"Obliquity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... small natural depression along which it runs, while a small area east of the Forum, which also breaks loose from the general scheme, is thought to have been laid out abnormally in order to remedy the effect of this obliquity.[48] ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... to Rowland, something acutely touching in this humble petition. He had always felt a sort of imaginative tenderness for poor little unexplained Giacosa, and these words seemed a supreme contortion of the mysterious obliquity of his life. All of a sudden, as he watched the Cavaliere, something occurred to him; it was something very odd, and it stayed his glance suddenly from again turning to Mrs. Light. His idea embarrassed him, and to carry off his ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... thus, by changing the situation of the stone, as often as there is occasion, the island is made to rise and fall by turns in an oblique direction, and by those alternate risings and fallings (the obliquity being not considerable) is conveyed from one part of the dominions to ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... enmities of the tribes one against another. He succeeded well. He got the confidence of the natives, and kept it; from fearing his power, most of them came to revere the man. When all is said of the Indians,—of their savage craft, their obliquity of moral vision, their unsparing cruelty, and their utter remissness in most matters of behavior, the fact remains that they know how to appreciate candor and honor, and will respond to it as well as they are able. They are slow to believe in wordy protestations: they must have signs more ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... been distinctly snubbed, and the Member of the Haouse thought I must defend myself, as is customary in the deliberative body to which he belongs, when one gentleman accuses another gentleman of mental weakness or obliquity. I could not make up my mind to oblige him at that moment by showing fight. I suppose that would have pleased my assailant, as I don't think he has a great deal to lose, and might have made a little capital out of me if he ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his preserves and breeding can not give back to it,—its God-given place in the ranks of Living Things. Where is man's boasted intelligence, or his sense of proportion, that every man does not see the monstrous moral obliquity involved in the destruction ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... use his own words, "a rapid sweep through the eons and the centuries," illustrating the great truth of the development of the race from its origin to the time in which we are living. It is a long distance from the planetary fact of the obliquity of the equator, which gave the earth its alternation of seasons, and rendered the history, if not the existence of man and of civilization a possibility, to the surrender of General Lee under the apple-tree ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that we had decided otherwise. For it is the same as wishing that we had not followed the dictates of judgement and conscience. As this is a world designed for discipline and trial, untoward events are never to be construed as indications of the obliquity ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... now at the fruit, now at the old woman and myself; he wore a blue mantle, and had a kind of fur cap on his head; he was somewhat above the middle stature; his features were keen, but rather hard; there was a slight obliquity in his vision. Selecting a small apple, he gave the old woman a penny; then, after looking at me scrutinizingly for a moment, he moved from the booth in ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... do not wonder, Berganza, that ill-doing is so easily learned, since it comes by a natural obliquity. ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... laterally, with greater or less prominence; the nose is very small, tilted up slightly at the end, and is usually hollowed instead of arched. The eyes are small and black in color, set somewhat obliquely, and the upper lid is drawn down over the eye at its inner corner so as to make the obliquity still more marked. The teeth are larger than those of the Caucasian. Finally, the Mongol is below the average of all men as regards height, being usually about five ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... or at least what appears to the moderns fanciful, arrangement of the cases amongst grammarians, may be dispensed with for the present. The idea, that the nominative is a direct, upright case, and that the genitive declines with the smallest obliquity from it; the dative, accusative, and ablative, falling further and further from the perpendicularity of speech, is a species of metaphysics not very edifying to a child. Into what absurdity men of abilities may be led by the desire of explaining what they do not sufficiently ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... about with dishes of all kinds, and the hairdresser becomes communicative to his next neighbour, a butcher from Whitechapel, and they exchange their sentiments about kidneys and music in general, and the kidneys and music now offered to them in particular. In a few minutes, a gentleman with a strange obliquity in his vision, seated in the middle of the coffee-room, takes off his hat, and after a thump on the table from the landlord's hammer, commences a song so intensely comic, that when it is over, the orders for supper and drink are almost unanimous. The house is now full, the theatres ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... not so brilliant in his acquirements, nor so vigorous in his teaching, and therefore clever boys did not catch fire from him so much as from the fourth-form master. But he was a far truer and deeper Christian; and, with no less scrupulous a sense of honour and detestation of every form of moral obliquity, he never yielded to those storms of passionate indignation which Mr Gordon found it impossible to control. Disappointed in early life, subjected to the deepest and most painful trials, Mr Rose's fine character had come out like gold from the ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... disputes then coming to a head. On account of these latter he thought it expedient, the year after his marriage, to withdraw to Hungary, from whence he sent short treatises to Tuebingen, "On the magnet" (following the ideas of Gilbert of Colchester), "On the cause of the obliquity of the ecliptic" and "On the Divine wisdom as shown in the Creation". His next important step makes it desirable to devote a chapter to a ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... the dependence of great events on trifles is found in the story of the volume of Tacitus, which by chance suggested the sleeping potion for Frau v. L., or that Tobias's inability to take off his hat with his right hand was influential on the boy's future life. This is a reminder of Tristram's obliquity in his manner of setting up his top. As in Shandy, there is a discussion about the location of the soul. The character of Selmann is a compound of Yorick and the elder Shandy, with a tinge of satiric exaggeration, meant to chastise the thirst for "originals" and overwrought sentimentalism. ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... in convulsions, and the left arm, too, is paralysed. They take him down to Cairo; and Medicine, considering the disease of his mother, guesses a third time—tuberculosis of the spine, it says—and guesses wrong. Again, considering the strabismus, the obliquity of the mouth, the palsy in the arms, and the convulsions, we guess closely, but ominously. Nay, Medicine is positive this time; for a fifth and a sixth Guesser confirm the others. Here we have a case of cerebral meningitis. That ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... entered into his eighteenth year, when he met at the table of a certain Anglo-Germanist, an individual, apparently somewhat under thirty, of middle stature, a thin and weaselly figure, a sallow complexion, a certain obliquity of vision, and a large pair of spectacles. This person, who had lately come from abroad, and had published a volume of translations, had attracted some slight notice in the literary world, and was looked upon as a kind of lion in a small provincial capital. After dinner ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... last moment, and without completely ruining him prevents him from attaining his object. Why? Very likely, just because his nose is crooked. I assure you, that sort of crookedness is nearly always the sign of a twist in the intellect, an obliquity in the character. The helm's ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... the Rio Grande during this period there sprang up many factional differences from various causes, some personal, others political, and some, I regret to say, from downright moral obliquity—as, for example, those between Cortinas and Canales —who, though generally hostile to the Imperialists, were freebooters enough to take a shy at each other frequently, and now and then even to join forces against Escobedo, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... that Mr. Froude should be dinning in our ears this case of benefited self-interest, gaining the amplest reciprocity, both as to service and serviceableness, with the disinterested spontaneity of America's elevation of Mr. Douglass, is but another proof of the obliquity of the moral medium through [143] which he is wont to survey mankind and ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... old bottles, and wine that is much too strong for the bottles. Everybody can see why some particular law might be violated without a sense of guilt, but they cannot see how a law they believe in can be violated without serious obliquity. ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... strange passage. What did Shakespeare mean us to feel? One is astonished that Othello should not be startled, nay thunder-struck, when he hears such dying words coming from the lips of an obdurate adulteress. One is shocked by the moral blindness or obliquity which takes them only as a further sign of her worthlessness. Here alone, I think, in the scene sympathy with Othello quite disappears. Did Shakespeare mean us to feel thus, and to realise how completely confused ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... call madness. For instance, any one who imagined himself too tall to pass under a gateway of the Long Wall without stooping, or so strong as to try to lift a house, or to attempt any other obvious impossibility, is a madman according to them; but in the popular sense he is not mad, if his obliquity is confined to small matters. In fact, just as strong desire goes by the name of passion in popular parlance, so mental obliquity on a grand scale ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... Much is made of sin, so called, in the Hindu system, as we shall presently see; but nowhere is more care needed than here that we may distinguish between ideas conveyed by this word in these two faiths. In Christianity the ethical character of sin is emphasized. It is described as a thing of moral obliquity and spiritual darkness. According to the Upanishads the only defect of man is an intellectual one. He is in bondage to ignorance. Plato made ignorance the chief source of moral evil and proposed philosophy as a remedy for the malady. The Vedantin differs from the Greek philosopher ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... and rather inclined to be frizzy. Projecting jaws and teeth, thick lips, low narrow foreheads, and broad flat noses are the features characteristic of the tribe. The eyes are often bright and full, and no obliquity is observable in ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... the illustration the Ecliptic is represented by the curved line, C V T. The plane of the Ecliptic is inclined to that of the Equinoctial at an angle of 23 deg. 27-1/2', and this inclination is called the obliquity of the Ecliptic. ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... Fayries, Devils, The impure extract of a world of Evils; Natures great Errour, the Obliquity Of the Gods Wisdom; and th'Anomaly From all that's good; Ile curse you all below The Center, and if I could, then further throw Your cursed heads, and if any should gain A place in Heaven, Ile rhyme 'em down again To a worse ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... patrons of vice, and especially with many, who, though they were often covered with a garb of outward morality, were full of rottenness within. Some, who pass for moral and religious persons, have in this thing exhibited a moral obliquity that has ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... acquaintance we were on our way to a race meeting, and he proposed to give me his company. Like all of his class, he knew many "certainties," and he offered, with engaging frankness, to put me in the way of "gittin' a bit." The racing blackguard never talks of money; indeed, his obliquity of mind prevents him from calling anything by its right name. For him the world is divided between those who "have got it"—it being money—and those who mean to "get a bit" by any means, fair or foul. On that day, long ago, this creature fancied that I had some ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... recitations, etc., and to merely accept, while boys are more inspired by being told to do things and make tests and experiments. In this, girls are often quite at sea. One writer speaks of a certain feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that singing classes the voices of each sex are better in quality for the presence of the other. In many topics of all kinds boys and ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... sometimes wore, the man's back and shoulders married so intimately with the night that it was hard to determine the dividing line between the two. So much more of the deck behind him, and of the sky immediately beyond his neck, was obliterated than by any possible human outline. Whether owing to obliquity of disturbed vision, tricks of shadow, or movement of the vessel between the stars and foam, the Irishman saw these singular emanations spread about him into space. He saw them this time directly. And more than ever before they seemed in some way right and comely—true. They were in no sense ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... went toiling upstairs, her chained ornaments clinking, and only when she had shut the door upon herself did she relax and smile over the simplicity of even a feminine creature so versed in obliquity as Esther. For Esther might want to escape the man who had brought disgrace upon her, but her flying feet would do her no good, so long as the mainspring of her life set her heart beating irrationally for conquest. Esther had to conquer even when the event would bring disaster: like ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... a sincere personal confession with the decorous obliquity of an Official Narrative; and I found that I had put the Antarctic Committee in a difficulty from which I could rescue them only by taking the book off their hands; for it was clear that what I had written was not what is expected from a Committee, even though no member may disapprove ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... correspondency. The simple perusal of the writings is sufficient to prove that neither the history was taken from the letters, nor the letters from the history. And the undesignedness of the agreements (which undesignedness is gathered from their latency, their minuteness, their obliquity, the suitableness of the circumstances in which they consist to the places in which those circumstances occur, and the circuitous references by which they are traced out) demonstrates that they have not been produced ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... of the primitive Roman was essentially different from that of the contemporary Greek, and as his struggle for existence was severe in the extreme, there was little moral obliquity during the first two hundred and fifty years. The "coelibes prohibeto" of the Twelve Tables was also a powerful influence in preserving chastity. By the time of Plautus, however, the practice of paederasty was much more general, as is clearly proved by the many references ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... learned Greeks and Jews taught in the schools, and a number of advances on the scientific work done by the Greeks were made. A degree of the earth's surface [3] was measured on the shores of the Red Sea; the obliquity of the ecliptic was determined (c. 830); astronomical tables were calculated; algebra and trigonometry were perfected; discoveries in chemistry not known in Europe until toward the end of the eighteenth century, and advances ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... object of their mental contemplation. Since the time when he had been exiled from the Temple, the Pagan's faculties had, unconsciously to himself, acted solely in reference to the daring design which it was the business of his whole existence to entertain. Influenced, therefore, by this obliquity of moral feeling, he had scarcely reflected on the discovery that he had just made at the base of the city wall, ere his mind instantly reverted to the ambitious meditations which had occupied it in the morning; and the next moment, the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... entirely new study, with the whole-hearted enthusiasm that had made him an adept at linotypes, gas engines, and the sport of kings. Not yet, in Winona's view, had he actually gone down into the depths of social obliquity; but she soon knew he had ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... is placed under the three that are in the midst, and is oblique, gently touching them all. Likewise, they are all divided in right angles by the meridian, which goes from pole to pole. It is supposed that Pythagoras made the first discovery of the obliquity of the zodiac, but one Oenopides of Chios challenges to himself the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... he exclaimed. Again the feeling that his surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own attitude. She was not ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... prevail over logical arrangement; and he who spends time due to prompt library service in worrying over errors in a catalogue, or vexing his soul at a faulty classification, is as mistaken as those fussy individuals who fancy that they are personally responsible for the obliquity of the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... but the perfection of the original was gone. Again and again I have heard him [Leech] sigh as he looked over the new number of Punch; and as I, seeing but excellence, would ask an explanation, he would point to some almost imperceptible obliquity which vexed his gentle soul." It is a curious fact that, in common with most draughtsmen, Leech never became reconciled to the fact that black printer's-ink cannot exactly render the tender grey tones of a hard ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... viewed from the side, the profile of the teeth shows a very noticeable increase in the obliquity with which they meet. The posterior borders of the corners show considerable wear. The notch in the superior corners is still present, but as the teeth come more nearly in apposition it may begin to disappear. All of the inferior tables are level. The nippers ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... do you want?" exclaimed Vanslyperken, rather alarmed; while Snarleyyow walked round and round the thick calves of the man's legs, growling, and in more than two minds to have a bite through his blue worsted stockings; and the peculiar obliquity with which he carried his head, now that he surveyed with only one eye, ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... lantern from which proceeded the picture, was managed by a hidden operator, evidently from his voice, occasionally overheard, a mere boy; and an old man, like a broken-down clergyman, whose dirty white neckcloth seemed adjusted on a secret understanding of moral obliquity, its knot suggesting a gradual approach to the last position a knot on the neck can assume, kept walking up and down the parti-colored gloom, flaunting a pretense of lecture on the scenes presented. Whether he was a little drunk or greatly in his dotage, it was impossible to determine ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... appeared, and after the initial thirty-six hours under the commander's roof, rarely went thither at all. She knew her brother disapproved of him, and thought it to be because of moral, not military, obliquity. She saw with instant apprehension his quick interest in Angela and the child's almost unconscious response. With the solemn conviction of the maiden who, until past the meridian, had never loved, she looked on Angela as far too young and immature to ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... his stunted growth, seemed about twelve or thirteen years old, though he was probably, in reality, a year or two older, with a carroty pate in huge disorder, a freckled, sunburnt visage, with a snub nose, a long chin, and two peery grey eyes, which had a droll obliquity of vision, approaching to a squint, though perhaps not a decided one. It was impossible to look at the little man without some disposition to laugh, especially when Gammer Sludge, seizing upon and kissing him, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... was all said good-naturedly, was meant to be funny, and was uttered from a public rostrum with an utter obliviousness to the mental obliquity that a moment's thought will disclose. It left upon my mind much the same impression as that once made by hearing an apparently respectable man boast of having stolen an umbrella out of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... of the greatest dramatists of the nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest realistic French dramatist, died at the close of the century in all the odour of obliquity. His work is now the chief literary topic in Paris; it has indeed rivalled the Portuguese revolution and the French railway strike as a subject of conversation among people who talk like sheep run. This dizzy popularity ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... Eboli, which the misty delirium of the poet may have magnified, or the expedient boldness of the romancer too voluptuously emblazoned, but which more than one grave annalist has calmly commemorated.[4] We shall not, however, venture to decide the nice question which oscillates between an obliquity and a loss of vision. The Spanish word "tuerto" means, ordinarily, "blind of one eye." And there is an answer which M. Mignet probably considers apocryphal, as he does not allude to it, said to have been made by Perez to Henry ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... all young people. It may be said that all five were concerned in a complicated hoax on Mr. Gurney. Nor would such a hoax argue any unusual moral obliquity. Surtees of Mainsforth, in other respects an honourable man, took in Sir Walter Scott with forged ballads, and never undeceived his friend. Southey played off a hoax with his book The Doctor. Hogg, Lockhart, ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... anything but elf locks, or to obliterate the bristly tuft that made him like Riquet, was impossible, illness had made him additionally lean and sallow, and his keen eyes, under their black contracted brows and dark lashes, showed all the more the curious variation in their tints, and with an obliquity that varied according to the state of the nerves. There was a satirical mischievous cast in the mould of the face, though individually the features were not amiss except for their thinness, and in fact the unpleasantness of the expression had insensibly ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of belief in the supernatural—one theory respecting the origin and government of the universe—stands wholly clear both of intellectual contradiction and of moral obliquity. It is that which, resigning irrevocably the idea of an omnipotent creator, regards Nature and Life not as the expression throughout of the moral character and purpose of the Deity, but as the product of a struggle between contriving goodness and an intractable material, as was believed ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... me for my obliquity (as you will consider it) about Ossian. You know I always talk sincerely to you, and you have not made me afraid of telling you the truth—that is, my truth, the truth ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Edward the credit of superior insight, more resolute policy, and a more clearly perceived goal, the intellectual superiority, which he possessed over his rival, was hardly balanced by any special moral obliquity on his part; though to Philip, with all his weakness, must always be given the sympathy provoked by the defence of his land against the foreign invader. It is useless to refine the issue further. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... was soon over and forgotten; but sometimes, if the young man didn't do the right thing by her, and the girl's folk took it hardly, well, then—-! So had run the reasoning of this good woman. Being of the same class, she had looked at her lodger from the first without obliquity of vision. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... obliquity on the slavery question, Douglas made a dignified and worthy reply. "I hold that the people of the slave-holding States are civilized men as well as ourselves; that they bear consciences as well as we, and ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... region of the toe, the wall following the angle of the bones is greatly oblique. This obliquity decreases as the quarters are reached, until on reaching the heels the ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... over why he was on the Indian. There was a moral obliquity about his present position; the new light of his discovery showed him this strongly. His feelings had been played upon by the owner of the Indian, at ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... these promises and prophecies, and wondered whether there was really deep down in his soul some moral obliquity that the acute master crook had detected and responded to. There had been clergymen and philanthropists among Archie's forebears, but never murderer or thief, and he was half-persuaded that he was the predestined black sheep that he had always ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... of earth or a stone. Just some such thing he was to her; she did not seem able to realise that there was the cold body of her friend. Bran just sniffed him over and left him, but Thumbeline showed no consciousness that he was there at all. I wondered, was this heartlessness or obliquity? But I have never found the answer ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... brother-in-law,' said the late Ioan Bratianu when speaking on the Transylvanian question, 'it is no affair of mine; but when he raises a knife against his wife, it is not merely my right to intervene, it is my duty.' It is difficult to account for the obliquity of vision shown by so many Rumanian politicians. 'The whole policy of such a state [having a large compatriot population living in close proximity under foreign domination] must be primarily influenced by anxiety as to the fate of their ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... which—when all has been said—was the nearest possible approach to the ideal peace. It is clear that the blame is not entirely on one side. Historians will doubtless level the indictment of ignorance and political obliquity against the Senators who tried, either directly or indirectly, to defeat the treaty; they will find much justification for their charge, although it will be more difficult to determine the dividing line between mere incapacity to appreciate the necessities ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... his own did he contribute; he preferred elephants' tusks. The author of Headlong Hall[640] makes a grand error, which is quite high science: he says that Laplace proved the precession of the equinoxes to be a periodical inequality. He should have said the variation of the obliquity. But the finest instance is the following: Mr. Warren,[641] in his well-wrought tale of the martyr-philosopher, was incautious enough to invent the symbols by which his savant satisfied himself Laplace[642] was right on a doubtful point. And this ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... doubtless, and reprehensible to Right Reverend persons, who never 'cast away' anything; to whom a religious profession has been a highway to pleasure and preferment, who live in the comfortable assurance that as it has been in this life so it will be in the next. Only moral obliquity of the worst kind could admit a doubt about so excellent a religion as this. But Bunyan was not a Right Reverend. Christianity had brought him no palaces and large revenues, and a place among the great of the land. If Christianity was not true his whole ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... were well known, and the natural politeness of the people prevented them from putting me to any inconvenience; but they could not help eyeing me, nor I them. I may as well say at once what my after-experience taught me—namely, that with all their faults and extraordinary obliquity of mental vision upon many subjects, they are the very best-bred people that I ever fell ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... am inclined to think that he is of our nation and fair complexion. Really, when you reflect, it is unjust to assume your tertium quid and complicate the story—yet. We have no actual evidence of her—obliquity." ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... life, Fig. 6, the internal ring is situated nearly opposite to the external ring, 4. As the pelvis widens gradually in the advance to adult age, Fig. 5, the canal becomes oblique as to position. This obliquity is caused by a change of place, performed rather by the internal than the external ring. [Footnote] The greater width of the female pelvis than of the male, renders the canal more oblique in the former; and this, combined with the circumstance that the female inguinal canal, Fig. 7, ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... why on the radial surface of the test blocks the plane of rupture passes in a direction nearly following a medullary ray, whereas on the tangential surface the direction of the plane of rupture is oblique—but with an obliquity varying with the species and determined by the pitch of the spirals along which the medullary rays are distributed in the stem." See Jaccard, op. cit., pp. 57 ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... was 18 feet long, and could therefore be looked at very obliquely. I placed myself near the end of the beam, as it issued from the electric lamp, and, looking through the Nicol and selenite more and more obliquely at the beam, observed the colours fading until they disappeared. Augmenting the obliquity the colours appeared once more, but they were now ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... not afford proofs of its existence. Every thing that the Almighty has formed is practically useful; and is arranged in such a manner as to give the clearest indications, that it was designed to be turned to some useful purpose by man. The annual and diurnal motions of the earth in its orbit; the obliquity of its axis; the inequality of its surface, and the disposition and disruption of its strata, all shew the most consummate wisdom, and are severally a call to intelligent man to turn them to use. On these, and on every other department of Nature's ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... sister Arabel, 'it would not do.' And she was right, and we all agreed that she was right. It is an obliquity of the will—and one laughs at it till the turn comes for crying. Poor Henrietta has suffered silently, with that softest of possible natures, which hers is indeed; beginning with implicit obedience, and ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... I marvel at the obliquity of vision whereby any one is enabled, standing in this metropolis, to anticipate the subversion of the Republic and the restoration of Monarchy. Such prophets must belong essentially to that school which teaches the omnipotence ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... with nave and aisles, all terminated by semicircular apses, with an arcade of nine arches of unequal width, owing perhaps partly to the obliquity of the west wall, itself caused by the close proximity of the palace of the Count, which was still in existence till 1833. The three easternmost bays are enclosed as presbytery, and this and other alterations are the work of the seventeenth century; but ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... Upon this he approached the pawnbroker: it was long before he could obtain a hearing, and he did not find civility. The man was unwilling to part with a valuable pledge so soon, or perhaps he hoped to retain it eventually; or it might be, that the obliquity of his nature disqualified him for respectful behaviour. A pawnbroker is frequently an important witness in criminal proceedings: it has happened to me, therefore, afterwards to see many specimens of this kind of banker; they sometimes appeared not less respectable than other tradesmen, and sometimes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... not lived. I had only waited—for her and for what she stood for. It was in my blood, in my race, in my tradition, in my training. We, all of us for generations, had made for efficiency, for drill, for restraint. Our Romance was just this very Spanish contrast, this obliquity of vision, this slight tilt of the convex mirror that shaped the same world so differently to onlookers at ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... England. Everybody began to talk of Reineke; and now, at any rate, we said to ourselves, we shall see whether we are alone in our liking—whether others share in this strange sympathy, or whether it be some unique and monstrous moral obliquity in ourselves. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... men generally refer their actions to, to judge of their rectitude or obliquity, seem to me to be these three:—1. The DIVINE law. 2. The CIVIL law. 3. The law of OPINION or REPUTATION, if I may so call it. By the relation they bear to the first of these, men judge whether their actions are sins or duties; by the second, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... condition, and with no more consideration of the high and mighty of this world than the high and mighty had for her. Slowly and by insensible degrees, since she was too young to mark the phenomena in any case, she had been forged and hammered into a living piece of moral obliquity,—and yet the very first contact with an innocent mind and kindly sympathy awoke in her childish breast a subtle consciousness ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... quite won my heart by the evident pride and affection with which he spoke of Freddy. The lady of the house was a little, round, merry-looking woman, chiefly remarkable (as I soon discovered) for a peculiar mental obliquity, leading her always to think of the wrong thing at the wrong time, whereby she was perpetually becoming involved in grievous colloquial entanglements, and meeting with innumerable small personal accidents, at which no one ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... a mist came before my eyes, and confounded all things. At length I was awakened to something like consciousness, by a rapid and universal expectoration. I rose, and became painfully distressed by a conflict of opposing feelings. I remembered, in spite of the present obliquity of the minister, his great kindness to me—I remembered it with gratitude—this urged me to speak aloud, whilst a sense of justice as strongly demanded silence, and pity for the man whom I had undertaken to accuse, but who had never offended me, cried shame upon me for the words I was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... with just one cent in my pocket, and put up at a boarding-house where the charge was one dollar a day. In this no moral obliquity was involved. I had simply reached the goal for which I had sacrificed all, and felt sure that the French people or the Danish Consul would do the rest quickly. But there was evidently something wrong somewhere. The Danish Consul could only register my demand ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... was considerate on my part: I was allowing for the angle of obliquity in your vision. You would have exactly fetched ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... earth's axis is undoubtedly a very important factor in climate. Practically it more than doubles the width of the belts of ordinary food-stuffs by lengthening the summer day in the temperate zone. Beyond the tropics the obliquity of the sun's rays are more than balanced by the increased length of time ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... sight only in one eye, an obliquity caused, it is suggested, by lying when a baby in a wooden cradle, the sides of which prevented ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... that the line of the eaves, if continued, would intersect the top of the gable chimney. The dwelling and the tree then form a focus for the converging lines of sidewalk and roof, thus qualifying the vertical effect of the building on the right. As the obliquity of the composition is still objectionable, we decide to introduce a foreground figure which will break up the line of the long sidewalk, and place it so that it will increase the influence of some contrary line, see Fig. 59. We find that by putting it a little to the right of the entrance and on ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis |
