"Obtuse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... believe and drink." How strange to add, in this nefarious trade, That men of parts are dupes by dunces made: That creatures, nature meant should clean our streets, Have purchased lands and mansions, parks and seats: Wretches with conscience so obtuse, they leave Their untaught sons their parents to deceive; And when they're laid upon their dying bed, No thought of murder comes into their head, Nor one revengeful ghost to them appears, To fill ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... most obtuse vanity could ever have induced Bozzy to publish all this. 'Curiosity,' he declares in the preface, 'is the most prevalent of all our passions, and the curiosity for reading letters is the most prevalent of all kinds of curiosity. Had any man in the three kingdoms found ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... to speak more plainly than I like, Derek," she was saying, "because you make yourself so obtuse. You seem to forget that years have a way of passing, and that Dorothea is no longer a ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... remind her of her flirtatious preferences for the young beef-witted London chaps, and her incertitude and disdainful capriciousness towards myself, who was not a beetlehead or an obtuse, but a cultivated native gentleman with high-class university degree, and an oratorical flow of language which was infallibly to land me upon the pinnacle of some tip-top judicial preferment in the ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... failure to appreciate Storri as a nobleman possessing wealth and station,—in short, if Dorothy betrayed an intention to refuse his exalted hand,—then she, Mrs. Hanway-Harley, would interfere. She would take Dorothy in solemn charge, and compel that obtuse maiden to what redounded to her good. Mrs. Hanway-Harley doubted neither the propriety nor the feasibility of establishing a censorship over Dorothy's heart, should the young lady evince a blinded inability to see ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... thought I was very obtuse, but I could not understand the relation between the parties, and I had not the faintest idea why she was running away from Mrs. Loraine. I was not willing to believe that a young miss like her intended to resort ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... hard, Geert. Besides, we wives, for I can count myself one since you are back"—and she reached out her hand and laughed—"we wives guess easily. We are not so obtuse ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... stealthy smile: "It was a coup de theatre, and it had evidently great success. They had to accept peace at my hands as a favor. Ah, if they had guessed how much I needed it myself! But these men are obtuse; they cannot see any thing. They have no aim; they only live from minute to minute, and whenever they find a precipice on their route, they stumble over it, and are lost beyond redemption. My God, how scarce real men are! There are eighteen millions in ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... streets, which Rimmer, a minute observer of English domestic architecture, thus describes: "An acute-angled street may be made to contain rectangular rooms on an upper story.... Draw an acute angle—say something a little less than a right angle—and cut it into compartments; or, if preferred, an obtuse angle, and cut this into compartments also. Now, the roadway may be so prescribed as to prevent right angles from being made on the basement, but the complementary angles are ingeniously made out by allowing the joists ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... gate on the inside and watched again. After long waiting the old cow came quickly round the corner and approached the gate. She lifted the latch with her nose. Then, as the gate did not move, she lifted it again and again. Then she gently nudged it. Then, the obtuse gate not taking the hint, she butted it gently, then harder and still harder, till it rattled again. At this juncture I emerged from my hiding-place, when the old villain scampered off with great precipitation. She knew she was trespassing, and she had learned that there ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... Jupiter as long as possible, and moved at tremendous speed. Saturn was somewhat in advance of Jupiter in its orbit, so that their course from the earth had been along two sides of a triangle with an obtuse angle between. During the next four terrestrial days they sighted several small comets, but spent most of their time writing out their Jovian experiences. During the sixth day Saturn's rings, although not as much ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... gasped, and with a faint shake of his head at the floor abandoned the thankless task of giving hints to a young man who was too obtuse to see them; and it was not until some time later that Mr. Hardy, sorely against his inclinations, gave his host a hearty handshake and, with a respectful bow to Miss Nugent, ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... Depressed-globose: tubercles cylindrical, obtuse, with some axillary bristles: radial spines very much crowded, exceedingly numerous, radiant, very slender and bristle-like, white; central spines 6 to 10 and even more, erect and more rigid: flowers pale reddish: ...
— The North American Species of Cactus, Anhalonium, and Lophophora • John M. Coulter
... speak to him. I knew then that he had seen the same thing that I had seen: if his strong, rather obtuse material nature had recognized it, what could so blind her mother and father and the doctor? I burst into ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... was heavy, and made a massive shelter for the eyes. So looked the young German who had perhaps heard Melanchthon; so, in this middle nineteenth century, looked Jacob Delafield. No, anger makes obtuse; that, no doubt, was Lady Henry's case. At any rate, in Delafield's presence her theory ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of men; their muscular coordinations are surely no prompter. One finds quite as many obvious botches among them; they have as many bodily blemishes; they are infested by the same microscopic parasites; their senses are as obtuse; their ears stand out as absurdly. Even assuming that their special malaises are wholly offset by the effects of alcoholism in the male, they suffer patently from the same adenoids, gastritis, cholelithiasis, nephritis, tuberculosis, carcinoma, arthritis and so on—in short, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... participate in his sneer, was, for many anxious months, a riddle I could not resolve. Perhaps the gradation of his copy rendered it not so readily perceptible; or, more possibly, I owed my security to the masterly air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see) gave but the full spirit of his original for my ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... only, will suppose I mean grate, for the most obtuse nincompoop must know that anybody can become a grate man by going into the stove business; but to develop yourself into a real bona-fide great man, like GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN or DANIEL PRATT, requires much study and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... inexplicable, but there is no mystery in my leaving Chicago. My future sister-in-law bluntly informed me that my absence from the city would greatly facilitate the necessary dressmaking. Although an obtuse person in some ways, I know when I am bumped. Three days after Fuller's luncheon to Howells, I reached the town of Gallup, which is the point of departure for the Navajo Agency, some twenty-five or thirty miles north ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... size. These cells are filled with a protoplasm, to which the plant owes its orange colour. When they have attained their normal dimensions, they elongate at the summit into two, three, or four distinct, thick, obtuse tubes, into which the protoplasm gradually passes. The development of these tubes is unequal and not simultaneous, so that one will often attain its full dimensions, equal, perhaps, to three or four times the diameter of the generative cell, whilst the ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... lawyer. Let him always seek to have a clear understanding of his object: be sure it is honest and right, and then march directly to it. The covert, indirect, and insidious way of doing anything, is always the wrong way. It gradually hardens the moral faculties, renders obtuse the perception of right and wrong in human actions, weighs everything in the balances of worldly policy, and ends most generally, in the practical adoption of the vile maxim, "that the end sanctifies the means." If it be true, as he ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... "My merits are grossly undervalued by a stiff-necked and obtuse generation. But what would you have, my learned brother? If poverty steps behind you and claps the occulting bushel over your thirty thousand candle-power luminary, your brilliancy is apt to ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... narrow and winding stair, resembling in shape and size a draw-well, the verge of which opened on the threshold of the iron door, showed a descent which seemed to conduct to the infernal regions. The Varangian, however obtuse he might be considered by the quick-witted Greeks, had no difficulty in comprehending that a staircase having such a gloomy appearance, and the access to which was by a portal decorated in such a melancholy style of architecture, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... might. He was a rude, coarse boy. It was scarcely possible, with his past training, that he should be otherwise. But he was very faithful in fulfilling his obligations. Though his sense of right and wrong was very obtuse, he was still disposed to do the right so far as his uncultivated ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... energy in the direction I had pointed out. We followed a parallel line to the high flat plateau on the other side of the stream, the slopes of which, in relation to the plain we were standing on, were at an obtuse angle of about 115 deg.. The snow-covered plateau extended from S.W. to N.E. Beyond it to the N. could be seen some high snowy peaks, in all probability the lofty summits S.E. of Gartok. At the point ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... large masses, some or all of the endoderm cells with thick outer walls. Cones from 10 to 17 cm. long, short-pedunculate, ovoid-conic; apophyses lustrous brown-ochre or fuscous brown, elevated into thick, often reflexed, beaks with obtuse mutic umbos; seeds with large nuts and adnate striated dark gray or ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... century established the monastery of Mont St. Bernard in the forest, and brought large tracts under cultivation as garden-land. Bardon, the highest hill of Charnwood, which is near by, rises nine hundred feet, an obtuse-angled triangular summit that can be seen for miles away: not far from the forest are several famous places. The abandoned castle of Ashby de la Zouche has been made the site of an interesting town, deriving ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... right angles, for a given triangle, I do not need to prove it for every triangle thereafter. For not only the color and size of the triangle are indifferent, but its other peculiarities as well; the question whether it is right-angled or obtuse-angled, whether it has equal sides, whether it has equal or unequal angles, is not mentioned in the demonstration, and has no influence upon it. Abstracta exist only in this sense. In considering the individual Paul I can attend ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... his wife as soon as it was proper to do so. This was sooner than any steward or missions mother in his church would have suspected. For, once a man is in love, his sense of propriety becomes naively obtuse ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... rustles in silks for diamonds, the other hustles in rags for bread, their occupation being identical. New York was Tory even in Revolutionary times. From its very foundation it has been at the feet of royalty and mouthing of "divine right." It is ever making itself an obtuse triangle before the god of its idolatry—its knees and nose on the earth, its tail-feathers in the air; but we had yet to learn that it considered "that divinity which doth behedge a king" capable of sanctifying a woman's shame, transforming a foul leman ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... and muttered something about "professions of regard," and "affectionate epistles," etc.; but it was all lost upon the obtuse man who talked on, about what especially concerned him, and then went ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... dumb students are nothing new to me. But even the worst of them couldn't have been any more obtuse than Bishop. I had the dead plants, all brown and withered. There were simple charts showing exactly, in terms of time, how the virus worked, killing the poppy within forty-eight hours, and even destroying the viability of any seeds ...
— Revenge • Arthur Porges
... and sister. Every thing the reverse of what has been recited of Hector was visible in Olivia. He was boisterous, selfish, and brutal; she was compassionate, generous, and gentle: his faculties were sluggish, obtuse, and confined; hers were acute, discriminating, and capacious: his want of feeling made him delight to inflict torture; her extreme sensibility made her fly to administer relief. The company of Olivia soon became very attractive, and the rambles that I have sometimes taken ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... about twenty hours, in dreams as well as in waking moments, I bad been brooding over the identity of the lady of the ice, and had become convinced that the O'Halloran ladies knew something about it; yet so obtuse was I that I had not suspected that the lady herself might be found in this house. In fact, such an event was at once so romantic and so improbable that it did not even suggest itself. But now here was the lady herself. Here she stood. Now I could understand the emotion, the ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... until I have given my friendly counsel. Thou art free to follow it or not to follow it. But for the sake of this beard Sheikh Khalid, do not speak at the Mosque to-day. I know the people of this City: they are ignorant, obtuse, fanatical, blind. 'God hath sealed up their hearts and their hearing.' They will not hear thee; they can not understand thee. I know them better than thou: I have lived amongst them for forty years. And what talk have we wasted. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... short-sighted person's immature feet, certain malicious spirits had so willed it that the chief and more autumnal of the Maidens Blank (who, nevertheless, wore an excessively flower-like name), had long lavished herself upon the possession of an obtuse and self-assertive hound, which was in the habit of gratifying this inconsiderable person and those who sat around by continually depositing upon their unworthy garments details of its outer surface, and when the weather was more than usually cold, by stretching its graceful and refined ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... upon certain days, any individual might have the honour of sharing her family repast; and many, of various callings, though chiefly in commercial life, met at her miscellaneous board. Clarence must, indeed, have been difficult to please, or obtuse of observation, if, in the variety of her guests, he had not found something either to interest or amuse him. Heavens! what a motley group were accustomed, twice in the week, to assemble there! the little dining-parlour seemed a human oven; and it must be owned that Clarence was no ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... character presents as much unlikeness to the Oriental as to the European type, and is comparable only to itself. In nothing is this more apparent than in the fact that a people who are so intelligent, who can reason calmly and cogently on nearly any other subject, should be so obtuse in religious matters. A Japanese believes the little caricature in ivory or wood, which has perhaps been manufactured under his own eye, or even by his own hands, is sacred, and will address his prayers to ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... more form and regularity with increased proportions and the conviction, forced upon the most obtuse mind, that a struggle was at hand demanding most perfect organization, the looseness of a divided system had become apparent. The laws against any State maintaining a standing army were put into effect; and the combined military ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... that he considered poor Tom to be mad; and indeed I was myself completely mystified by his conduct. I had, however, seen so many proofs of my friend's good sense and quickness of apprehension that I thought it quite possible that Wharton's story had had a meaning in his eyes which I was too obtuse to take in. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... of idiots is curiously low; they hardly distinguish between heat and cold, and their sense of pain is so obtuse that some of the more idiotic seem hardly to know what it is. In their dull lives, such pain as can be excited in them may literally be accepted with a welcome surprise. During a visit to Earlswood Asylum I saw two boys whose toe-nails had grown into the flesh ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... to, and to convince them of errors to which they have no temptation, they might as well be spending their money to persuade schoolmasters that two and two make four, or geometricians that there cannot be two obtuse angles in a triangle. If this be their notion of the way in which the gospel is to be preached, we do not wonder that they have found it necessary to print a tract upon the impropriety of sleeping ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... crisis. A little cat of manifestly humble origin, with only an innate sense of propriety to oppose to a coarse-minded magistrate, and a circle of mocking friends. The judge, imperturbably obtuse, dropped the kitten on the rug, and prepared to resume their former friendly relations. The kitten did not run away, she did not even walk away; that would have been an admission of defeat. She sat down very slowly, as if first searching for a particular spot in the intricate ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... [from the instant question of life] by any weakness of imagination; 4th, in a tolerably thick skin—not literally, for she was fair and blooming, and decidedly handsome, having such a skin as became a young woman of family in northernmost Spain. But her sensibilities were obtuse as regarded some modes of delicacy, some modes of equity, some modes of the world's opinion, and all modes whatever of personal hardship. Lay a stress on that word some—for, as to delicacy, she never ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... expression in our issue of April 6th concerning the possibility of a crisis in Anglo-Armenian relations. The incident of the Bobadig mules is already bearing fruit, and we can no longer doubt that popular feeling in the vilayet of Arimabug has been dangerously inflamed by the obtuse procrastination of the British Government. These ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... spiritual capital of the world, while Asia—rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police regulations, glorious in all material glories—postures, complacent and obtuse, before a Europe content in the ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... When the shaft revolves, the balls fly outwards by centrifugal force, and as their velocity increases the quadrilateral figure contained by the four links expands laterally and shortens vertically. The angles between K K and L L become less and less obtuse, and the weight W is drawn upwards, bringing with it the fork C of the rod A, which has ends engaging with the groove. As C rises, the other end of the rod is depressed, and the rod B depresses rod O, which is attached to the spindle operating a sort of shutter in the steam-pipe. Consequently ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... Strauss strongly resented the action of one of his opponents who happened to refer to his reverence for Lessing. The unfortunate man had misunderstood;—true, Strauss did declare that one must be of a very obtuse mind not to recognise that the simple words of paragraph 86 come from the writer's heart. Now, I do not question this warmth in the very least; on the contrary, the fact that Strauss fosters these feelings towards ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... custom of all men, everywhere, to be obtuse where women are concerned. Hoddan went skyward in the spaceboat with feelings of warm gratitude toward the Lady Fani. He had not the slightest inkling that she, who had twice spoiled her father's skulduggery so far as it affected him, felt any but ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... and unfathomable are thy mysteries! And why is it that thou permittest the course of true love, like this, so seldom to run smooth, when so many who, uniting through the impulse of sordid passion, sink into a state of obtuse indifference, over which the lights and shadows that touch thee into thy finest perceptions of enjoyment pass ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... eggs, and afford an acceptable dish. I obtained a live specimen, which Dr. Rayner of this ship describes thus:—"Cereopsis Novae Hollandiae. Body about the size of a common goose; bill short, vaulted, obtuse, two-thirds of which is covered by an expanded cere of a pale greenish-yellow colour, the tip of the bill being black, arcuated, and truncated. Nostrils large, round, open, and situated in the middle of the bill. Wings ample, third quill longest. Legs long, light dull-red, ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... geometry are all lost; they include (1) the Conics in four Books, which covered almost the same ground as the first three Books of Apollonius's Conics, although no doubt, for Euclid, the conics were still, as with his predecessors, sections of a right-angled, an obtuse-angled, and an acute-angled cone respectively made by a plane perpendiular to a generator in each case; (2) the Porisms in three Books, the importance and difficulty of which can be inferred from Pappus's account of it and the lemmas which he gives for use ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... central window of the nave was enlarged, and that, and the others which now enliven the inner wall, were filled with perpendicular tracery. The porch is vaulted with stone, and is entered by an obtuse arch, over which is an elliptical window, divided by mullions into six lights under cinquefoil arches, which are again subdivided in ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... from the rest. It is infinitely the most various sort. It includes all those heresies which result from wrong-headed mental elaboration, as distinguished from those which are the result of hasty and imperfect apprehension, the heresies of the clever rather than the heresies of the obtuse. The former are of endless variety and complexity; the latter are in comparison natural, simple confusions. The former are the errors of the study, the latter the superstitions that spring by the wayside, ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... reply to what I have said about having upon a previous occasion made the speech at Ottawa as the one he took an extract from at Charleston, says it only shows that I practiced the deception twice. Now, my friends, are any of you obtuse enough to swallow that? Judge Douglas had said I had made a speech at Charleston that I would not make up north, and I turned around and answered him by showing I had made that same speech up north,—had made it at Ottawa; made ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... staircases, and iron roofings; and as the employment of these materials increased the outlay, he again ended with a catastrophe, which was all the greater as he was a pitiful manager, and had lost his head since he had become rich, rendered the more obtuse, it seemed, by money, quite spoilt and at sea, unable even to revert to his old habits of industry. This time Margaillan grew angry; he for thirty years had been buying ground, building and selling again, estimating at a glance the cost and return ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Yardsley (obtuse). Ha, ha! Yes. Why, of course! Ha, ha, ha! For repartee I have always said-polite repartee, of course—Miss Andrews is—(Aside.) Now what the dickens did she mean ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... jury, reserving to himself final decision. Was it not an historic scene which was enacted there in that little courthouse in Canandaigua? All the inconsistencies were embodied in that Judge, punctilious in manner, scrupulous in attire, conscientious in trivialities, and obtuse on great principles, fitly described by Charles O'Conor—"A very ladylike Judge." Behold him sitting there, balancing all the niceties of law and equity in his Old World scales, and at last saying, "The prisoner will stand up." Whereupon the accused arose. "The sentence of the court is ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... be the saving of us all!" she insisted significantly. But Alaric was still obtuse. "Now, how would my holding and moulding Margaret save us?" The old lady placed her cards deliberately, on the table as she said sententiously: "She would stay with us here—if you were—engaged to her!" The shock had cone. His mother's ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... desperately wicked. Applying these to the circumstances, what a lurid glare they shed on his behaviour! How quickly, how suspiciously quickly, had he succumbed to her charms! How abruptly had his insouciance changed to devotion, his impertinence to respect! How obtuse, how strangely dull had he been in the matter of her claims and her identity! Finally, with what a smiling visage had he lured her to her doom, showed her to his tools, settled to a nicety the least detail of ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... The vacillating tone,—even when the resolve to suppress vacillation has been most determined,—is perceived and understood, and at once utilized, by the least argumentative of lovers, even by lovers who are obtuse. The word "never" may be so pronounced as to make the young lady's twenty thousand pounds full present value for ten in the lover's pocket. There should be no arguments, no letters, no interviews; and the young lady's love should be starved by the absence of all other ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... enthusiasm. He was aggrieved and annoyed, though he might have reflected that each of them was just passing through a spiritual crisis such as does not come often in a lifetime. But though Rakitin was very sensitive about everything that concerned himself, he was very obtuse as regards the feelings and sensations of others—partly from his youth and inexperience, partly from ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... don't be so—" he hesitated for the right word, not wishing to be unjust,—"so obtuse. Listen to that wind! It's cold here. Think what it must be ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... overwhelmed with regret for his own lack of thought and observation, and yet he could not understand why she should hesitate to ask for money. "Why, it is all yours, dear," he said. "You were only asking for what already belongs to you." And many young husbands are just as obtuse, therefore they should receive in advance the instruction that is needed to prevent a possibility of such neglect. Have it understood that if you are worthy to be trusted as a bearer of the name and a sharer of the fortunes of a man, you are worthy to share also the burden of ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... respect which will finally rest upon the principle that the end sanctifies the means. I don't feel in favor of a compromise on a basis like that. Religion may be an excellent means of training the perverse, obtuse and ill-disposed members of the biped race: in the eyes of the friend of truth every fraud, even though it be a pious one, is to be condemned. A system of deception, a pack of lies, would be a strange means of inculcating virtue. The flag to which I have taken ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... stone and bridged with plank, large enough for a man to pass through with a wheelbarrow, and laid diagonally across the road, so that the torrents pouring down the gutter shall not have to turn a right angle, which they would gladly evade doing, but a very obtuse one, which they cannot in conscience refuse; and, as the road all the way is built a little higher on the precipice side than on the mountain side, the water naturally runs into the gutter on that side, and so is easily beguiled into leaving the road, which it would delight to destroy, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... inferior petal about two inches and a half in length, the lower half somewhat triangular, grooved on the two lowermost sides, and keeled at bottom, the keel running straight to its extremity, the upper half gradually dilating towards the base, runs out into two lobes more or less obtuse, which give it an arrow-shaped form, bifid at the apex, hollow, and containing the antherae, the edges of the duplicature crisped and forming a kind of frill from the ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 4 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... became manifest even to the most obtuse that whenever the Supreme Council, following its leaders and working on such lines as these, terminated its labors, the ties between the political communities of Europe would be just as flimsy as in the unregenerate days of secret diplomacy, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... best to keep her thoughts on the move. He compelled her to talk when she yearned to be silent, and again in a vague, disjointed fashion Olga wondered at his lack of penetration. Yet, since he was actually obtuse enough to misunderstand her preoccupation and to be even mildly hurt thereby, she exerted herself for his sake to respond intelligently to his remarks. So, with cheery indifference on his part and aching suspense on hers, they passed ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... of possibility that his "speaking" brown eyes may have said something without his permission! Mary Jackson, being also modest in a degree, of course did not reveal the state of her feelings, and made no visible attempt to ascertain his, but her bluff sagacious old father was not obtuse—neither was he reticent. He was a man of the world—at least of the back-woods world—and his knowledge of life, as there exhibited, was founded on somewhat acute experience. He knew that his daughter was young and remarkably pretty. He saw that Dick ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... dear to my cost I've found— God made your soul for pleasure, not for use: It cleaves no way, but angled broad obtuse, Impinges with a slabby-bellied sound Full upon life, and on the rind of things Rubs its sleek self and utters purr and snore And all the gamut of satisfied murmurings, Content with that, ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... new position was at right angles with my original line, and it took the shape of an obtuse angle, with my three batteries at the apex. Davis, and Carlin of his division, endeavored to rally their men here on my right, but their efforts were practically unavailing,—though the calm and cool appearance of Carlin, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... insane things he did...I understand all she must have felt, and I agree with her that it's best she should go away for a while. She's made me," Anna summed up, "feel as if I'd been dreadfully thick-skinned and obtuse!" ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... did not like Bertha's scoffing mirth at Maria's question. Glad as she was to be at home, her glimpse of the outer world had so enlarged her perceptions, she could not help remarking the unchildlike acuteness of the younger girl, and the obtuse comprehension of the elder; and she feared that she had become discontented and fault-finding after her visit. Moreover, when Bertha spoke much English, a certain hesitation occurred in her speech which was apt to pass unnoticed in her foreign tongues, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and when the little delinquent blushed and hung her head, stammering a faint excuse for her slighted task, he said nothing, but slowly lifting up the lid of his desk, he placed his black ruler in a perpendicular position, letting the lid rest upon it, forming an obtuse angle with the desk. Then he piled the books in the back part, leaving a cavity in front, which looked something like a bower in a greenwood, for it was lined with baize within ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... AVERRHOA BILIMBI.—This is called the blimbing, and is cultivated to some extent in the East Indies. The fruit is oblong, obtuse-angled, somewhat resembling a short, thick cucumber, with a thin, smooth, green rind, filled ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... Doctor; "He is actually edible in them. Note moreover, my son, that He is round in an apple, long-shaped in an aubergine, sharp in a knife and musical in a flute. He has all the qualities of substances, and likewise all the properties of figures. He is acute and He is obtuse, because He is at one and the same time all possible triangles; his radii are at once equal and unequal, because He is both the circle and the ellipse—and He is the hyperbola besides, which is ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... of Jimmy, the unbeliever. The fact that there was not also a hole through his head was due to his forethought in having put on a tam-o'-shanter underneath. The net result was a truncated "toorie." Wullie's bullet had struck his helmet at a more obtuse angle, and had glanced off, as the designer of the smooth exterior ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... that, though the inhabitants of the hives were familiar and friendly with her by this time and recognized that she came among them without hostile intent, it might well happen that among so many thousands there might be one slow-witted enough and obtuse enough not to have grasped this fact. And in such an event a veil was better than any amount of explanations, for you cannot stick to pure reason ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... some twelve feet below. He was up the next instant, and running with huge paces diagonally towards the Surrey side. He had seen the figure of a woman come flying along from the Westminster side, without bonnet or shawl. When she came under the spot where we stood, she had turned across at an obtuse angle towards the other side of the bridge, and Falconer, convinced that she meant to throw herself into the river, went over as I have related. She had all but scrambled over the fence—for there was no parapet yet—by the help of the great beam that ran along ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... Sense is obtuse and safe. Morgan was a mass of fine sensibility; his temperament was full of subtle light and shade—therefore dangerous. Plain-souled, clumsy-handed Common Sense, with perception limited to the thick outlines of character, could not have comprehended him, and would ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... Bloc, the Red Bloc, the Neutral Bloc and such scraps as had been too obtuse to find themselves a Bloc were drawn into the whirlpool in an amazingly short time, if in a variety of ways. In less than two years the world was rid of most of what had ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)
... to Laura's object in making request for the services of Beppo. She herself knew it to be obvious that she intended to probe and cross-examine the man, and in her wilfulness she chose to be obtuse to opinion. She did not even blush to lean a secret ear above the stairs that she might judge, by the tones of Vittoria's voice upon her giving Beppo the order to wait, whether she was at the same time conveying a hint for guardedness. But Vittoria said not a word: it was Ammiani who gave the order. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... kennel, appropriated to the lodging of the muleteer, was a triangular garret already described, formed by the ceiling of the upper story and the roof of the house, which rose in an obtuse angle above it. Its greatest elevation was about six feet, and that only in the centre, whence the tiles slanted downwards on either side to the beams by which the floor was supported. The entrance was by a step-ladder, and through a trap-door, against which, when he reached it, Paco gave two very ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... joint, but at an obtuse angle. An example of its use is in fixing boarding around an octagonal ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham
... leaves, the uppermost of four, in the form of a cross; from the top of the stalk grows a single flower, of an exceedingly dark red colour, in shape resembling the flower, of the narcissus, only much smaller; from the centre of the flower rises a style of a triangular form, and obtuse at the end, which is surrounded by six white stamina, whose extremities are yellow. The root is of the bulbous kind, and resembles in shape that of garlic, being much of the same size, but rounder, and having, like that, four or five ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... modest knave; Scapin directly the reverse. He had no cause to boast so much of his tricks: they are so stupidly planned that in justice they ought not to have succeeded. Even supposing the two old men to be obtuse and brainless in the extreme, we can hardly conceive how they could so easily fall into such a clumsy and obvious snare as he lays for them. It is also disgustingly improbable that Zerbinette, who as a gipsy ought to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... if you were not obtuse you would see it. But you don't see and you don't feel, or you would never have tried to make any one care for you for whom you did not care a bit. But I won't care for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... mouldiness to delight an antiquary, cracks of aged dilapidation, and broken corners that looked as though the rats had gnawed them; also, the gilt edges were tarnished with surprising perfection. As soon as the book was duly prepared, the entries were made. The following extracts will show to the most obtuse mind the purpose to which the office of Maitre Desroches devoted this register, the first sixty pages of which were filled with reports of fictitious cases. On the first page appeared as follows, in the legal spelling of the ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... the mind of Dexter his bride had no knowledge; nor did her keen instincts warn her that the demon of jealousy was already in his heart. Suffering, and the colder spirit of endurance that followed, had rendered her, in a certain sense, obtuse in ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... appear sometimes to have wars with each other, not only from their weapons, but the scars with which many of them were marked, and some of which appeared to be the remains of very considerable wounds, made with stones, bludgeons, or some other obtuse weapon: By these scars also they appear to be no inconsiderable proficients in surgery, of which indeed we happened to have more direct evidence. One of our seamen, when he was on shore, run a large splinter ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... baseless assumptions—"mere theories—"but things self-evident and "obvious to all;"[540] as for example, the postulates and definitions of Geometry. "After laying down hypotheses of the odd and even, and three kinds of angles [right, acute, and obtuse], and figures [as the triangle, square, circle, and the like], he proceeds on them as known, and gives no further reason about them, and reasons downward from these principles,"[541] affirming certain judgments ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... being, by strong influences around him to retain General Abercromby at the head of one of the expeditions in America, but he hoped that the co-operation of Lord Howe would keep up the courage of the army, and prevent any blunders on the part of the slow and obtuse soldier in command. The plan of the campaign which opened in 1758 was to send three expeditions simultaneously against the three all-important French positions held by the French in the Ohio valley, on Lake Champlain, and ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... think of a girl so obtuse that she permits a man like this fat, disgusting actor to dangle about her?" asked Mrs. Crego of her husband, who was Haney's ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the angles were turned away from each other the legs of the angles in the two figures compared were brought into closer relation, so that in 2b, for instance, the average is even higher than in 2a. Similarly the average in 3b, an obtuse angle, is higher than in 3a. The notes show that in such cases the contrasted angles tended to close up and coalesce into a single figure with a continuous boundary. "The ends (2b) came together and formed a diamond." "When the ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... human fallibility, and the fine fight that human nature was always making against stupendous odds stirred him to a fine and comprehending clarity. He had many faults. He was obstinate, often dull and lethargic, in many ways grossly ill-educated and sometimes wilfully obtuse—but he was a fine friend, a noble enemy, and a chivalrous lover. There was nothing mean nor petty in him, and his views of life and the human soul were wider and more all-embracing than in any Englishman I have ever known. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... prove in this letter how my head turns round when I write it, than explain why I didn't write it before—and so you will go on to think me the most insusceptible and least grateful of human beings—no small distinction in our bad obtuse world. Yet the truth is—oh, the truth is, that I am deeply grateful to you and have felt to the quick of my heart the meaning and kindness of your words, the worth of your sympathy and praise. One thing especially which you ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... further error, by conceiving, that the mind could form a general or abstract idea by its own operation, which was the copy of no particular perception; as of a triangle in general, that was neither acute, obtuse, nor right angled. The ingenious Dr. Berkley and Mr. Hume have demonstrated, that such general ideas have no existence in nature, not even in the mind of their celebrated inventor. We shall therefore take for granted at present, that our recollection ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... disposal of the ground, calculating the gradients and summit levels as if he were a railway-engineer for the time being—let him observe where the moss lies deep, and precipices rise too steep to be scrambled over; and he will be very obtuse indeed, if he is not able to chalk out for himself precisely the best way to the top. It is a good general rule to keep by the side of a stream. That if you do so when you are at the top of a hill, you will somehow or other find your way to the bottom, is, we are convinced, a proposition ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... pronoun would have rendered his meaning clear to even a more obtuse man than myself. No Lady ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... and striking circumstances, in our peculiar history and splendid prospects, and, above all, in the character, superstitions, and legends of our aborigines, who, to eyes across the water, look like poetical beings. We are continually reproached by British writers for the obtuse carelessness with which we are allowing these people, with so much of the heroic element in their lives, and so much of the mysterious in their origin, to go into the annihilation which seems their inevitable fate as ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... fellow?" asked Cap, scarcely knowing how to take the other's manner, which was so dry, while it was so simple, that a less obtuse subject than the old sailor might well have suspected its sincerity. "One who has passed the place knows how to feel ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... sweet and fugitive, others are obtuse, complex, and tortuous as nightmares—difficult to understand and well-nigh impossible to relate. And the day after the tennis party was such a day in the Brookes household, nor did its tumult cease when the lights were turned ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... difficult matter in a large family to keep your actions a secret. Obtuse as most men are, with things going on right under their eyes, it is not easy to baffle them when once their curiosity is roused. And yet curiosity is always imputed exclusively to women! Though Eve was the first to taste the apple, Adam had no intention of being behindhand. I know ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... called—are pleasant companions, and the story of those feats in the gymnastics of sentimentalism in which they lived to shine is the prettiest reading imaginable. But others not so fortunate or, to be plain, more honestly obtuse persist in finding that story tedious, and the bewildering appearances it deals with not human beings—not of the stock of Rose Jocelyn and Sir Everard Romfrey, of Dahlia Fleming and Lucy Feverel and Richmond ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley |
