Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Obliquity   Listen
noun
Obliquity  n.  (pl. obliquities)  
1.
The condition of being oblique; deviation from a right line; deviation from parallelism or perpendicularity; the amount of such deviation; divergence; as, the obliquity of the ecliptic to the equator.
2.
Deviation from ordinary rules; irregularity; deviation from moral rectitude. "To disobey (God)... imports a moral obliquity."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Obliquity" Quotes from Famous Books



... particle of antiquarian credit and to bestow it upon himself. In fact, our confidence in Mr. Collier's trustworthiness, which, diminished by discoveries like these, as our knowledge of his labors increased, has been quite extinguished under the accumulated evidence of either his moral obliquity or his intellectual incapacity for truth. We can now accept from him, merely upon his word, no statement as true by which he has anything ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... aroused by the Duchess's effigy is purely artistic, that of her husband excites curiosity rather than admiration. The head is strangely poised, much as if the artist intended to suggest the fact of decapitation; obliquity of vision, a defect hereditary in the Montmorencys, is also indicated, adding singularity. The half-recumbent figure by the Duke's side, is of rare pathos and beauty. Almost angelic in its resignation ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... 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 ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley

... self-parallelism of the earth's axis is undoubtedly a very important factor in climate. Practically it more than doubles the width of the belts of ordinary food-stuffs by lengthening the summer day in the temperate zone. Beyond the tropics the obliquity of the sun's rays are more than balanced by the increased length of ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway

... were intended to be flattering or sarcastic, I must respectfully decline to accept the compliment, or to apply the sarcasm to myself. I object to obliquity of procedure and ambiguity of speech in all shapes. And I confess that I find it difficult to understand the state of mind which leads any one to suppose, that deep respect for single-minded devotion to high aims is incompatible with the unhesitating ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... it in the court, contrary, as it unquestionably was, both to liberty and law, had high authorities for its justification, and was supported by the unanimous opinion of the judges who sat at his side. Posterity will acquit the otherwise upright judge of the moral obliquity of which his living enemies, with regard to this proceeding, pronounced him guilty, and for which Junius would have crushed the Chief Justice, had his ability been equal to ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... to the turbulent times in which he lived. He was vigorous and prompt in action, and naturally of a high and generous spirit. Still, however, he exhibited glimpses, even in his last hours, of an obliquity, not to say ferocity of temper, which characterized many of his line, and which led to ominous conjectures as to what would have been his ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... Strauss accentuated its sexual perversity by his hysterical music, lo! Berlin accepted it with avidity. The theatres of the Prussian capital were keeping pace with the pathological spirit of the day, and were far ahead of those of Paris, where, it had long been the habit to think, moral obliquity made its residence. If Berlin, then why not New York? So thought Mr. Conned, saturated with German theatricalism, and seeing no likely difference in the appeal of a "Parsifal" which he had successfully produced, and a "Salome," he prepared to put the works of Wagner and Strauss on the same footing ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... thick with voices, and strange hands Reach through the dusk and pluck me by the skirts. There is a voice which sounds like words from home, But, as I stumble on to reach it, seems To leap from rock to rock. Oh! if it is Willing obliquity of sense, descend, Heal all my wanderings, take me by the hand, And lead me homeward through the shadows. Let me not by my wilful acts of pride Block up the windows of thy truth, and grow A wasted, withered ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... with voices, and strange hands Reach through the dusk, and pluck me by the skirts. There is a voice which sounds like words from home, But, as I stumble on to reach it, seems To leap from rock to rock: oh, if it is Willing obliquity of sense, descend, Heal all my wanderings, take me by the hand, And lead me homeward through the shadows. Let me not by my wilful acts of pride Block up the windows of thy truth, and grow A wasted, withered thing, that stumbles on Down to the grave with folded ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald

... what Marx thought, or how far Lenine follows his teachings, but it is of importance that the claim set up by Lenine and Trotzky and many of their followers that they are guided by the principles of Marxian Socialism is itself demonstrably an evidence of moral or intellectual obliquity, which makes them very dangerous guides to follow. It is of importance, too, that the claim they make allures many Socialists of trusting and uncritical minds ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... obliquity, inclination, slope, slant, crookedness &c adj.; slopeness^; leaning &c v.; bevel, tilt; bias, list, twist, swag, cant, lurch; distortion &c 243; bend &c (curve) 245; tower of Pisa. acclivity, rise, ascent, gradient, khudd^, rising ground, hill, bank, declivity, downhill, dip, fall, devexity^; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... is a singular example of poetic, or rather unpoetic obliquity; we should never have done were we to attempt to point out all its absurdities and contradictions. Why, for instance, does Orestes fruitlessly torment his sister by maintaining his incognito so long? The poet too, makes it a light matter to throw aside whatever ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... so severely in satiric verse that he was ashamed to show himself at neighborhood gatherings. All the people about Gentryville feared Lincoln's caustic wit, and disliked him for it, although they were greatly impressed with his ability exhibited thereby. Lincoln recognized his moral obliquity, and curbed his propensity for satire, which was a case of that "exercise of natural faculty" which affects all gifted persons. And when he left that region he visited all the neighbors, and asked pardon of those whom ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various

... New York with just one cent in my pocket, and put up at a boarding-house where the charge was one dollar a day. In this no moral obliquity was involved. I had simply reached the goal for which I had sacrificed all, and felt sure that the French people or the Danish Consul would do the rest quickly. But there was evidently something wrong somewhere. The Danish Consul could only register my demand to be returned to Denmark in the event ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various

... 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 lead pencil; but to the fact that he ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... 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

... to attain anything difficult, he cannot afford to indulge in vanity or self-satisfaction; for action can be kept true to its end only when the least obliquity is marked and corrected. Hence the strong man does not attribute his failure to fortune or to his amiable virtues, but to his folly; for he knows that to be the crucial fault which it lies within his power to remedy. On the other hand, if the purpose be one {97} which involves ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry

... 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 IV. of France, who expressed ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... haply over-honest and over-honourable; but let that be. To please a whim, a caprice, you set yourself to flout him, as is the way of your sex when you behold a man your utter slave. From this—being all unversed in the obliquity of woman—he conceives, poor boy, that he no longer finds favour in your eyes, and to win back this, the only thing that in the world he values, he behaves foolishly. You flout him anew, and because of it. He is as jealous with you as ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini

... 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 ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... but which is in reality extremely uncommon; the quality, I mean, of telling a tale directly and in straightforward order. In speaking of Hallam, Macaulay complained that Gibbon had brought into fashion an unpleasant trick of telling a story by implication and allusion. This provoking obliquity has certainly increased rather than declined since Hallam's day. Mr. Froude, it is true, whatever may be his shortcomings on the side of sound moral and political judgment, has admirable gifts in the way of straightforward narration, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley

... Observe 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 ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis

... 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 ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar

... from the table at which he was writing when Sadie entered the room. He was, on the whole, a handsome man, but was rather fat, and his black eyes were unusually close together. This perhaps accounted for the obliquity of his glance, which, some believed, conveyed a useful hint about his character. He was neatly dressed in light, summer clothes, although the farmers generally wore brown overalls. As he got up his look indicated that he was trying ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss

... Adams, nor has had any ratification of his payments; neither had he "ever received a syllable of approbation for having done so. Thus I stand charged with vast sums which I have disbursed for the public service without authority." The thought might cause some anxiety, in view of the moral obliquity manifested by Congress ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... they said, "arise from the moral obliquity of the fastidious, and the cupidity of the avaricious. They consist in an illiberal opinion of the worth and rights of the laboring classes, an unjust estimation of their moral, physical, and intellectual powers, and unwise misapprehension ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... comprehend, out of the general mass of things, from the block as it were of nature: And it is, I think, an easier thing to give a just draught of man from these Theatric forms, which I cannot help considering as originals, than by drawing from real life, amidst so much intricacy, obliquity, and disguise. If therefore, for further proofs of Falstaff's Courage, or for the sake of curious speculation, or for both, I change my position, and look to causes instead of effects, the reader must not be surprized if he finds the former ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith

... weak—cunning. When you have knocked a man down, trampled on him, and picked his pocket, you can hardly expect him to enter into social relations with you merely because you pick him up and, retaining his property, propose that you should now be friends and begin to do business. The obliquity of vision of the European residents on all these points is extraordinary. They cannot see that wrong has been done, and that wrong engenders wrong. They repeat comfortable formulae about the duplicity and evasiveness of the Chinese; they charge them with dishonesty at the very moment that they ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... Association in 1881 Sir John Lubbock called attention to the fact that these animals appear to indicate both a hot and a cold climate, and he referred to the fact (known to astronomers) that the earth passes through periods of slow change in the eccentricity of its orbit, and in the obliquity of the ecliptic. The result of the latter condition is, to produce periods of about 21,000 years each, during one-half of which the Northern hemisphere will be hotter, and in the other the Southern. At present we are ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... of them which have been opened, the principal passage preserves the same inclination of 26 degrees to the horizon, being directed toward the polar star.... Their obliquity being so adjusted as to make the north side coincide with the obliquity of the sun's rays at the summer's solstice, has, combined with the former particulars, led some to suppose they were solely intended for astronomical uses; and ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... Temple, the Pagan's faculties had, unconsciously to himself, acted solely in reference to the daring design which it was the business of his whole existence to entertain. Influenced, therefore, by this obliquity of moral feeling, he had scarcely reflected on the discovery that he had just made at the base of the city wall, ere his mind instantly reverted to the ambitious meditations which had occupied it in the morning; and the next moment, the first dawning conception of a bold and perilous ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... not been a person of higher moral purposes than her husband, sad indeed would have been the lot of the two children that slept in the captain's state-room on board of the Caribbee. As is often the case, she knew less of her husband's moral obliquity than the world at large, though even she knew enough to believe that he was not what he should be. People did not tell her of Dock's wicked deeds, and he complained bitterly to her of the hard treatment ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic

... the friendship of a lady and gentleman, when they bring against each other all kinds of delightful charges of moral obliquity. Take care, Miss Blunt! A couple of intelligent New-Englanders, of opposite sex, young, unmarried, are pretty far gone, when they begin morally to reprobate each other. So you told Mr. Johnson that he is conceited? And I suppose you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... "initiation," save that which the Ruler of the universe has implanted in every system and in every government. Yet we concede the right of others to think differently on these points, without being suspected of moral obtuseness or obliquity. Especially can we comprehend how a patriotic Frenchman should choose to accept all the conditions of his epoch, and embrace every opportunity of aiding in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... of the nature of shadows and the way in which they are cast [Footnote 2: Avendo io tractato.—We may suppose that he here refers to some particular MS., possibly Paris C.], I will now consider the places on which they fall; and their curvature, obliquity, flatness or, in short, any character I may be able to ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... the normal equanimity observable in circumstantial evidence, hereditary disciplinarisms are totally devoid of potential abstemiousness. This may be owing to the fact that at ebb and neap tides the obliquity of vision (duism) remarked by most invalid veterans in their occasional adversaria, is unconscious of their parental dignity, and by no means to be confounded with the referees in astronomical or pharmaceutical cases, or with ordinary omphalopsychites. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various

... moral obliquity on the slavery question, Douglas made a dignified and worthy reply. "I hold that the people of the slave-holding States are civilized men as well as ourselves; that they bear consciences as well as we, and that they are accountable ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... features it presents to the faithful companion of man. So close indeed is the analogy, that some of the ablest zoologists, the celebrated John Hunter included, have entertained the opinion that dogs, in all their varieties, and wolves, have descended from a common stock. With the exception of an obliquity in the position of the eyes, there is no appreciable anatomical difference between these animals. The question is one of difficulty; but we believe we are correct in stating that the majority of the highest ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... wholly answerable for beginning his life again with the imposture he had practised? The contributor had either so fallen in love with the literary advantages of his forlorn deceiver that he would see no moral obliquity in him, or he had touched a subtler verity at last in pondering the affair. It seemed now no longer a farce, but had a pathos which, though very different from that of its first aspect, was hardly less tragical. Knowing with what coldness, or at the best, uncandor, he (representing Society in its ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... literature we meet with men who seem endowed with an obliquity of understanding, yet active and busy spirits; but, as activity is only valuable in proportion to the capacity that puts all in motion, so, when ill directed, the intellect, warped by nature, only becomes more crooked and fantastical. A ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... practicable by the end of the summer of 1846. A second obstacle lay in the nature and opinions of Miss Barrett's father, who governed even his grown-up children by "an incredible system of patriarchal absolutism." By what was variously termed an obliquity of the will, an eccentricity, a monomania, he had decided that none of his children should marry, and on this point he demanded "passive obedience." It was perfectly clear that Miss Barrett could not gain his consent to her marriage, and so, after long hesitation and much unhappiness, she decided ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... probably correct in its general estimate, represents him as a successful student of astronomy and geography, and as one of the pioneers of exact science among the Greeks. He taught, if he did not discover, the obliquity of the ecliptic, is said to have introduced into Greece the gnomon (for determining the solstices) and the sundial, and to have invented some kind of geographical map. But his reputation is due mainly to his work on nature, few words of which remain. From these fragments we learn that the beginning ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... maintain their identity. They were in truth a pair of patriarchal bottles rivalling many of the biggest houses in the kingdom for antiquity. They would have made the donkey that stood between the two bundles of hay look at them with obliquity: supposing him to have, for an animal, a rum taste, and a turn for hilarity. Wonderful old bottles! So, on the label, just over the date, was written large: UNCLE BENJAMIN'S WEDDING PRESENT TO HIS NIECE BESSY. Poor Bessy ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... competitors—I felt a kindliness, that almost amounted to a tendre, for those five thoughtless virgins.—I have never made an acquaintance since, that lasted; or a friendship, that answered; with any that had not some tincture of the absurd in their characters. I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you. I love the safety, which a palpable hallucination warrants; the security, which ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... enough to him, I suppose, but I had 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 could have got a laugh out of the Member ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... plaid, very much faded, and both ragged and dirty. Her large mutch with its broad frills formed a sort of glory round her head, setting off to no advantage her pock-marked, flabby face, wide mouth and yellow projecting teeth. She had a comical, good-natured obliquity of vision in her prominent light-grey eyes, which were very red about the rims; and Flora thought, as she read with an inquiring eye the countenance of their landlady, that without being positively disgusting, she was the most ordinary, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... Higgins wading out into the creek in his shirt, with a lantern, sounding the depth of the water with a walking-stick. I thought it was desperately funny, and was densely unconscious that there was any moral obliquity about such a publication. Being satisfied with this effort I looked around for other worlds to conquer, and it struck me that it would make good, interesting matter to charge the editor of a neighboring country paper with a piece of gratuitous ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... some shells originate from the thinness of the laminae of which they consist, rather than to any colouring matter, as is seen in mother-pearl, which reflects different colours according to the obliquity of the light which falls on it. The beautiful prismatic colours seen on the Labrodore stone are owing to a similar cause, viz. the thinness of the laminae of which it consists, and has probably been formed from ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... this day in a cloudless sky was so great, that Mr. Rae and I were glad to take shelter in the water while the crews were engaged on the portages. The irritability of the human frame is either greater in these Northern latitudes, or the sun, notwithstanding its obliquity, acts more powerfully upon it than near the Equator; for I have never felt its direct rays so oppressive within the Tropics as I have experienced them to be on some occasions in the high latitudes. The luxury of bathing at such ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... raise the original in estimation. An old lady, in passing a public-house distinguished as above, her companion called her attention to the sign. "Ah!" replied she, "Wilkes swings everywhere but where he ought." Wilkes's squint was proverbial; yet even this natural obliquity he turned to humorous account. When Wilkes challenged Lord Townshend, he said, "Your lordship is one of the handsomest men in the kingdom, and I am one of the ugliest. Yet, give me but half an hour's start, and I will ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... arching, proportion, obliquity, and position of the skull, or bone of the forehead, show the propensity of thought, power of thought, and sensibility of man. The position, colour, wrinkles, tension of the skin of the forehead, show the passions and present state of the mind. The bones indicate ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... because it was absolutely impossible to handle it fitly in the proper place, shall be briefly adverted to, here. I proceed to describe it not without indignation; for I am profoundly struck by the intellectual perversity, not to say the moral obliquity, which has so entirely made this ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... author to fall back into his easy chair in a condition of profound emotion. It appeared to have corrected a certain dimness or obliquity in his vision, of the existence of which its cure rendered him for the first time conscious. The appearance of the little country girl (whose very introduction into the romance the author had looked upon with misgivings) had afforded the first gleam of natural, ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various

... which large numbers feel in his success, instance the perverted moral sense which is very much the result of the absence of principle in public life; for the example of men in the highest positions in a state must influence the masses powerfully either for good or evil. A species of moral obliquity pervades a large class of the community, by which the individuals composing it are prevented from discerning between truth and falsehood, except as either tends to their own personal aggrandisement. Thus truth is at a fearful discount, and men exult in successful roguery, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... say but little in favour of the morals of too many of the pieces represented here. In this particular there is a strange obliquity of reason, arising out of habitual exaggeration of feeling, that really seems to disqualify most of the women, even from perceiving what is monstrous, provided it be sentimental and touching. I was particularly advised to go to the Theatre Madame to see a certain ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... speak, a flattened circle, somewhat elongated, called an ellipse. The axis of the earth is not perpendicular to the plane of the orbit, which is an imaginary flat surface enclosed by the line of the earth's revolution, but is inclined to it at an angle of 23 deg. 28', which angle is called the obliquity of the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the path or way among the fixed stars which the earth in its orbit appears to describe to an eye placed in the sun, for the sun is the fixed centre and not the earth. The earth, therefore, in moving about the sun, is not upright, but inclined, so that ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu

... the image is partly due to the obliquity of the pencils which form parts of the image, and partly to what is termed spherical aberration. The first cause cannot be modified by the optician's skill, and is not important when the field of view ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor

... into his eighteenth year, when he met at the table of a certain Anglo-Germanist {372a} 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, {372b} had attracted some slight notice in the literary world, and was looked upon ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... the morals of the young. His accusers appear to have been instigated by personal resentment, which he had innocently provoked, and by envy of his many virtues; and the result shows not only the instability but the moral obliquity of the Athenian character. He approached his trial with no special preparation for defence, as he had no expectation of an acquittal; but he maintained a calm, brave, and haughty bearing, and addressed the court in a ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... 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 ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to think before replying. Here was a direct, even abrupt, approach to a matter of delicacy. There was a complete lack of the diplomatic obliquity to be expected in such a case. This was not like Millard, and though his exterior was calm and suave enough from mere force of habit, she quickly formed an opinion of his condition of internal ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... as elsewhere we shall show, was not primarily with the maxim: that was but a secondary purpose. His direct and real object lay in one or two of the illustrative cases under the maxim. With this particular obliquity impressed upon the movement of his own essay, we can have no right to quarrel. Kant had an author's right to deal with the question as best suited his own views. But with one feature of his treatment ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... only knows how to bid for them. And there are "Delijahs" who will break any confidence and risk any fortune, nay, their own lives, to show a rival she has been eclipsed. There are also women, even girls, who are of such pure eyes they cannot discern obliquity anywhere. And there are others just as pure—the lily's own heart isn't purer—who, nevertheless—but why waste time or type. In short, Johanna first, and then Barbara, had seen how easily Daphne Jane's tittle-tattle might be serious news ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable

... 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, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... the phenomena in question, however, it cannot be said that they have been fairly or fully investigated by scientists. They have been set down as the work of charlatans, and their apparent results ascribed to fraud, collusion, credulity, and mental obliquity in general. The fact, that of the scientists who have exhaustively investigated the spiritistic phenomena, a considerable number have accepted them as valid, has had no effect upon scientists as a body, who, in this particular, ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... wife. She even felt a twinge of disappointment when the young officer appeared, and after the initial thirty-six hours under the commander's roof, rarely went thither at all. She knew her brother disapproved of him, and thought it to be because of moral, not military, obliquity. She saw with instant apprehension his quick interest in Angela and the child's almost unconscious response. With the solemn conviction of the maiden who, until past the meridian, had never loved, she ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... is often tortured by more elliptical phrases.[22] This power of charging lines with great fulness of meaning enables Pope to soar for brief periods into genuine and impressive poetry. Whatever his philosophical weakness and his moral obliquity, he is often moved by genuine emotion. He has a vein of generous sympathy for human sufferings and of righteous indignation against bigots, and if he only half understands his own optimism, that "whatever is is right," the vision, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... out-of-doors curriculum offered by even the little world of Newbern. He was to take up an 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 ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... remained silent, thinking over why he was on the Indian. There was a moral obliquity about his present position; the new light of his discovery showed him this strongly. His feelings had been played upon by the owner of the ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser

... must affect the vertical position, because obliquity deprives the movement of force, by taking from it the possibility of showing the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... [48] From the obliquity of the opposite coasts of England and France, some part of the former runs further south than the ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... over the cord as far as the testicle, renders the adult male especially liable to hernial protrusions at this part. The oblique direction of the canal is, in some measure, a safeguard against these accidents; but this obliquity is not of the same degree in all bodies, and hence some are naturally more prone ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise

... big corporations themselves, even where they did wrong, there was a wide difference in the moral obliquity indicated by the wrongdoer. There was a wide distinction between the offenses committed in the case of the Northern Securities Company, and the offenses because of which the Sugar Trust, the Tobacco Trust, and the Standard Oil Trust were successfully prosecuted under my Administration. It was ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... inherited traditions, prejudices, predilections, all my training ranged me on the side of Eleanor. I was clamouring for the real. Was she not the incarnation of the real? Her very directness piqued me to a perverse and delicious obliquity. And I knew, as I knew when I parted from her months before, that it was only for me to awaken things that lay virginally dormant. On the other hand stood Lola, with her magnetic seduction, her rich atmosphere, her ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... serves to excite, and especially whatever shows the moral crookedness of the Negro, and that the years of freedom already enjoyed by him have simply brought forth a generation of vipers. Too often, from the lowest to the highest court, the records are so manipulated as to show the moral obliquity of the Negro. It is a potent fact that public opinion of the Negro is largely, if not wholly, based upon press reports, whether it pertains to religion, politics, morality, or otherwise. I hold, therefore, that it is largely misinformation that ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... works of love and charity, sat Thomas Whitson, of the Hicksite school of Friends, fresh from his farm in Lancaster County, dressed in plainest homespun, his tall form surmounted by a shock of unkempt hair, the odd obliquity of his vision contrasting strongly with he clearness and directness of his spiritual insight. Elizur Wright, the young professor of a Western college, who had lost his place by his bold advocacy of freedom, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... the eyes of Miss Royden to the obliquity of vision which is wrought, all unconsciously in many cases, by the power of selfishness. The condition of her coachman and footman had never for a moment presented itself to the lady's mind. Miss Royden made acquaintance with righteous indignation. She became a reformer, ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie

... with each recurring crisis. For testimony in the present instance, I need only adduce that he wrote poetry, more or less, after meeting Miss Lansdale but a scant half-dozen times. This came to me in confidence, however, and the obliquity of it spread no farther beyond ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... faith? Has any Catholic writer of our time been able to present fairly the arguments which seem so overwhelmingly convincing to Protestant thinkers? In either case, is there not something of distortion or exaggeration? Certainly it cannot be due to intentional and perverse obliquity of mental vision. As a rule reasonable men endeavour to be just and fair. Now and then, in the heat of controversy, a tendency to overstatement or exaggeration may be evident, especially where great issues appear to be involved; but the purpose can be reconciled with honesty. Is it not ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... however, 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 ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler

... and his chief forte lay in telescopes; and accordingly, a large board, with "Nicholas Forster, Optician," surmounted the small shop window, at which he was invariably to be seen at his employment. He was an eccentric person, one of those who had narrowly escaped being clever; but there was an obliquity in his mind which would not admit of lucid order and arrangement. In the small town where he resided, he continued to pick up a decent sustenance; for he had no competitor, and was looked upon as a man of considerable ability. He was the only one of the three brothers who had ventured ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... subject-matter pumped into them by recitations, etc., and to merely accept, while boys are more inspired by being told to do things and make tests and experiments. In this, girls are often quite at sea. One writer speaks of a certain feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that singing classes the voices of each sex are better in quality for the presence of the other. In many topics of all kinds boys and girls are interested in different aspects of the same theme, and therefore ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... 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 has been due to an accident, but it is, nevertheless, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett

... stall, and was glancing 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 the ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... happens that perfect coaptation is prevented by the interposition, between the bony surfaces, of such substances as a small fragment of detached bone or a clot of blood; sometimes the extreme obliquity of the fracture, by permitting the bones to slip out of place, is the opposing cause. These are difficulties which can not always be overcome, even in small-sized animals, and still it is only when they are mastered that a correct consolidation can be looked for. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... the Circle. I detected and was annoyed by the R—D. I determined the latitude. I exhibited the separate results for N.P.D. of stars in ledger, and their means in Catalogue. I investigated from my observations the place of equinox and the obliquity of the ecliptic. I made another series of observations of Jupiter's 4th Satellite, for the mass of Jupiter. I observed the solar eclipse with the Equatoreal, by a method then first introduced, which I have since used several times at Cambridge and Greenwich with excellent ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy

... exact meaning of the words, 'IF THINE EYE BE SINGLE'? It is an expressive term; and in its curt simplicity covers a profound truth. 'If thine eye,' namely,—the ability to see,—'be single,' that is straight and clear, without dimness or obliquity,— 'thy whole body shall be full of light.' Christ evidently did not apply this expression to the merely physical capability of sight,— but to the moral and mental, or psychic vision. It matters nothing really to the infinite forces around us, whether physically speaking, we are able to see, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... devil 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, was by no ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... rebels, and the rage of anger and the uneasiness of impatience, and the restlessness of unlawful desires; and by 240 this time the monsters and diseases will be numerous and intolerable, when God's heavy hand shall press the sanies and the intolerableness, the obliquity and the unreasonableness, the amazement and the disorder, the smart and the sorrow, the guilt and the punishment, out from all our sins, and pour them 245 into one chalice, and mingle them with an infinite wrath, and make the wicked drink off all the vengeance, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... even of morbid analysis—you had to be on some footing, you had to feel some confidence, pretty different from his own up to now. He had never not enjoyed passing his show on the other side of the street and taking it in thence with a casual obliquity; but he had never held optical commerce with the drawn blind for a moment longer than he could help. It always looked horribly final and as if it never would come up again. Big and bare, with his name staring at him from the middle, it thus offered in its grimness ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... also, did the agent know what he was doing. No sin is culpable that is not formal. But, as has been said, there may be a culpable perversion of the intellect, so that the man is the author of his own obliquity or defect of vision. When Saul persecuted the Christians, he probably sinned materially, not formally. When Caiphas spoke the truth without knowing it, he said ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.

... regarded himself as clean handed. Yet deep in his nature was that obliquity, that adeptness at trickery, that facility in deceit, which made him the success he was. He could always meet a crook on his own ground. He had no extraneous sensibilities to eliminate. He mastered a secret process of opening and reading letters without ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... action of the screw will, by impinging on the overhanging stern, press the vessel forward in the water, just in the same way as is done by the wind when acting on an oblique sail. I believe, the two revolving vanes without any twist or obliquity on them at all, would propel a vessel if set well forward in the dead wood or beneath the bottom, merely by the ascent of the water up the inclined plane of the vessel's run; and, at all events, a screw so placed would, in my judgment, aid materially ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... 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 at Appomattox Court-House. No one but a scholar familiar with the course ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... into the water, but drawn cautiously and rapidly up again, when a red drop at 42 deg. indicated that the fluid had risen to that point or above it. At this period the daily visits of the sun were very short, and owing to the obliquity of his rays, afforded us little warmth or light. It is half past eleven before he peeps over a small ridge of hills opposite to the house, and he sinks in the horizon at half past two. On the 28th Mr. Hood, in order to attain ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin

... seat!" thundered Mr. Crawford. "I'll give you a lick after school. Think of bringing obliquity upon the school in the presence of a teacher from the ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth

... along the Rio Grande during this period there sprang up many factional differences from various causes, some personal, others political, and some, I regret to say, from downright moral obliquity—as, for example, those between Cortinas and Canales —who, though generally hostile to the Imperialists, were freebooters enough to take a shy at each other frequently, and now and then even to join forces against Escobedo, unless we prevented them by coaxing or threats. A general ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan

... would, we may be sure, have rejoiced to know that many more have visited the tomb of Tom Sayers in Highgate Cemetery than have visited the tomb of George Eliot in the same burial-ground. A curious moral obliquity this, you may say. But to recognise it is to understand one side of Borrow, and an interesting ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... an observatory was built. Large numbers of students thronged the city, learned Greeks and Jews taught in the schools, and a number of advances on the scientific work done by the Greeks were made. A degree of the earth's surface [3] was measured on the shores of the Red Sea; the obliquity of the ecliptic was determined (c. 830); astronomical tables were calculated; algebra and trigonometry were perfected; discoveries in chemistry not known in Europe until toward the end of the eighteenth century, and advances ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... cannot but think the peculiar type of piety cherished by the Boers is largely responsible for the moral obliquity of which, justly or unjustly, I heard complaints continually from those who professed to know them well. These sons of the Huguenots and of the Dutch refugees who fled from the persecuting zeal of Alva have all sprung from an exceptionally religious stock, and ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... 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

... at the side of the house, much deeper than at the front, so that the depth of the bed at the back may be eighteen to twenty inches or two feet, while the front is eight to ten or twelve inches. This provides a slightly increased surface because of the obliquity of the upper surface of the bed, but it consumes probably a greater amount of material. It probably is not advantageous where the operations are carried on on a large scale, where abundant room is available, where the material ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson

... rather inclined to be frizzy. Projecting jaws and teeth, thick lips, low narrow foreheads, and broad flat noses are the features characteristic of the tribe. The eyes are often bright and full, and no obliquity is observable in the opening ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... schoolboys in 1830. Then, more than ever, his deep consciousness of the invisible world became evident; then, more than ever, he seemed to be battling with the wicked one. For his sermons ran on the eternal themes of the darkness of evil, the craft of the tempter, the punishment of obliquity, and he justified the persistence with which he dwelt upon these painful subjects by an appeal to a general principle: 'The spirit of Elijah,' he said, 'must ever ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... mixture of Pagan and Christian ornaments, not very unfrequent in Italian churches. The Leaning Tower should be contemplated from the portico of the church to heighten its effect: when the perpendicular column cuts it to the eye like a plumb line, the obliquity appears really terrific. ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... the wandering lights, that in the obscurity of the night beguiled the weary traveller "through bog, through bush, through brake, through briar." But their power of evil only extended, or was only employed, to vex those who by a certain obliquity of conduct gave occasion for their reproofs. They besides pinched and otherwise tormented the objects of their displeasure; and, though the mischiefs they executed were not of the most vital kind, yet, coming from a supernatural enemy, and being inflicted ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... curve is broken in upon by a building composed of simple vertical and horizontal lines, the eye is furnished, by the interruption, with the equation to that part of the curve which is interrupted. If, instead of square forms, we take obliquity, as r s t (fig. C), we have one line, s t, an absolute break, and the other r s, in false proportion. If we take another curve, we have an infinite number of lines, only two of which are where they ought to be. And this is the true ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin

... was a tall, thin, fair, rather faded woman, with a perfectly amiable disposition, a high standard of gentility, a taste for light literature, and a certain foolish indirectness and obliquity of character. She was romantic, she was sentimental, she had a passion for little secrets and mysteries—a very innocent passion, for her secrets had hitherto always been as unpractical as addled eggs. She was not absolutely veracious; but ...
— Washington Square • Henry James

... lovely cast and almost Grecian contour, with features of classic regularity; while the absence of obliquity in the orbs of the eye—despite the dusky hue of her akin—forbids the ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid



Words linked to "Obliquity" :   deceptiveness, travail, labor, labour, oblique, lying-in, abnormality, confinement, parturiency, speciousness, asynclitism, abnormalcy



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com