"Blunted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the crater of the Puy de Pariou, near Clermont, is so sharp, and has been so little blunted by time, that it scarcely affords room to stand upon. This and other cones in an equally remarkable state of integrity have stood, I conceive, uninjured, not IN SPITE of their loose porous nature, as might at first be naturally supposed, but in consequence ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... Winny and to marry her, if (and that was not by any means so certain) she would have him—no idea could well have agitated Ranny more. It blunted the fine razorlike edge of his appetite for Sunday supper. It obscured his interest in The Pink 'Un, which he had unearthed from under the sofa cushion in the back parlor, whither he had withdrawn himself to ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... perspiration from his forehead, and cast furious glances on Andreas Hofer, who, however, was utterly unaware of his presence, and from whose breast, protected as it was by his beard and crucifix, rebounded all such glances like blunted arrows. ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... fast, they experience grave remorse of conscience; and, with consciences agitated and torn with drinking the sweet beverage, they sin. Under the guidance of these skilful theologians, the remorse aroused by natural and Divine light being blunted, Christians drink joyfully. For all agree that he will break his fast who eats any portion of chocolate, which, dissolved and well mixed with warm water, is not prejudicial to keeping a fast. This is a sufficiently marvellous presupposition. He who eats 4 ozs. of exquisite sturgeon roasted ...
— The Food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa • Brandon Head
... spirit or energy of a man, which here corresponds with the Heb. "Aub"; so in the Hamasah the poet says, "My Jinn have not fled; my life is not blunted; my birds never drooped for fear," where, say commentators, the Arabs compare an energetic man with a Jinni or Shaytan. So the Prophet declared of Omar, "I never saw such an 'Abkari amongst men," 'Abkar, in Yamamah, like Yabrin and Wabar ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... exploits of the earlier commanders. To them the voyage was one in which the lust of gold was the sole stimulant; and, accustomed to deeds of bloodshed, what feelings they ever had had become utterly blunted, and they needed but the power to become despotic ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... box, with a lid, about twelve feet in length. The lid, when thrown back, forms a chopping-table; and it is covered with bits of whale's tail from end to end, which, being elastic, though hard, prevents the knives being blunted. In the middle of the trough is a square hole, which is placed over the hatchway; and to the hole is attached a hose or pipe of canvas, leading into the hold, and movable, so as to be placed over the bungs of each cask. A pair of nippers ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... hearing—unless, indeed, your delivery took me in, for you read with great charm and skill. But I feel pretty sure that I am not so completely led away by the mere pleasures of the ear that my critical powers are wholly disarmed by the pleasure of listening—they might be blunted possibly and have their edge turned somewhat, but they certainly could not be subverted or destroyed. Consequently, I am not rash in pronouncing a general verdict on the whole even now, but in order to judge of them in detail, I ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... neighbor's land must restore the value of the grain he has damaged. The owner of a vicious ox which has gored a man must pay a heavy fine, provided he knew the disposition of the animal and had not blunted its horns. A builder who puts up a shaky house which afterwards collapses and kills the tenant is himself to be put to death. On the other hand, the code has some rude features. Punishments were severe. For injuries to the body there was the simple ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... sight and hearing were somewhat blunted by age, and he was proceeding very slowly; for his horse was old and feeble, like his owner. He was suddenly disturbed by loud hurrahs from behind, and by a furious pelting of balls of snow and ice upon the top of ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... had even lost the sense of being watched in a sort of heavy tranquillity. His uneasiness, his exasperation, his scorn were blunted at last by all these trying hours. It seemed to him that now they were blunted for ever. "I am a match for them all," he thought, with a conviction too firm to be exulting. The woman revolutionist had ceased speaking; ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... rearing of her family, the economizing of the family means, the supplying of the family wants. But the factory takes her from all these duties. Homes become no longer homes. Children grow up uneducated and neglected. The finer affections become blunted. Woman is no more the gentle wife, companion, and friend of man, but his fellow-labourer and fellow-drudge. She is exposed to influences which too often efface that modesty of thought and conduct which is one of the best safeguards ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... employment, which affords neither scope nor stimulus for one half of his faculties, and, from want of education or society, has no external resources, his mental powers, for want of exercise to keep up due vitality in their cerebral organs, become blunted, and his perceptions slow and dull. Unusual subjects of thought become to him disagreeable and painful. The intellect and feelings not being provided with interests external to themselves, must either ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... keen pleasure when the surgeon removed vegetations from her vulva (as recorded by Fere) took no pleasure in pain, but in one case the intense craving for strong sexual emotion, and in the other the long-blunted nerves of pleasure, welcomed the abnormally strong impulse; and the pain of the incision, if felt at all, was immediately swallowed up in the sensation of pleasure. Moll remarks (Kontraere Sexualempfindung, third edition, p. 278) that even in man a trace ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... could walk alone. She limped. Instantly her companion's blunted emotions quickened into life. He caught ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... just the first feeling, which wears away after a time; but at last, your own sense of indignation becomes blunted, and becoming indifferent to it, you forget also that you wound the feelings of others, and carry the habit with you, to the great injury and disgrace of the service. But it's time to dress for ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... mother, who was generally with the king, was a restraint upon his purpose, which he could not break through. Besides, the very circumstance that the usurper was his mother's husband filled him with some remorse, and still blunted the edge of his purpose. The mere act of putting a fellow-creature to death was in itself odious and terrible to a disposition naturally so gentle as Hamlet's was. His very melancholy, and the dejection of spirits he had so long been in, produced an irresoluteness and wavering of purpose, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... a measure owing to her having been from childhood used to the sight of such, that her sympathies were so soon and so thoroughly waked on the side of suffering humanity. With parents like hers she had never been in danger of having her feelings or her insight blunted by the assumption of such a relation to the poor as that of spiritual police-agent, one who arrogates the right of walking into their houses without introduction, and with at best but faint apology: to show respect if you have it, is the quickest way to ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... of the Erie he approved the measure enabling corrupt operators to retain possession of the road for an indefinite period in defiance of the stockholders. It is probable that the real character and fatal tendency of his associates had not been revealed to him. Nevertheless, ambition seems to have blunted a strong, alert mind. The appointment of Ingraham, Cardozo, and Barnard to the General Term of the Supreme Court within the city of New York, if further evidence were needed, revealed the Governor's subserviency. To avoid ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... played a large part in the restoration of white control, but it could not have been effective without some connivance from the North. Before 1872 the keenness of Northern radicalism was blunted. Thoughtful Republicans began to examine their work and criticize it. "We can never reconstruct the South," wrote Lowell, "except through its own leading men, nor ever hope to have them on our side till we make it for their interest and compatible with their honor to be so." A social order which ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... and it required all Dick's efforts and those of the pastor of the settlement to comfort her. But from the first the widow's heart was sustained by the loving Hand that dealt the blow, and when time blunted the keen edge of her feelings her face became as sweet and mild, though not so ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Parliament at the time of the conviction of Charles I.: it is related that he was only persuaded to agree to the condemnation by the impetuous Ireton, who came there and sat up all night in urgent argument "to whet his almost blunted purpose." Stephens died in May, 1649, expressing regret for having participated in the execution of his sovereign. We are further told in the traditions of the house that when all the relatives were assembled for the funeral, and the ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... it? But you hear that on every corner. As I told you, in the presence of so much death the sensibilities are blunted. People do not yet ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... at coming unexpectedly on the guillotine, where some criminal had been put to death an hour or two before. The sudden surprise had quite overcome him; and Adams, who seldom saw the point of a story till time had blunted it, listened sympathetically to learn what new form of grim horror had for the moment wiped out the memory of two thousand years of Roman bloodshed, or the consolation, derived from history and statistics, that most citizens of Rome seemed to be the better for guillotining. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... flippant remark of lord Orford, were, for the most part, as completely out of my reach, as a crown and sceptre. There was, indeed, a resource; but the utmost caution and secrecy were necessary in applying to it. I beat out pieces of leather as smooth as possible, and wrought my problems on them with a blunted awl; for the rest my memory was tenacious, and I could multiply and divide by it to a ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... loved, went like one in a dream. He hired a horse and a guide at the little hostelry, and rode swiftly towards the German frontier. But all was mechanical; his senses felt blunted; trees and houses and men moved by him like objects seen through a veil. His companions spoke to him twice, but he did not answer. Only once he cried out savagely, "Shall we never be ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... fumbler.... We took to bows next, twelve arrows each. At full speed he put two bolts in the target, and I twelve, all in the white ring.... Then spear against cimeter. I offered him choice, and he took the spear. In the first career, the blunted head of his weapon fell to the ground shorn off close behind the ferrule. The spectators cheered and laughed, and growing angry, Orchan shouted it was an accident, and challenged me to combat. I accepted, but His Majesty interposed—we might conclude ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... a good woman." "Yes, she says in her letter that 'never did the full realization of what I am, come so plainly before me, as when this villian so cooly told me of his plans. I drove him from my presence as I would a dog.' This shows that Molly's race pride is not entirely blunted by dissipation and unholy living. I counsel you all ere you depart, to remember that we are at the mercy of the whites, and each one of us should do all in our power to show our men the wisdom of coolness. By this, with God's help, we may be able to avert ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... events, or what objects and circumstances, in appearance the least important, lead to changes in fortune, there is not, to my mind, a deeper cause and opportunity for thought. For something in our ordinary actions resembles the little blunted arrows we shoot at targets; little by little we make of our successive deeds an abstract and regular entity that we call our prudence or our will. Then comes a gust of wind, and lo! the smallest of these ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ones! I have always wondered 15 at the ease with which the poor forget their wretchedness. Accustomed to live in the present, they use every pleasure as soon as it offers itself. But the rich, blunted by luxury, gain happiness less easily. They must have all things in harmony before they consent to ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... "we now-a-days discourage the romantic turn a little too much. Our boys are prudent too soon. Mistake me not, I do not mean to blame them for want of levity or dissipation; but their pleasures are those of hackneyed vice, blunted to every finer emotion by the repetition of debauch; and their desire of pleasure is warped to the desire of wealth, as the means of procuring it. The immense riches acquired by individuals have erected a standard of ambition, ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... live in an atmosphere better adapted to hard work. He would attain a higher standard in his studies and examinations. He would be better fitted to be a useful citizen. Friendliness would, at any rate, have blunted antagonistic tendencies. And what a difference it would make to his people! The father who has spent so much on him would no longer feel that his son has lost and not gained by crossing the seas. The mother who, though behind the purdah, has eagerly been watching ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Easter Eve we sallied up-stream again, snow falling and driving heavily, and the wind still strong but with yesterday's keen edge blunted. By the time we had beaten around the long bend up which we had fought our way the day before, the snow had ceased, and by noon the wind had dropped and the sun was shining, and in a few moments of his unobscured strength all the loose ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... of the Lion! your watch is the wild-lands, The garb of the Highlands is mingled with blue, Though the target and bosses are bright in the Highlands, The axe in your hands might be blunted well, too. Then forward—and see ye be huntsmen true, And, as erst the red deer felling, So fell ye the Gaul, and so strike ye all The tribes in the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... dimple holds a drowning fly Strong is the pine by Maine's ambrosial streams, But stronger augers pierce its thickest beams; No iron gate, no spiked and panelled door, Can keep out death, the postman, or the bore. Oh for a world where peace and silence reign, And blunted dulness verebrates in vain! —The door-bell jingles,—enter Richard Fox, And takes this letter from his ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... father the whole secret of my peril. He was not very much shocked at what I had done, for poverty had perhaps blunted his sense of honor and principle. He was not very much shocked, but he was frightened, and he promised to do all in his power to assist me in ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... even the solace of tobacco is denied because the hand is too tired to grope for and fill the pipe. Thereafter comes a deeper stage of fatigue, one in which every separate step requires a distinct and tragic effort of will. The perceptions are blunted, the uncertainty of footfall is more pronounced, the stark reality of the winter woods partakes of a dreamlike quality. Then ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... snowy hills should lie bowed like flocks of sheep, and the kingdoms of the earth fade away in unregarded blue; and around it—weak, wave-drifted mica flake!—the great war of the firmament should burst in thunder, and yet stir it not; and the fiery arrows and angry meteors of the night fall blunted back from it into the air; and all the stars in the clear heaven should light, one by one as they rose, new cressets upon the points of snow that fringed its ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... puts such truth in the heart of all of us as we can bear; but sometimes we keep it like a sword in its scabbard, until the bright and sharp thing, that might have wrought great deeds, be all rusted and blunted." ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the lists, and shivering of lances; while some knights were borne backwards, horse and all, others had their helmets carried off; but Rene, who sat in great enjoyment, with his staff in hand, between his sister and her husband, King Charles, had taken care that all the weapons should be blunted. Sigismund, a tall, large, strongly made man, was for some time the leading champion. Perhaps there was an understanding that the Lion of Hapsburg and famed Eagle of the Tyrol was to carry all before him and win, in an undoubted manner, the prize of ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... assist poor nations by making an apportionment of goods and credit which the individual members of the rich nations, the owners of the surplus, would not make upon their own account. The edge of this issue should not be blunted. If the people and government of America were only concerned to let their individual citizens extort the highest prices they could get for their surplus in the best markets, they would let Central and Eastern Europe starve. If, ...
— Morals of Economic Internationalism • John A. Hobson
... and thus ended her life. I will not say that this most horrid murder produced no sensation in the community. It did produce a sensation; but, incredible to tell, the moral sense of the community was blunted too entirely by the ordinary nature of slavery horrors, to bring the murderess to punishment. A warrant was issued for her arrest, but, for some reason or other, that warrant was never served. Thus did Mrs. Hicks not only escape condign punishment, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... Brigades of burning Archers upward fly, Bright Spears and shining Spear-men mount on high, Flash in the Clouds, and glitter in the Sky. A Seven-fold Shield of Spheres doth Heav'n defend, And back again the blunted Weapons send; Unwillingly they fall, and dropping down, Pour out their Souls, their sulph'rous Souls, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... a reality; but its voice is troublesome, and the captious arguments which go to deny its value find support in the evil tendencies of our nature. If it has no faith in eternal justice it runs the risk of being blunted by contact with the world. So doubt takes place, doubt still deeper and more agonizing than that which bears upon the processes of the understanding. The questions which arise are such as these:—"This voice of duty—whence comes it? and what would it ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... face with life, especially women. It means marrying, child-bearing, household cares and burdens, neighbourhood gossip, sickness, death, burial, and whether the corpse appeared natural. But ever so much kindness goes with their disillusion; they are blunted, ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... cases the discontented, careworn look is by no means a certain indication of corresponding suffering, but there are too many others in which tempers that should have been generous, and faces that should have been noble, and aims that should have been high, are blurred and blunted by the real weight of ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... club about half-past three with his mind rather dishevelled and with his private determination to do something promptly for his country's needs blunted by a perplexing "How?" His search for doors and ways where no doors and ways existed went on with a gathering sense ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Acre represents a blunted arrow-head jutting out from a point in the Syrian coast. Napoleon could only attack, so to speak, the neck of the arrow, which was protected by a ditch and a weak wall, and flanked by towers; but Sidney Smith, having command of the sea, could sweep the ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... exactly just?" faintly interposed Mrs. Deane, whose perceptions of right and wrong were not quite so blunted as those of her daughter, who, in answer to her question, proceeded to advance many good reasons why Dora, for a time at least, should be kept in ignorance of the fact that her uncle supported her, ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... relief, at least to her mother's mind, when young Mrs. Harcourt returned, and without a word took up the reins again. No one disputed her claims. Now and then there would be a lazy protest from Audrey—a concealed sarcasm that fell blunted beneath the calm amiability of the elder sister. Geraldine was always perfectly good-tempered; the sense of propriety that guided all her actions never permitted her to grow hot in argument; and when a person is always in the right, as young Mrs. Harcourt believed herself to be, the ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his self-respect by the simple expedient of assailing Flamel's, the result had not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He saw now that his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a passionate self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of the man; ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... after his death, that the trusty reasoner, the faithful writer, the promulgator of sterling principles, the child of simplicity, triumphs; it is then that the stings of hatred, the shafts of envy, the arrows of malice, either exhausted or blunted, enable mankind to judge with impartiality; to yield to conviction; to establish eternal truth upon its own imperishable altars, which from its essence must survive all the error of the earth. It is then that calumny, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... and always inhabited the same neighborhood in London, I still continued to hear, on dark drizzly evenings (and never without a thrill of poignant pain and pity) this angel's voice wandering in the muddy streets, its perfect, round, smooth edge becoming by degrees blunted and broken, its tones rough and coarse and harsh, some of the notes fading into feeble indistinctness—the fine, bold, true intonation hiding its tremulous uncertainty in trills and quavers, alternating with pitiful husky coughing, while ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... confiscate, and there is not an honest Frenchman but spits upon my name. All infamy I come to you for this last time, Jehane! as a man already dead I come to you, Jehane, for in France they thirst to murder me, and England has no further need of Montbrison, her blunted and her filthy instrument!" ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... outer periphery of his thought—nowhere near the bull's-eye, so to speak—as a vague automaton that worked when he pulled a bell-rope. Infinitely more important things were troubling him; the visit of Peter had somehow put a keener edge on his blunted self-confidence; he had started a grand opera, and worked at it furiously in all the intervals left him by his engrossing pursuit after a publisher. Sometimes he would look up from his hieroglyphics and see Mary Ann at his side surveying ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... Ring lasted, our Cavaliers alternately bore away great share of the Honour. That Sport ended, Marshals were appointed for the Field, and every thing in great form settled for the Combat. The Cavaliers were all in good earnest, but orders were given to bring 'em blunted Lances, and to forbid the drawing of a Sword upon pain of his Highness's Displeasure. The Trumpets sounded and they began their Course: The Ladies' Hearts, particularly the Incognita and Leonora's beat time to the Horses Hoofs, and hope and fear made ...
— Incognita - or, Love & Duty Reconcil'd. A Novel • William Congreve
... thing to be attended to is, your demeanor towards a young wife. As to oldish ones, or widows, time and other things have, in most cases, blunted their feelings, and rendered harsh or stern demeanor in the husband a matter not of heart-breaking consequence. But with a young and inexperienced one, the case is very different; and you should bear in mind, that the first frown that she receives from you is a dagger to her heart. Nature has ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... shields we brought from home were white, Now they are red-stained in the fight: This work was fit for those who wore Ringed coats-of-mail their breasts before. Where for the foe blunted the best sword I saw our young king climb on board. He stormed the first; we followed him— The war-birds now in blood ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... fortunate discovery. Jack went down on his knees, and with the edge of the axe began carefully to force out the nails. But as they were firmly fixed in, and the operation blunted our axe, we carried the oar up with us to the place where we had left the rest of our things, intending to burn the wood away from the iron at a more ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... entertainment costly. We are reminded, however, by the Observances of Barnwell Priory that "by showing hospitality to guests the reputation of the monastery is increased, friendships are multiplied, animosities are blunted, God is honoured, charity is increased, and a plenteous reward in heaven is promised." It was enjoined that the hosteller, or brother in charge of the hospitium, should have "facility of expression, elegant manners, and a respectable bringing up; and ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... speaking the admixture with praise of such faults as are not altogether base and ignoble stops envy. Thus many have blunted the point of envy by admitting and introducing, when they have been praised, their past poverty and straits, aye, and their low origin. So Agathocles pledging his young men in golden cups beautifully chased, ordered some earthenware pots to be brought ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... rapids of the Grand Cascade, the whirlpools of the Devil's Mouth, the thundering roar and boiling dragon teeth of the Black Run—on to the end of the Athabasca, to the Slave, and into the Mackenzie, until the last rock-blunted nose of the outfit drank the tide-water of the Arctic Ocean. And he, James Kent, would ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... belts, hangers, etc. 3 steel backs and breasts. 4 morions. 1 beaver hat excellent wide in the brim, should do for Sir Richard; he suffering much by the sun despite the hat of leaves I had made him. 1 axe heavy and something blunted. 2 excellent knives, 2 wine skins, both empty. 3 flasks, the same. Good store of meat with cakes of very excellent bread of cassava. 1 horse with furniture for same, 5 cloaks, something worn. 3 pair of boots, very serviceable. 1 tinder ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... no mercy. His feelings were blunted by what he had already gone through, so the worst that might happen now did not worry him; for, when hope of relief entirely goes, what one has to face loses most of ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... of expectation, was again bent upon political affairs, a certain oracle blunted the edge of his inclination; for consulting the god of Delphi how he should attain most glory, the Pythoness answered, by making his own genius and not the opinion of the people the guide of his life; and therefore ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... good-bye, for he seemed moody, answered them in monosyllables, and at last, after a curt nod, left them long before they were ready to go. And when at last they were heading down the broad river to the old pleasant music of the clanging levers, the edge of their joy was blunted by the thought of ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... moon being red near midnight, with blunted corners or horns, portends mild weather that month. If the corners are white and sharp, there will be frosty ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... young to be blunted and coarsened," thinks Philip. Annoyed by the impudent stare which possibly amuses rather than displeases his wife, he tells Eleanor she has had enough, and rises to signify departure. Lothario is still ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... it is, barring the bones, only "a memory of the past." The puddings, turned out of the towels in which they have been boiled, then undergo the brunt of a fierce assault; but the edge of appetite has been blunted by the first course and with most of the men a modicum of pudding goes on the shelf for supper. The soldier is very sensitive on the subject of his Christmas pudding. I remember once seeing a cook put on ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... with care the clouds which still lingered upon the tallest summits, as if debating whether to go or to stay. He had never been an imaginative soul, and now that age had somewhat dimmed his eyes and blunted his senses he was placidly content with his path. The rapture of the lover, the song of the poet, had long since abandoned his heart. And yet he was not completely oblivious. To him it was a nice day, but a ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... gorgets, shoulder and arm pieces, and padded leathern jerkins were put on; and then, with blunted swords, they took their places facing each other. The squire took up a position of easy confidence. He was a good swordsman, and good-naturedly determined to treat the lad easily, and to play with him for a time before ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... to some extent, and the strength and activity of Dick showed him that he was able to play the part of a man. He said little, but watched the boy closely, made him go through trials of strength with some of his troopers, and saw him practise with blunted swords with others. Dick did well in both trials, and the Rajah then requested Anwar, who was celebrated for his skill with the tulwar, to give him, daily, half-an-hour's sword play, after his riding lesson. He himself undertook to ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... prince said, speaking for the first time, "It was but yesterday in the great hall downstairs he stood up with blunted swords against young Victor de Paulliac, who is nigh three years his senior. It was amusing to see how the little knaves fought against each other; and by my faith Gervaise held his own staunchly, in spite of Victor's superior height and weight. If he join the Order, Sir Thomas, I warrant ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... when the sting and faith of romance were blunted, would engage in Great Propositions, and fight for the recognition of his—toothpicks. Would his creations be favorites in the best lunch rooms? Would ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... ethics of the Decalogue; they are specific applications of the rules of conduct which have governed enlightened and honorable men in all ages and in all walks of life. It is only when the moral sense is blunted or temptation presents itself in some new and unrecognized form that it is difficult to draw the line between right and wrong. I am aware that a delicate sense of honor often comes between a man and his opportunities of profit, and that a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various
... public, I have no doubt that the feeling of shame and sympathy, are blunted by these repeated military calamities, and by Mr. Lincoln's ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... see; only a person with the scientific habit of mind can be trusted to report things as they are. Most of us, in observing the wild life about us, see more or see less than the truth. We see less when our minds are dull, or preoccupied, or blunted by want of interest. This is true of most country people. We see more when we read the lives of the wild creatures about us in the light of our human experience, and impute to the birds and beasts ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... in her mind. After the first recoil of horror at Ferriss's death she was able to see the false position in which she stood. She had been so certain already that Ferriss would die, leaving him as she did at so critical a moment, that now the sharpness of Miss Douglass's news was blunted a little. She had only been unprepared for the suddenness of the shock. But now she understood clearly how Miss Douglass had been deceived by circumstances. The fever nurse had heard of Ferriss's death early in the afternoon, and supposed, of course, that Lloyd had ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... to conditions of diameter which are augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less spread of sail in the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... "I mustn't speak about it," he said. "Silence helps me to bear my misfortune as becomes a man. I have had some hard blows in my time: they don't seem to have blunted my sense of feeling as I thought they had. Thank God, she doesn't know how she has made me suffer! I want to ask her pardon for having forgotten myself yesterday. I spoke roughly to her, at one time. No: I won't intrude on her; I have said I am sorry, in writing. Do you mind giving it to her? Good-by—and ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... Nothing then would avail thee thy bow and thy thick shot of arrows. Now thou plumest thee vainly because of a graze of my footsole; Reck I as were that stroke from a woman or some pettish infant. Aye flies blunted the dart of the man that's emasculate, noughtworth! Otherwise hits, forth flying from me, and but strikes it the slightest, My keen shaft, and it numbers a man of the dead fallen straightway. Torn, troth, then are the cheeks of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... still darkness, passages-twist and are led over blind pits which, men say, the wise builders childishly hoped would be taken for the real tombs by thieves to come. Up and down these alley-ways clatter all the races of Europe with a solid backing of the United States. Their footsteps are suddenly blunted on the floor of a hall paved with immemorial dust that will never dance in any wind. They peer up at the blazoned ceilings, stoop down to the minutely decorated walls, crane and follow the sombre splendours ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... strumpet"; "Good morrow, cuckold"; and there was not anything wherewith he more commonly and openly entertained those who came to see him than with this design of his, by which he stopped the private chattering of mockers, and blunted all the point ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... whose fighting teeth are blunted runs from the field before his foe. With many an afterthought ran Gisli. Gone is his ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... drink champagne, thinking this would forward his purpose. The wine made her rosy and pretty, and it also made her forget her poses and affectations. She was more charming to him than ever before, partly because of the change in her, and partly because his own critical faculties were blunted by alcohol. He was almost in love with her and he felt sure that he was about to win her. But presently she began wheedling him in the old vein. She wanted him to take her to the dance at the ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... inanition, a little drowsy comfortable in his place, prone upon the ground, warmed just enough by such sunlight as filtered through the live-oaks, soothed by the good tobacco and the prolonged murmur of the spring and creek. By degrees, the sense of his own personality became blunted, the little wheels and cogs of thought moved slower and slower; consciousness dwindled to a point, the animal in him stretched itself, purring. A delightful numbness invaded his mind and his body. He was not asleep, he was not awake, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... quite within our own power to dwarf or extend it. If we are content to rest satisfied with a small amount of knowledge we can do so, and even cease to suffer in our own self-esteem by feeling we are stupid, or indolent, or ignorant. Our perceptions are gradually blunted, and society is kind enough to case most of its remarks and opinions in a sugar-coating, so that the real truth never reaches us. We gradually find, then, that an opinion that soothes our personal vanity and self-esteem is a very pleasant opinion. So long as we cherish ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... were the campaigns of Napoleon, and astonishing his successes, but he who had so often deceived others in the end deceived himself. Accustomed to the dark dealings of intrigue and chicanery, his judgment, once so penetrating, became blunted. He believed what he wished to believe, and not that which was fact. More than once in his later campaigns he persuaded himself that the chances were with him when in reality they were terribly against him. He trusted to the star that had befriended ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... holy feet devolv'd I cast me, praying him for pity's sake That he would open to me: but first fell Thrice on my bosom prostrate. Seven times The letter, that denotes the inward stain, He on my forehead with the blunted point Of his drawn sword inscrib'd. And "Look," he cried, "When enter'd, that thou wash ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... thought of that. So much had happened in the past three years; there had been so much adulation and worship and daring assault upon her heart—or emotions—from quarters of unusual distinction, that the finest sense of her was blunted, and true proportions were lost. Rudyard ought never to have made that five months' visit to South Africa a year before, leaving her alone to make the fight against the forces round her. Those five months had brought a change in her, had made her indignant ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... strengthened. If I endeavor to find out the most general and the most prominent of all these different characteristics, I shall have occasion to perceive, that what is taking place in men's fortunes manifests itself under a thousand other forms. Almost all extremes are softened or blunted: all that was most prominent is superseded by some mean term, at once less lofty and less low, less brilliant and less obscure, than what ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... a danger of the sensibilities and perceptive faculties becoming blunted by exposure to and familiarity with offensive effluvia. "The General repeatedly called the attention of the officers at Fort George to the filthy state and foul effluvia of their camp, but they perceived no offensive odor; their olfactories had lost their acuteness, and failed to warn ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... was permitted to linger on, in despised obscurity, a poor swamp of some twenty houses that might, half in derision and half in civility, be called a Village. It had a church without a steeple, but with a poor Stump like the blunted wreck of some tall ship's mainmast. The priest's wages were less than those of a London coal-porter. The poor man could get no tithes, for there were no tithes to give him. Three parts of his glebe were always under ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... too dazed to think, though he was aware that he did not like himself. He was self-repelled, as though he had undergone some degradation or was intrinsically foul. All that was god-like in him was blotted out. The spur of ambition was blunted; he had no vitality with which to feel the prod of it. He was dead. His soul seemed dead. He was a beast, a work-beast. He saw no beauty in the sunshine sifting down through the green leaves, nor did the azure vault of the sky whisper as of old and hint of cosmic ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Consuls—did the republic's vengeance delay the death of Lucius Saterninus, a tribune of the people, of Caius Servilius, a prtor, even a single day? And yet, we Consuls, suffer the edge of this authority to be blunted, until the twentieth day. For we have such a decree of the Senate, but hidden in the scroll which contains it, as a sword undrawn in its scabbard. By which decree it were right, O Catiline, that thou shouldst have been slaughtered on the instant. Thou livest; and livest not to lay aside, but to ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... become blunted, the hearing becomes dull, the eyes lose their luster, vivacity, and strength, and vision becomes in general shorter, less piercing, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... he listened to the tirade, but he made no answer. Ralston looked at him keenly, wondering with a queer amusement whether he had not blunted the keen edge of that tool which he was keeping at his side because he foresaw the need of it. But there was no sign of any softening upon Linforth's face. He could be hard, but on the other hand, when he gave his faith he gave it without reserve. Almost every word which ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... 'Unhappy woman, what have you done? Three days more and this unholy spell would have fallen from me, and now, who knows how long I may have to go about in this disgusting shape? I must leave you at once, and we shall not meet again until you have worn out three pairs of iron shoes and blunted a steel staff in your search for me.' So ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... Fates lay their hand upon a man his senses are wont to be blunted and dimmed, so Gallus, being led on by these alluring persuasions to the expectation of a better fortune, quitted Antioch under the guidance of an unfriendly star, and hurried, as the old proverb has it, out of the ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... are blunted at an age when they should be keenly sensitive. It is only within ten years or so that very many of the higher schools have made a point of indoor sanitation beyond plumbing provisions. Outdoor sports have been relied ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... eyes, They surfeited with honey, and began To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little More than a little is by much too much. So, when he had occasion to be seen, He was but as the cuckoo is in June, Heard, not regarded; seen, but with such eyes As, sick and blunted with community, Afford no extraordinary gaze, Such as is bent on sun-like majesty When it shines seldom in admiring eyes; But rather drowsed, and hung their eyelids down, Slept in his face, and render'd such aspect As cloudy men use to their adversaries, ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... winter for use the following summer in another place. In this way the actual cost of the water supply can be reduced to scarcely more than $3, the removable pump being a permanent possession. In rocky or mountain regions the driven well is not practicable, because the driving point is blunted and broken by the rock and cannot pierce the rocky ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... also are so easily obtained from India, that much might be done in England, or in France, or in Germany—much that would be of interest not only to Oriental scholars, but to all philosophers whose powers of independent appreciation are not entirely blunted by their study of Plato and Aristotle, of Berkeley, Hume, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... and for a while it was a humdrum time. Nothing happened. The edge of excitement had become blunted. The streets were not so crowded. The working class did not come uptown any more to see how we were taking the strike. And there were not so many automobiles running around. The repair-shops and garages were closed, and whenever a machine broke down it went out of commission. The clutch ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... about the state of the weather, it was resolved to leave the artificers on board this evening, and carry only the smiths to the rock, as the sharpening of the irons was rather behind, from their being so much broken and blunted by the hard and tough nature of the rock, which became much more compact and hard as the depth of excavation was increased. Besides avoiding the risk of encumbering the boats with a number of men who had not yet got the full ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... work in scrambling about among the wrecks, and a little light-headed because of my stomach's emptiness, and feverish because of my growing thirst, and my mind stunned by the dull pain of my despair. And it was lucky for me, I suppose, that my thinking powers were so feeble and so blunted. Had I been fully awake to my own misery I might very well have gone crazy there in the darkness; or have been moved by a sharp horror of my surroundings to try to escape them by going on through the black night from ship to ship—which would have ended quickly ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... not even know the name before your brother Charles II., who knows what he is, pronounced it before you. He is a marvel of depth and tenacity, the two only things against which intelligence and ardor are blunted. Sire, I had ardor when I was young, I always was intelligent. I may safely boast of it, because I am reproached with it. I have done very well with these two qualities, since, from the son of a fisherman of Piscina, I have become prime minister to the king of France; and ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... his pick in his hands the following day, but placed it again in its corner, slowly, after a moment's examination of its blunted steel. ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... a certain boredom in these monotonously voluptuous days. His senses were becoming blunted with so many indulgences mechanically repeated. Besides, a monstrous debilitation was making him think in self-defense of the tranquil life of the hearth. He timidly began calculating the time of his seclusion. How ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the assaults ever made upon the character of Washington. They always failed to injure it in the slightest degree; and the sharpest and best-tempered shafts of malignity fell blunted and harmless from the invulnerable shield of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... has made us familiar with horrors. That which once touched us to the heart is now passed over with scarce a moment's thought. Our nerves have been hardened, our sensibilities blunted, our hearts steeled against suffering, in the terrible school through which ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... rebelled against this delay, for she was strongly biased by her religious training, and looked with horror on the state of wickedness in which she was living. But Gaston laughed at her scruples, and as time went on, her finer feelings became blunted, and she accepted the position to which she was reduced in ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... set in their sockets that they are incessantly worn away in front, and as incessantly grow from the base, take the curved form of their sockets, and act much like shears which have the inestimable property of self-sharpening when blunted, and self-renewal when chipped or actually broken off by coming against any hard substance. Were the teeth to be without this power, the animal would run a great risk of dying from hunger, the injured tooth not being able either to do its own work, or to aid its companion ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... occasion, and to the times. It was calculated to rouse those indignant feelings which a high spirited people, insulted and injured by a foreign power, can never fail to display, if their judgment be not blinded, or their sensibility to external wrongs blunted, by invincible prejudices. He relied principally on the manifestation of these feelings for the success of the negotiation; and on their real existence, for the defence of the national rights, should negotiation fail. His endeavours were ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... eyes of a wealthy youth, but in spite of that he had remained fresh and open-hearted even to the smallest things; and this was what most rejoiced his father. In him there was no trace of the satiety, the blunted faculty for enjoyment, which fell like a blight on so many men of his age and rank. He could still play as merrily with little Mary, still take as much pleasure in a rare flower or a fine horse, as before his departure. At the same time he had gained keen insight into the political ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... spoke to me down at the harbour, or I'd have mentioned it earlier. The savages in my Tin Islands go naked and stain themselves blue with woad, and are very filthy and brutish to look upon. They are sturdy, and should make good slaves, but one would have to get blunted in the taste before one could wish to ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... laughter. Those matters which until now he had regarded with an almost sacred veneration were subjects for immense jokes. A few years ago he would have been horrified at it all, but the fine quality of this first sensitiveness had been blunted since his experience at college. He tolerated these ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... his book, he would ask himself, "Why take all this trouble? Who is going to be made wiser or happier by this rigmarole?" and his pleasure in the work was gone again for days. The consciousness of exile, instead of being blunted by time, weighed ever more heavily upon him. He never realized till now what an absolute necessity it was to his nature to lean upon a kindred spirit, for he had never before been without one. Since the death of his father he had first had Paul, and then Dr. Schrotter, whom he had seen daily, and ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... either you or George. I have lived long enough to know, that the true secret of making ourselves happy is to endeavour to make others so. This is, at least, the case with all those whose finer sensibilities have not been blunted, or, more properly speaking, have been rightly cultivated. But it will do no good to enter into a metaphysical discussion of the subject. The course proper to be pursued by a woman, whose husband's income is rather limited, appears to me ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... not remorse or shame. And when she dies by her own hand, it is not in madness, but to escape humiliation. Suicide was one of the worst features of Pagan antiquity. It was a base and cowardly reluctance to meet the evils of life, as much as indifference to the future and a blunted moral sense. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... verdure and water-growth gradually growing confused and dim. To Vane all now seemed dreamlike and strange. He was in no trouble—there was no sense of dread, and the despair of a few minutes before was blunted, as with his body lower in the water, which kept rising now above his lips, ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... a great girl now, called in her father, and all the household; and after a while the old Doctor came home, and the fatted calf was killed, and all made merry over the return of this altogether unrepentant prodigal son, who, whether from affectation, or from that blunted sensibility which often comes by continual change and wandering, took all their affection and delight ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... love for her child had so moulded her that she seemed the very incarnation of motherhood. So might Ceres have appeared as she wandered forlornly in search of her lost Persephone, gentle, weary, her fineness a little blunted by her woes. ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... with great readiness, for whiskey in some degree blunted the fierce passions of his brother, and deadened his cruelty; or rather diverted it from minor objects to those which occurred in the lawless ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... with joyful faces; but the appearance of a stranger blunted many a gibe which had been prepared on Hobbie's lack of success in the deer-stalking. There was a little bustle among three handsome young women, each endeavouring to devolve upon another the task ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... her great trouble. She had lost her influence over Walter Hine. She had knowledge of the under side of life—yes, but her father had a greater knowledge still. He had used his greater knowledge. Craftily and with a most ingenious subtlety he had destroyed her power, he had blunted her weapons. Hine was attracted by Sylvia, fascinated by her charm, her looks, and the gentle simplicity of her manner. Very well. On the other side Garratt Skinner had held out a lure of greater attractions, greater ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... occasioned by the evaporation of the fluid constituents; and a time comes when these sides are so depressed that a section of the pseudochrysalis through a plane perpendicular to its axis would be represented by a curvilinear triangle with blunted corners and inwardly convex sides. This is the appearance displayed by the pseudochrysalis during the winter ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... the cry: "Remember of what race you come and do nothing contrary to your honour." There were many strict rules to be observed; for instance, it was forbidden to strike your adversary with the point, although it was usually blunted (but not in this tournament of Bayard's). It was forbidden to attack the horse of your opponent, and this we can quite understand, for in those days, when a knight wore complete and heavy armour, if his ...
— Bayard: The Good Knight Without Fear And Without Reproach • Christopher Hare
... know by rote The clarion watchword of each Grecian school And follow none, the flawless sword which smote The pagan Hydra is an effete tool Which we ourselves have blunted, what man now Shall scale the august ancient heights ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... have saved him. If he from childhood had been taught that the property of others was sacred, the very gravity of the crime to which he now was urged would have sobered and awakened him to his danger. But his sense of wrong in this had been blunted, and there was no very ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... hints and observations, though rude and ungenerous, gave her but little pain. The form of language in which they were expressed, she added, and the indefensible violation of all the laws of hospitality, blunted the severity ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... felt better, now that the vichy had been "killed"; mentally his temper became more vicious than ever as he thought of Dumont's blunted wit at his expense—a wit with edge enough left to make ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the inconsequence of troubled dreams. And then we were on the Rialto and J. was saying "Of course you know that?" and I was answering "Of course, the Bridge of Sighs!" and the many years between have not blunted the edge of his disgust or my remorse. But my disgrace drove me back to the Casa Kirsch, to sleep for fifteen blessed hours before looking at one other beautiful thing or troubling my head about what we were to do with our days and our nights ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... him the lion's teeth and claws—so much of them as she could find—and hack him a club of alder. And he put the teeth and claws very cunningly into the wood so that the points were outward. Very long it took him, and he blunted two of the teeth hammering them in, and was very angry and threw the thing away; but afterwards he dragged himself to where he had thrown it and finished it—a club of a new sort set with teeth. That day there ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... with a homesick longing for Patrick. The two years which had elapsed since his death had blunted the edge of her sorrow—as time inevitably must—but she still missed the shrewd, kindly, worldly-wise old man unspeakably, and just now, thrown back upon herself in some indefinable way by Miles's attitude, her whole heart cried out for that ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... others, only a word or so, but there was amongst them an obvious haste to get away, of which Persimmon Sneed was cognizant, albeit his head was swimming, his breath short, his eyes dazzled by the fire which he feared. His understanding, however, was blunted in some sort, it seemed to him, for he could make no sense of Nick Peters's observation as he took him by the arm, although afterward it ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... manifestations away. I am about to give you the philosophy of bomb throwing from my point of view; from the point of view you pretend to have been serving for the last eleven years. I will try not to talk above your head. The sensibilities of the class you are attacking are soon blunted. Property seems to them an indestructible thing. You can't count upon their emotions either of pity or fear for very long. A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive. It must ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... as easily as from any other dispute; she had not realized it as a final, an almost irrevocable act on his part, which could only be met by reprisal on hers. All those points of law which had been so sharply enforced upon her must have fallen blunted from her longing to be at one with him; she had, perhaps, not imagined her defence in open court, except as a sort of ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... the shadowy reaches that lie between life and death it is doubtful whether he suffered. The glow of fever through his drowsiness was rather a grateful warmth, blunted of all responsible thinking, than a recognized affliction, and the realization of the presence near him enveloped him with a ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... exceedingly unreasonable and improper, and one that would meet with general disapprobation in America. I do not wonder that a people gets to be immoral and depraved in their practices, who keep such improper hours. The mind acquires habits of impurity, and all the sensibilities become blunted, by taking the meals out of the natural seasons. I impute much of the corruption of France to the periods of the day in which the ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... claimed at once by Kenneth Malcolm, a favourite partner, boy though he was. But the keen edge of her interest was blunted. She wanted one thing only to be alone with Theo; to set his mind at rest: and those 'separated selves,' who drew her like nothing else on earth, became of a sudden mere voluble obstructions between herself and ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... he had been witless indeed. The thought of raising the bid of five hundred gold to a thousand or more had bemused him, blunted his ordinary cunning. ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... memory. By slow but sure degrees, we neared the shore, until Vera Cruz, in all its ugliness, became visible to our much-wearied eyes. We had brought a pilot from Havana to guide us to these dangerous coasts, but though a native of these parts, it seemed that a lapse of years had blunted his memory, for we had nearly run upon the rocks. A gun was therefore fired, and another pilot came out, who at sight of the Spanish flag waxed enthusiastic, and pointing out the castle to our ignorant friend, exclaimed, alluding to the desperate struggle ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... her with apparent stolidity, nodding his head from time to time as she spoke. The keenness of his dislike of her as a woman began to be blunted. He thought she was rather pretty, that he even liked her because she was so small, so prettily made, so good natured ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... constitution of the Lord of Avannes could not long endure this, and he began to grow so pale and lean that even without his mask he might well have passed unrecognised; yet the mad love that he had for this woman so blunted his understanding that he imagined he had strength to accomplish feats that even Hercules had tried in vain. However, being at last constrained by sickness and advised thereto by his lady, who was not so fond of him sick as sound, he asked his master's leave to return ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... natural, therefore, that on Mr. Kennedy announcing his decrees, Charley and Kate should hasten to some retired spot where they could commune in solitude; the effect of which communing was to reduce them to a somewhat calmer and rather happy state of mind. Charley's sorrow was blunted by sympathy with Kate's joy, and Kate's joy was subdued by sympathy with Charley's sorrow; so that, after the first effervescing burst, they settled down into a calm and comfortable state of flatness, with very red eyes and exceedingly pensive ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... gutter leisurely. He felt no anger or resentment toward his ejector. Fifteen years of tramphood spent out of the twenty-two years of his life had hardened the fibres of his spirit. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune fell blunted from the buckler of his armoured pride. With especial resignation did he suffer contumely and injury at the hands of bartenders. Naturally, they were his enemies; and unnaturally, they were often ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... was Scheffer's nature that when his daughter had given her whole heart to another, the fine edge of his art was dulled and blunted. He painted through habit, and the work had merit, but only at rare intervals was there in it that undefinable something which all can recognize, but none analyze, that stamps ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... and with which he had hoped to rejoice the hearts of his wife and child, were utterly neglected. He let Isquay do what she pleased with them. The only thing that seemed to comfort him was the tobacco, for that, he found, when smoked to excess, blunted the edge ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... of his wonderful career being morally blunted, but his own belief in the sanctity of the verbal arrangement was sound to the core, and he hazarded the opprobrium of our stern conventional system. To him, Lady Hamilton had an enduring charm which influenced his ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... his temper gentle, and his hopes enthusiastic—just at that most critical period, his heart is full of anxieties and household cares; he is chilled by disappointments, and vexed by injustice; he becomes obstinate in his errors, no less than in his virtues, and the arrows of his aims are blunted, as the reeds of his trust ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... behind him when he came in. He heard her say timidly in her foreign voice: "Thank you, sir!" the policeman's retreating steps, the outer door being shut, and felt her close to him again. That something in her youth and strange prettiness which had touched and kept him gentle, no longer blunted the edge of his exasperation, now that he could not see her. They were all the same, these women; could not speak the truth! And he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The Anarchiad was followed by the Echo and the Political Green House, written mostly by Alsop and Theodore Dwight, and similar in character and tendency to the earlier series. Time has greatly blunted the edge of these satires, but they were influential in their day, and are an important part of the literature of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... moments, was like a theatre with all the lustres blazing. That the illumination should have been kindled by his cousin's husband was not precisely agreeable to Marvell, who thought Peter a bore in society and an insufferable nuisance on closer terms. But he was becoming blunted to Undine's lack of discrimination; and his own treatment of Van Degen was always tempered ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... and having married, more or less improvidently, he turned his back on the visions that had haunted his youth: afterwards, the cares, great and small, that came in the train of the years, drove them ever further into the background. Want of sympathy in his home-life blunted the finer edges of his nature; of a gentle and yielding disposition, he took on the commonplace colour of his surroundings. After years of unhesitating toil, it is true, the most pressing material needs died down, but ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... cries of the Indians increased when they found that the door was closed. They attacked it with their tomahawks; but their weapons were blunted against the hard oak, clamped with iron as it was. By Tim's advice we still reserved our fire, as our stock of ammunition was small, and we might require it ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... days and hours; hardly recognizing the reality of her own situation, or that the sloop, Winthrop's walk behind her, the moonlight, her lonely seat on the deck, and her truly lonely place in the world, were not all parts of a curious phantasm. Or if realizing them, with senses so tried and blunted with recent wear and tear, that they refused to act and left her to realize it quietly and almost it seemed stupidly. She called it so to herself, but she could not help it; and she was in a manner thankful for that. She would wake up ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... number and their variety show the intenseness of his industry and the extent of his capacity. He was one of the first authors that taught the Dissenters to court attention by the graces of language. Whatever they had among them before, whether of learning or acuteness, was commonly obscured and blunted by coarseness and inelegance of style. He showed them that zeal and purity might be expressed and enforced by polished diction. He continued to the end of his life a teacher of a congregation, and no reader of his works can doubt his fidelity or diligence. In the pulpit, though ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... children ragged, and squalid, and ignorant. He is the tenant of some little cabin that poverty has erected to house him from the storm and the tempest. He is useless, and worse than useless: he is a pest to all around him. All the feelings of his nature are blunted; he has lost all shame; he procures his accustomed supply of the poison that consumes him; he staggers through mud and through filth to his hut; he meets a weeping wife and starving children; he abuses ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... should be resisted, but as her wedding-day drew near her heart grew more at peace regarding her contemplated change of life, and unfolded to the enchanting influence of youth's master passion. The roseate mists it weaves before the vision of its happy and willing victims, blunted even this girl's exceptional and matter-of-fact perspicacity, and with her ears grown suddenly deaf to those who had at first alarmed her by the recapitulation of their unfortunate practical and ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... tore the spear from his hand; but almost before it could drop, he had recovered it. And in that flashing instant Denny had darted in at the side of the thing and half disembowelled it with a thrust of the acid-blunted point of his three-foot bar, and a lightninglike wrench ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... about to round off his ultimatum with a spurt of tobacco-juice aimed at a passing cat, when he checked himself hastily at sight of a woman. What became of the tobacco-juice was a mystery or a conjuring trick, but the cat's somewhat blunted sensibilities, and the ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... neither to be daunted, nor surprised, nor affected by what passed before him, however dreadful, however sudden, however afflicting. Habitual danger, with unbounded confidence in his own strength and sagacity, had rendered him indifferent to fear, and the lawless and precarious life he led had blunted, though its dangers and errors had not destroyed, his feelings for others. And it was to be remembered that I had very lately seen the followers of this man commit a cruel slaughter on ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... towards restoring a basis for the resumption of normal political and economic activity; it would have permitted Wilson to return to the United States as the unquestioned leader of the world; it would have blunted the edge of senatorial opposition; and finally it might have enabled him to avoid the controversies with Allied leaders which compelled him to surrender much of his original programme ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... and caught up Ward's waggons. The women at Oakville were most anxious to buy snuff. It appears that the Texan females are in the habit of dipping snuff—which means, putting it into their mouths instead of their noses. They rub it against their teeth with a blunted stick. ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... obedient He never deserted them. They conquered hosts ten times their numbers—they were victorious against armed warriors, and mighty giants. The Lord blinded their enemies so that they saw not; He blunted their weapons; He paralyzed their courage; chariots and horses did not avail them; nor strong walls, nor mighty men of battle. The Lord loved the Israelites, and as long as they were faithful and obedient, they prevailed against all ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... smile passed quickly across the sullen face in which the corners of the mouth drooped morosely, her blunted expression grew animated for a moment or two. And then she prepared to trudge away, the shapeless bundle containing the child on one arm, the heavy ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... on, and by degrees the poignancy of the widower's grief was blunted, and Aunt Jane's name was seldom mentioned by any one; after all she had not done herself, or anybody connected with her, much credit. And other changes occurred: the stout old Colonel found it incumbent upon him to join Sir Arthur Wellesley in the ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... or more years old is known as wether. The ends of the fiber from such sheep are thick and blunted, on account of having been previously cut. It is necessary to be able to tell at once a hog fleece from a wether, and this can be done in two ways: by examining the ends of the fiber to see if they are pointed; or by pulling a staple out of the fleece. If it is wether, the staple will come ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley |
