunks, foliage—all wore the same inky livery, and seemed wrought of rusty iron, so still the huge trees stood, with every ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... seem to think that an hypothesis about obscure and remote questions of history can be refuted by a simple demand for the production of more evidence than in fact exists.—But the true test of an hypothesis, if it cannot be shewn to conflict with known truths, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... much weight to the argument arising from the lines on the Earl of Mulgrave himself contained in the poem. To transfer suspicion from himself, in so general a satire, it was necessary to include his own name amongst the rest; but, though the lines are somewhat obscure, it is, after all, as respects him, compared with the other persons mentioned, a very gentle flagellation, and something like what children call a make-believe. Indeed Rochester, in a letter to his friend Henry Saville (21st Nov. 1679), speaks of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various
... an obscure warrior I have elevated you, E-Thas, to the honors of a chief. Within the confines of the palace your word is second only to mine. You are not loved for this, E-Thas, and should another jeddak ascend the throne of Manator what would ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a wonderful people, these Romans, as even this obscure corner of Europe can witness," said Lady Mabel, her eyes dwelling on the beautiful colonade, and tracing out the exquisite symmetry of the shafts, and the rich ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... case might be, we had no fancy for further illustrating in our own persons their superiority in the art of mystification. And we were rendered all the more anxious by the fact that with nightfall the sky became overspread with a thin canopy of cloud that, while not sufficiently dense to wholly obscure the stars, so dimmed their lustre that it became difficult to distinguish, even through our night-glasses, the forms of the waves at a greater distance than half-a-mile; while as for the chase, we were at length reluctantly compelled to admit to each ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... House—fifty-six miles. All the young men of that day were fond of that sport. But the fashion of rapid driving deserted England; and, I believe, trotted over to America. Where are the amusements of our youth? I hear of no gambling now but amongst obscure ruffians; of no boxing but amongst the lowest rabble. One solitary four-in-hand still drove round the parks in London last year; but that charioteer must soon disappear. He was very old; he was attired after the fashion of the year 1825. He must drive ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hide its diminished head," it is, with a few exceptions, very unfortunate for a nation when a man of abilities, without rank or property, pushes himself forward to notice. Alas! what unheard of misery have thousands suffered to purchase a cardinal's hat for an intriguing obscure adventurer, who longed to be ranked with princes, or lord it over them by seizing ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... a year," writes a captain in the Spanish Navy, "we have had only one target practice, and that limited in extent, in order to expend the least possible amount of ammunition." The short brilliant moments of triumph in war are the sign and the seal of the long hours of obscure preparations, of which target practice is but one item. Had even the nominal force of Spain been kept in efficient condition for immediate action, the task of the United States would have been greatly prolonged and far ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... were not content to collect their prey only in obscure and little-known regions, for a chance was seen to commercialize the small birds of the forests and fields. Warblers, Thrushes, Wrens, in fact all those small forms of dainty bird life which come about the ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... has the greatest breadth, a fact which, taken in connexion with their early annals, can scarcely fail to be regarded as the work of a special Providence. After the fall of the Roman empire, a scanty and obscure people suddenly burst on the west and east, as the dominant race of the times; one swarm of the Normans making its way to England, while another was establishing its supremacy over the Sclavonians of the Borysthenes, the two being to meet in opposite ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... studying for rank or honor, but because he enjoyed doing what was right and fit for a young man to do; and now the reward had come to him, like the sun breaking through the clouds which seemed to obscure his future prospects. Still, there was a hard road before him. It is very pleasant to travel rapidly through foreign countries, seeing the best that is in them and to return home with a multitude of fresh impressions; but living ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... for his was one of those large-hearted, sweet-blooded natures that never know a narrow or a grudging thought; Epicurean, if you will, with no enthusiasm, no self-scourging sense of duty; but yet, as you have seen, of a sufficiently subtle moral fibre to have an unwearying tenderness for obscure and monotonous suffering. It was his large-hearted indulgence that made him ignore his mother's hardness towards her daughters, which was the more striking from its contrast with her doting fondness towards himself; he held it no virtue to ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... summary of sceptical philosophy, it is impossible to analyse and classify it without having first eliminated all those numerous later-date insertions which, without improving the author's theology, utterly obscure his meaning and entirely spoil his work. When, by the aid of text criticism, we have succeeded in weeding it of the parasitic growth of ages, we have still to allow for the changing of places of numerous authentic passages either by ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... leads us on by paths we do not know; Upward he leads us, though our steps be slow; Though oft we faint and falter by the way; Though clouds and darkness oft obscure the day, And ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... previous to the rise of the Empire of Majapahit, in the age immediately following our Traveller's voyage, is very obscure. But there is some evidence of the existence of a powerful dynasty in the island about this time; and in an inscription of ascertained date (A.D. 1294) the King Uttungadeva claims to have subjected five kings and to be sovereign of the whole Island of Java (Jawa-dvipa; ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... There was a small red fire in the grate, a strip of old, but gay carpet before it, two chairs and a table were covered with a harlequin patchwork made of bright odds and ends of all sizes and shapes. The fog in all its murky volume could not quite obscure the brightness of the often rubbed window and its harlequin curtain ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ye shall see me!" Would that the eye of faith might be kept more intently fixed on "that glorious appearing!" How the world, with its guilty fascinations, tries to dim and obscure this blessed hope! How the heart is prone to throw out its fibres here, and get them rooted in some perishable object! Reader! seek to dwell more habitually on this the grand consummation of all thy dearest wishes. "Stand on the edge of your nest, pluming your wings for flight." Like the mother ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... profound wisdom of the Upanishads, and then look at the mad idolatry in the India of to-day, with its pilgrimages, processions and festivities, or at the insane and ridiculous goings-on of the Saniassi. Still one can't deny that in all this insanity and nonsense there lies some obscure purpose which accords with, or is a reflection of the profound wisdom I mentioned. But for the brute multitude, it had to be dressed up in this form. In such a contrast as this we have the two poles of humanity, the wisdom of the individual ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... any ambition. He has no society. His friends are nearly all obscure people, like those you heard ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... Saturday we soon found out why we had come here, to use the rather obscure phrasing of the man of the party, for it speedily transpired that Miss Cassandra had brought us here with deliberate intent to lead us from the straight and narrow path of sightseeing into the devious ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... web of fate; and then those of Editha, who even as the old woman spoke had felt a tidal wave of long-forgotten memories sweeping right over her senses. The look in the Quakeress's eyes, the words she uttered—though still obscure and enigmatical—had already told her the whole truth. As in a flash she saw before her, her youth and all its follies, the gay life of thoughtlessness and pleasures, the cradles of her children, the tiny boys who to the woman of fashion were but ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... ante-room, while the girls, beautifully dressed and gay, flirted in the reception-room with those hateful young noblemen. All I had ever read in Hoffmann's Tales of certain demoniacal intrigues, which until that moment had been obscure to me, now became really tangible facts, and I left Prague with an obviously unjust and exaggerated opinion of those things and those people, through whom I had suddenly been dragged into an unknown world ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... ourselves then in the mouth of an obscure alley which my companion whispered would bring us to his house; and here we paused to take breath and look back. The sky was red behind us, the air full of the clash and din of the tocsin, and the flood of sounds which poured from every tower ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... that he diagnosed a moral not a bodily disorder. We often find in The Nights, the doctor or the old woman distinguishing a love-fit by the pulse or similar obscure symptoms, as in the case of Seleucus, Stratonice and her step-son Antiochus—which seems to be the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... cannot in the nature of the case be logical, because the subject's logical organ is not as yet functioning. I doubt if there is any discussion of moral matters in common life in which this form of appeal is not present in a measure sufficient to obscure the merits of the question at issue. I desire for present purposes to eliminate as far as possible all conflict and prejudices, and thus to dispense with zeal and eloquence. I shall assume, therefore, that ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... a mode of explaining the Scriptures, it is refuted by the fact that it is nowhere plainly stated in the New Testament, but is arbitrarily constructed by forced and indirect inferences from various obscure texts, which texts can be perfectly explained without involving it at all. For what purpose, then, was it thought that Jesus went to the imprisoned souls of the under world? The most natural supposition the conception most in harmony with ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... are The Religions of the World and their Relation to Christianity, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, The Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament (1853), The Doctrine of Sacrifice, and Theological Essays. M.'s style was copious, and was often blamed as obscure; nevertheless, he exercised an extraordinary influence over some of the best minds of his time by the originality of his views, and the purity ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... relative action. But so far as language and ideas are concerned, it matters not whether the sun actually sinks behind the hills, or the hills interpose between it and us; whether the landscape recedes from our view, or the shades of night intercept so as to obscure our vision. The habit of thought is the same, and the form of expression must agree with it. We say the sun rises and sets, in reference to the obvious fact, without stopping to inquire whether it really moves or not. Nor is such an inquiry at all ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... need to explain or discuss them here: suffice it to say that there are such laws,[34] as is now admitted by an overwhelming majority of the biologists of to-day. Mendel's facts were hidden in a somewhat obscure journal; they lay dormant, much to his annoyance, during his lifetime. Years after his death his papers were unearthed, and his discoveries have been proclaimed as being as fundamental to biology as those of Newton and ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... by an inviolable law, that very thing which the former punished with excommunication, and the latter gave a powerful reason for disapproving. There was a father[31] who asserted the temerity of deciding on either side of an obscure subject, without clear and evident testimonies of Scripture. This landmark they forgot when they made so many constitutions, canons, and judicial determinations, without any authority from the word of God. There was ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... whose grand and nervous English displays it in finer shades and nobler proportions. The present volume is his crowning work, and he has coined his life-blood into it. But as honest critics we have some grounds of quarrel with him. A man has no right to be obscure who can make words so flexible and luminous as he can. In the present volume, his readers who here make his first acquaintance will inevitably misconstrue him, simply because he alters the fundamental nomenclature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Meaning of group. Dieri customs. Tippa-malku marriage. Obscure points. Pirrauru. Obscure points. Relation of pirrauru to tippa-malku unions. Kurnandaburi. Wakelbura customs. Kurnai organisation. Position of widow. Piraungaru of Urabunna. Pirrauru and group marriage. Pirrauru not a survival. Result of scarcity ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... obscure the sky, When the tempest sweeps the lands, Still about, below, on high, God's great solar system stands. Never yet a star went out. What have I to fear or doubt?— I, a part of this great ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... are very obscure, and of course the poetry of the century closing in 1870 has much in common with earlier Italian poetry. Parini did not begin it, nor Alfieri; it began them, and its spirit must have been felt in the perfumed air of the soft Lorrainese despotism at Florence ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... the whole of this terrific burden. He alone, of the whole cabinet, was fit to bear it; beside him, the others were mere pigmies: Premier Caillaux, an amiable financier; Foreign Minister de Selves, a charming amateur of the fine arts; War Minister Messimy, an obscure army officer with a love for uniforms; Minister of Commerce Couyba, a minor poet, tainted with decadence—above all these, Delcasse loomed as a Gulliver among Lilliputians. But greatness has its penalties. While ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... a much longer period; and as he was permitted to make such extensive mission tours throughout the world, his witness was far more outreaching. The lowly-minded man who bowed down to take the lower place, consenting to be the more obscure, was by God exalted to the higher seat and greater ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... was very much humiliated at being condemned to death by hanging and made application for the sentence to be changed to shooting, but the military authorities declined acceding to his demand, and he was accordingly hanged on the branches of a tree near Jackson. A small mound of earth in an obscure portion of the Confederacy is all that is left to mark the remains of Horace Awtry. The libertine and prosecutor of Mrs. Wentworth is no more, and to God we leave him. In His hands the soul of the dead will be treated as it deserves, and the many sins which stain and blacken it will be punished ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... States has been effective as to such as seek to land from vessels entering our ports. The result has been to divert the travel to vessels entering the ports of British Columbia, whence passage into the United States at obscure points along the Dominion boundary is easy. A very considerable number of Chinese laborers have during the past year entered the United States from ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... rank and extensive possessions enjoyed at present by the Greymounts, had their origin immediately in great territorial revolutions of a recent reign, it was not for a moment to be supposed, that the remote ancestors of the Ecclesiastical Commissioner of 1530 were by any means obscure. On the contrary, it appeared that they were both Norman and baronial, their real name Egremont, which, in their patent of peerage ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... was quite dark repaired to the friperie shop of a Jew, where I purchased a second-hand suit of cavalier's clothes, which I thought would fit me. I concealed them in my cell, and the next morning went in search of a small lodging in some obscure part, where I might not be subject to observation. This was difficult, but I at last succeeded in finding one to let, which opened upon a general staircase of a house, which was appropriated to a variety of lodgers, who ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... thus done, are to us indeed evident, but to the Jews they are obscure; because they hearkened not unto ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... Descent of Man an eminent scientist turns his feet ruinously into the wide green descent to "popular" science, or as when in The Verdict a fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never do but third-rate work. Some such stress of conflict marks almost all Mrs. Wharton's stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority of her work. Love with ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... brother-in-law, Martial de la Roche-Hugon, was a minister, and who himself was under-secretary of State, and about to marry, rumor said, the only daughter of the Baron de Nucingen,—a girl with an illimitable "dot"; seeing, moreover, in the diplomatic body an obscure writer whom he had formerly known translating articles in foreign journals for a newspaper turned dynastic since 1830, also professors now made peers of France,—he felt with anguish that he was left behind on a bad road by ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... the privet hedge in the night, and robbed the garden of its cabbages? What, in short, was it that he had done? Deerham spoke out pretty broadly, as to the main facts, although the rumoured details were varied and obscure. It declared that some of Dr. West's doings at Chalk Cottage had not been orthodox, and ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... a hundred and thirty years ago published his Natural History of Selborne, was the first, and I suppose the most eminent, historian of any obscure village, and it is surprising, as his book has for so long been regarded as a classic, that so few have attempted a similar record. His great work remains an inspiring ideal which village historians can keep in view, not without ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... argued, was the knowledge of human nature and the habit of dealing with mankind in masses,—the very thing from which the younger regular officers at least had been rigidly excluded. From a monastic life at West Point they had usually been transferred to a yet more isolated condition, in some obscure outpost,—or if otherwise, then they had seen no service at all, and were mere clerks in shoulder-straps. But a lawyer who could manoeuvre fifty witnesses as if they were one,—a teacher used to governing young men by the hundred,—an orator trained to sway thousands,—a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... she said to herself. "How could I let him?" She sat for a long time hiding her flushed face in her hands trying to realize what had happened to her, but was unable either to understand what had happened or what she felt. Everything seemed dark, obscure, and terrible. There in that enormous, illuminated theater where the bare-legged Duport, in a tinsel-decorated jacket, jumped about to the music on wet boards, and young girls and old men, and the nearly naked Helene with her proud, calm smile, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... means all the power of Jesus' life, and has the other side, too. It means the wilderness, the intense temptation. It may mean the obscure village of Nazareth for you. It may mean that first Judean year for you—lack of appreciation. It may mean for you that last six months—the desertion of those hitherto friendly. It will mean without doubt a Gethsemane. Everybody who comes along after Jesus has a Gethsemane ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon
... has heroes fully as untranslateable as Brian Boru, and consequently I believe that Edward VII. is, among his innumerable other functions, really King of England. If my Scotch friends insist, let us call it one of his quite obscure, unpopular, and minor titles; one of his relaxations. A little while ago he was Duke of Cornwall; but for a family accident he might still have been King of Hanover. Nor do I think that we should blame the simple Cornishmen ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... a day and a night. The temperature within the motionless groves of plantain and orange-trees outside the city walls seems chilly by comparison. Heaven help all sick persons and young children within the city to-night! The high house-walls are still radiating heat savagely, and from obscure side gullies fetid breezes eddy that ought to poison a buffalo. But the buffaloes do not heed. A drove of them are parading the vacant main street; stopping now and then to lay their ponderous muzzles against the closed shutters of a grain-dealer's shops and to ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... and he could not sleep. Rising presently, he opened the window, and in the frosty October air stood looking through the darkness to the light that twinkled in the direction of Blake Hall. Faint stars were shining overhead, and against the indistinct horizon something obscure and black was dimly outlined—perhaps the great clump of oaks that surrounded the old brick walls. Somewhere by that glimmer of light he knew that Fletcher sat hugging his ambition like a miser, gloating over the grandson who would grow up to redeem his ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow |
